A LEGO heiress has expanded on her huge Highland estate with a new £25 million land purchase.
Billionaire Sofie Kirk Kristiansen has bought 3525 hectares (ha) of land in the Highland region of Ross and Cromarty – mostly part of the Scatwell estate.
It lies below the 28.448 ha Strathconon estate, which was bought by her father Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, whose father invented Lego.
Sofie, however, is the current director of the family firm – which owns a total of 42,730 ha in the area.
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Her net worth was estimated at nearly $7 billion last year.
She has previously claimed that she wants to turn the land into a “wholehearted nature restoration project”.
The sale comes just as the Scottish Government passed its new Land Reform (Scotland) Bill last week.
It was designed to help reduce the concentration of rural land ownership among a small number of people, as well as give communities a greater say in what happens on privately owned land.
It gives ministers powers to split up landholdings of over 1000 hectares when being sold, provided that it is in the public interest to do so. It also changes how new small landholdings are created and operated.
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