IT IS a tiny fishing village where life normally goes on undisturbed and the calm is rarely shattered by anything other than natural forces.
Hopeman, on the Moray Firth coast, was built by a benevolent Victorian laird to provide homes for quarry workers and local fishermen’s families. But their descendants are facing a new threat of a man-made kind.
The present-day laird faces claims
he is using ancient land laws to extract thousands of pounds from residents who face eviction from their homes unless they pay up.
The residents believed they owned their houses and gardens outright because they paid the previous owner of the estate the asking price in a legitimate sale.
But millionaire milkman Dean Anderson, who bought the 500-acre estate in the 1970s, is said to be laying claim to every square yard that has no formal title deed.
In what his critics claim is a bid to pre-empt new land reform legislation that will severely restrict the rights of lairds, Anderson recently embarked on a review of his land interests in the village.
Anderson’s review uncovered the fact that many 99-year ground rent leases granted by the previous laird had not been properly converted to full title when the houses that stood upon the land were sold.
This effectively means that Anderson still owns the land and under present legislation can legally demand any fee he chooses when the lease expires in return for full rights to the property.
Some Hopeman residents are having to find thousands of pounds just to secure a roof over their heads, including one elderly woman who has until Tuesday to pay £25,000.
Others have been forced to pay charges for a few square yards of garden they long considered their own. All have discovered that the law is on the laird’s side and they are powerless to resist.
The extent and level of the charges has astonished local solicitors but they concede that Anderson, who owns the Allarburn Dairies in Elgin, is acting within the law.
"Legally there is nothing anyone can do as what he is doing is perfectly within the law," said one Elgin solicitor.
"But one has to ask the moral question, particularly given the relatively small sums involved compared to his personal and commercial wealth.
"In all my years practising in this area, where much of our work brings us into contact with private estates, I have never encountered such an aggressive land grab."
One Hopeman resident, 68-year-old Anna Jack, has lived in the same single-storey house in Farquhar Street all her life.
She has until Tuesday to pay £25,000 to Anderson for the land her house stands on and an additional piece of garden. Otherwise she has been told she will have to move out.
Jack, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, said that an error of omission made by her grandparents when they bought the house has led to her present problems.
"There’s nothing I can do about it," she said. "The ground lease on which this house sits was not officially transferred, and we have never registered the ground as part of our property.
"The first thing I knew was when Mr Anderson called round with a surveyor to measure the garden."
Jack said her grandfather left the house to his brother when he died. "It was bought from him by my father, Daniel, for £300 in 1940 but there must have been a slip-up in the transaction because the ground lease was never officially transferred.
"That expires next May, and I have a deadline on Tuesday to pay Mr Anderson for the lease or I will have no house when it runs out."
She has borrowed the money from relatives but her troubles do not end there.
"Even when he gets the money most of my garden will go because Mr Anderson says that’s not part of the deal. He tells me that he will decide how much garden I will have, not me."
More than two-thirds of Jack’s mature and sheltered garden will disappear this week when builders move in to erect a wall along Anderson’s boundary.
After that, the plot will be sold for development, bringing in at least a further £50,000 to the Anderson pot.
The anxiety of the past few months has taken its toll on Jack and her Parkinson’s symptoms have worsened. The loss of most of her well-tended garden, with its mature trees, potato patch and carrots means she will be less active as a gardener and she will lose her beloved apple tree.
Another Hopeman resident who has suffered the same experience is 46-year-old Adrian Dunn. He paid £78,000 for his four-bedroom house last October only to find that he had to pay Anderson another £10,000 to transfer the garden just before he and his family moved in.
"The seller had to reduce the house by £5,000 as an allowance for the fact that the garden, which has been with the property since 1833, had never been formally transferred," he said.
"It was a bit high and I also had to pay his solicitor costs at £170 an hour, but what could I do? I did not want him to sell the patch so that someone else could put up a garage or something."
Another couple, who asked not to be named, admitted they had been forced to pay Anderson £5,000 for a two-foot strip of land that ran between their garage and house.
The strip had been left off title deeds in error when they bought the property, which allowed Anderson to claim it as his.
The estate, which includes the harbour and three farms as well as the village, stretches along 12 miles of coastline north of Elgin and was sold to Anderson for £100,000 in 1976 by the Duff family.
Today more than 1,700 people live in 650 households with the access to many across land, pathways and lanes owned by Anderson.
A fortunate few have previously negotiated conversion from lease to proper title with the former laird for just the cost of the legal expenses.
Under new land reform legislation passed by the Scottish Parliament and due to come into force later this year, feudal lairds will be unable to use leases in this way.
Anderson refused to return calls made by Scotland on Sunday and his solicitor, Michael Gascoigne of Edinburgh firm Gillespie MacAndrews, was described as too busy to respond on his behalf.
