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Our mission is to delight our customers by selling the most engaging gift in the world. We want people to enjoy owning their plot of land whether they can visit or not.
Now in our 16th year, we believe we are well on the way to achieving this, and do not know of another gift company that engages so well and so often with its customers.
We take huge pride in our mission, as do our customers. Tens of thousands of Lairds, Lords and Ladies have visited our nature reserves, all of whom have strengthened their emotional ties with Scotland.
Highland Titles was founded in 2006 by Dr. Peter Bevis, a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London, and his daughter, Laura. They started by selling plots from the family’s land in order to fund additional tree planting. The mission was simply to restore land that had been devastated by centuries of farming and unsympathetic commercial forestry.
The idea proved popular and the company was soon able to purchase a larger piece of land and expand the scope of the project. Highland Titles now manages more than 800 acres in the beautiful highlands of Scotland, and the flagship nature reserve at Duror, near Glencoe, is one of the most popular nature reserves in Scotland.
The Highland Titles Nature Reserve at Duror, near Glencoe, was acquired in 2007. It consisted of 220 acres that had long been used for commercial forestry and hill farming. This became the focus of an ambitious long-term project to transform the land into a nature reserve.
Key objectives for the land included:
The plans were laid out in full in our first Five-Year Plan, published in 2008. This document reviews our performance against the original goals we set out for conserving the Highland Titles Nature Reserve.
In 2014, we were able to purchase a second plot of land approximately 10 miles West of Invergarry, called Mountain View. As with so much of the Highlands, this 180 acre site had been used for commercial forestry and planted mainly with non-native Sitka Spruce. We eventually hope to create multiple havens for wildlife at this site and shortly after the purchase of this land in 2014, we created Bumblebee Haven, an area protected against deer with a fence, which with the help of the Bumblebee Trust and Trees for Life, we hope to enrich with a variety of flowering plants and trees. As we work to remove the non-native trees that provide little food or protection for the local wildlife, we have been planting several areas of more suitable habitat and endeavour to plant wild flowers to provide nectar and pollen for the bees that now make their home there.
As you may know, Scottish landowners have long been referred to as “Lairds”. As such, it seemed only natural for us to address our customers in this manner when we started the project 10 years ago. You may also recognise Laird as a Scottish word which translates into English as “Lord” and the female equivalent of both is “Lady”.
As well as our beautiful gift pack, our customers obtain a personal right to a souvenir plot of Scottish land. Whilst this makes for a wonderful gift on its own, being addressed as “Laird”, “Lord” or “Lady” definitely adds to the charm. There’s more to becoming a Laird, Lord or Lady than meets the eye, as with the stylised lordship title, comes the lifestyle.
The “title” is at least partly responsible for capturing the imagination of the world’s media, including many prime time slots on leading global TV channels.