Assynt is unusual even within the Scottish Highlands. The western part holds a handful of mountains - Quinag, Canisp, Suilven, Ben More Assynt - that rise nearly vertical from the rolling moorland around them. Geologists call this 'cnoc and lochan' country: knobs of bedrock and small lakes, an Ice Age landscape never tidied up. The mountains themselves are inselbergs of Torridonian sandstone perched on a base of Lewisian gneiss that is among the oldest rock in Europe, around three billion years old. During the last glaciation, peaks like Suilven were nunataks - islands of stone above the ice sheet - and the ice scoured away everything around them. The Moine Thrust runs through the area too, most visible at Knockan Crag National Nature Reserve where its visitor centre explains how older rocks ended up on top of younger ones.

The Vestey family had owned the Assynt Estate for decades when, in 1989, they put the northwest portion of it on the market. They renamed it the North Lochinver Estate and put it up to raise money for buying more deer-stalking ground elsewhere. Scandinavian Property Services Limited bought it. Three years later, the company went into liquidation, and the estate was broken into seven lots for sale. The crofters who actually farmed the land saw a problem: the lot boundaries cut across grazings, meaning some families would suddenly answer to multiple landlords for what was one piece of land. On 6 June 1992, the Assynt branch of the Scottish Crofters Union met to discuss the situation. They decided to try to buy the estate themselves.

The Assynt Crofters' Trust was formed as a company limited by guarantee, open to crofters in the estate. Each crofting family was asked to contribute £1,000. Caithness and Sutherland Enterprise donated £50,000. Scottish Natural Heritage gave £20,000. Highland Regional Council contributed £10,000. But the bulk - over £130,000 - came from a public appeal that drew 824 individual donors from across the UK and abroad. The local Member of Parliament, Robert Maclennan, donated. So did Ray Michie, Alex Salmond, Winifred Ewing, and Charles Kennedy. So did the rock band Runrig. After two unsuccessful bids of £235,000 and £245,000, the trust threatened to use crofting law's right-to-buy provisions to force a forced sale piece by piece - a threat that made the estate unsellable to anyone else. The Swedish creditor bank gave in. The crofters won the land.

The 1993 buyout did not stay isolated. In June 2005 the Glencanisp and Drumrunie estates - 18,000 hectares including the mountains Suilven, Canisp, Cul Mor and Cul Beag - were purchased by the local community through the Assynt Foundation, with the explicit aim of safeguarding the land for future generations. The Quinag estate had already been acquired by the John Muir Trust for conservation. The Little Assynt Estate is owned by the Culag Community Woodland Trust. Today most of Assynt is held by some combination of community, charitable, and conservation owners. The remaining Assynt Estate - around Lochinver and Ben More Assynt - is still in the Vestey family's hands. The whole parish has become a kind of case study in what happens when land ownership belongs to the people who live on it.

Twenty-two years after the original buyout, in 2022, a film crew came to Glencanisp asking permission to use the estate as an outdoor location for a Disney+ production. The Assynt Foundation said yes. The resulting footage shows Suilven and the cnoc-and-lochan country standing in for an alien wilderness in the Star Wars series 'Ahsoka'. The fee went into the foundation's accounts to fund education, housing and conservation work for local people. The crofters who bought the land in 1993 could not have imagined Jedi running through their hills three decades later. They could imagine that the decisions about what happened to the land would be made by people who lived there. That has come true.