FROM the top of Green Lowther the autumn hills spread for miles around, a rolling sea of soft browns, greens and every shade in between. It’s only 732m up but the sharp wind leaves you breathless.

“An awful lot of what you see here is Buccleuch’s,” says Lincoln Richford. “I think he can spare us a bit.”

Richford is leading the charge for a community land buyout around the village of Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway, in the Southern Uplands.

The bit of land they want is 14,600 acres – just a sliver of the 240,000 acres that makes the Duke of Buccleuch Scotland’s biggest landowner. Last month, in his first concession to the Wanlockhead Community Trust (WCT), the Duke offered just one tenth of this: land in and around the community, much of it connected to the old lead-mine works that brought the village – Scotland’s highest – into being.

The buyout group is currently drawing up a feasibility plan for the development of what they hope will become their land. It will examine a host of ideas local people have brought forward – and will defiantly include every inch of the 14,600 acres the trust says Buccleuch should part with. “We are still determined to get the lot,” says Richford, the chairman of the trust.

The Scottish Land Fund, set up by the government with £10 million a year to aid community buyouts, has put up £25,000 for the feasibility study, to be carried out by expert consultants who will report in May.

They will look at how the land the trust is bidding for is used at the moment and how it could be used better by the community.

In a recent survey of villagers, 93 different ideas were put forward for a buyout to improve the community. These will all be examined to find suggestions that can be developed to help make the village sustainable.

The most eye-catching plan is to turn Wanlockhead into a ski resort.

Those brown rolling hills, topped by a giant golf-ball radar station on Green Lowther, are frequently white with snow. Wanlockhead is 467m above sea level and in its mining heyday at the start of the 20th century had more curling ponds than anywhere else in Scotland.

Skiing began in the Lowther Hills in the 1920s, and in the 1950s the area was considered for Scotland’s first ski resort. In 2014 the Lowther Hills Ski Club opened a clubhouse with beginners’ lifts, followed by an intermediate 450m tow. It is this background that fires the imagination of Anjo Abelaira, the club founder and chairman and a Galician immigrant and business consultant who used to work for a ski resort.

The current ski club is on land belonging to the Leadhills Estate but it wants to expand and develop proper resort facilities: part of the Buccleuch land would be ideal.

Abelaira, a Trust committee member, says Wanlockhead, with its altitude and good access, should be the base for the resort, with perfect nursery slopes around the village.

He believes a small-scale ski resort could help transform the area as such development has done in the Alps.

“The Alps were just a wasteland before mountain tourism,” he says. “Now they are the playground of Europe. We could get just a bit of that here and make a real difference.” A tour of the would-be buyout area with Richford and trust secretary Mac Blewer includes the Mennock Pass, a deep split in the landscape floored with rich green turf. It is a popular spot for wild camping, and developing facilities for tourists there is on the WCT agenda.

Gazing up at the steep heather-clad hillsides, Blewer says: “It’s a great spot but it does get trashed by people leaving litter and human waste. We have talked about providing facilities for campers but we don’t want to spoil the nature of the place. Anything we do will have to be agreed with the community.”

The area is also crossed by the Southern Upland Way, but the village has had too little accommodation to be able to cash in on it. Richford says developing an outdoor centre and hostel would be possible with a buyout, as would building mountain bike trails.

Wind turbines are controversial in Wanlockhead, and one hoped-for result of the buyout will be to stop a major windfarm development on the surrounding hills planned by Buccleuch, but the buyout group says a handful of better-placed turbines could generate a good income for the community.

Another renewable energy idea is to use underground heat from within old lead mines, and a forestry scheme could provide firewood. Extensive willow planting could also be used to clean up polluted areas as the trees absorb lead. Richford adds: “The area we have designated is not just a random one, it’s what is dictated by the ideas that have come forward from the village. In order to realise all the interests of the village, I think we would need all 14,600 acres.”

The buyout team, however, is realistic, and the feasibility study will look at the different areas and ideas, and whether all the land is actually needed for viable schemes.

The offer of land around the village was made by Buccleuch estates’ chief executive, John Glen, at a brief meeting with the trust. Glen has since made it plain that the estate plans to stick to its guns over the remaining area.

He said in a statement there is “a large area of land where transfer of ownership would conflict with existing farming operations of tenant farmers and our own farming operations. The existing tenant farmers – some of whom have farmed the same land for generations – have made clear they do not wish to see a change of ownership.”

He also said there are areas of land where they could “enter into agreements with the community that would help facilitate their ambitions” and that objectives of the community trust could be achieved under existing access legislation.

Richford has dismissed that, saying the idea is for the community to be in control of its own destiny rather than negotiating with the duke.

But the trust members do say the pressure of their bid is prompting progress, and at the back of their minds are comments the duke was reported to have made last year that SNP land reform legislation made him want to sell land.

More widely, the trust hopes others can follow in its footsteps.

Trust representatives recently travelled to the Western Isles to see some of the many community buyouts in an area where 75 per cent of the population now lives on community-owned land.

Scotland’s north-west has been the crucible of land reform so far but the Trust has the backing of buyout umbrella group Community Land Scotland, and hopes its buyout will break the mould and show the way forward for more groups south of the Highland line.

“We are confident it will happen, even if we don’t know what it’s going to look like,” says Blewer. “Going to places we have been treated like heroes for trying this – we’ve been told what we are doing is very important for Scotland.

“Some people are looking at what is happening here and thinking that it can be a model, a template for the rest of Scotland outwith the Highlands.”