5 Year Action Plan for Langholm’s Community Land


Langholm made the headlines around the world when the South of Scotland’s largest community land buy-out brought 10,500 acres of the Tarras Valley into community ownership led by the Langholm Initiative. The vision, to create a vast nature reserve to support community regeneration, boost biodiversity and helping to tackle the climate and ecological emergency at a local level.
The Langholm Initiative have been working on the creation of the 5 year action plan for the Tarras Valley since the land transferred over from Buccleuch. The plan sets out overall priorities and collective direction for the Langholm Initiative through the development of Tarras Valley Nature Reserve which is the main vehicle for our community development objectives.
There has been a big focus on community engagement work to get conversations going with over 50 local events held over the past few years. The purpose has been to refresh the community mandate following the buy-outs and set out collective priorities for the next 5 years. All the community feedback has been used to help to shape priorities and direction the plan.

Our focus is getting the basics right over the next 5 years, building the right foundations for our community land to thrive in the long term. We know we have a great deal more work to do but this is our starting point.
The hard work continues to turn aspirations into reality. We are at the very start of our journey as a community landowner and we’re all learning together about how we become sustainable custodians of this very special landscape for many generations to come.
It’s a ‘living plan’. In such a period of transition and learning, it is important that our plans are flexible, iterative and are responsive to new ideas, opportunities and issues when they arise. We know we can’t meet these big aspirations without the ongoing support and involvement from the local community and our partners, we could not have made it this far without that.

A huge thankyou to everyone who has contributed to the making of this plan with ideas, feedback, suggestions and their time. We hope you enjoy reading it, and as always, we welcome any feedback!
If you’d like to come and chat to us about anything in this plan, we’ll be holding a community drop in event with the team and trustees at Thursday 27th February 5:30 – 7:00pm at the Buccleuch Centre. You can stop by for as little or as long as you like.
Please note: We are working on an Executive Summary which will be available on this page shortly
You can read a copy of the plan here: