THIS MORNING an official party led by local MP David Stewart will take Bruce Watt's boat from Mallaig on her regular service to Inverie (right) in Knoydart. Their mission may yet prove crucial to the future of Highland land reform. Stewart is due to meet John Turvill, managing director of Knoydart Peninsula Ltd (KPL), and the man who represents the controversial new owners of the Knoydart Estate, two of whom are being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office and the Department of Trade and Industry. He is also the man who sacked the manager of the estate, Ian Robertson, who had kept the place running for the best part of two years without any pay.

Also in the party will be senior figures from Highland Council, which is supporting the community-led Knoydart Foundation in its efforts to secure the estate, having launched a worldwide appeal in December. The council has another interest in Knoydart. It is understood that officials insist that the estate owes somewhere in excess of #26,000 in unpaid rates and council tax.

It had been hoped that Scottish Office Minister Brian Wilson would have been able to join the party, but that has proved impossible. However he made his views clear earlier this week: ''Everyone with Knoydart's interests at heart deplores the latest round of speculation, which as usual has been carried out over the heads of the people who live there.

''All of this represents the unacceptable face of Highland ownership and is further justification, if any is needed, for the establishment of the most fundamental review of land ownership in Scotland this century.''

No-one has done more for the cause of modern land reform than the Minister, but his was the latest of many expressions of outrage at what has happened in Knoydart. The strength of feeling on the issue may surprise many since all that has happened is that the shareholding in a company has changed and one man has lost his job.

Two of the new owners, Stephen Hinchliffe and Christopher Harrison, are being investigated, but to date neither has been found guilty of anything. So why all the fuss? After all, what has happened in Knoydart certainly hasn't been unusual in the Highlands and Islands where the ownership of a mountain or glen could easily be traced to a company address at a PO Box in the Bahamas, or the like. But things have changed. Now there is a terrible weariness with the status quo and a firm determination that at the end of the twentieth century Highland land will not only cease to be the plaything of rich men, but will no longer feature in some wheeze or other from the dodgier

elements of international capital.

That was clear in Assynt in 1992 when the 100 crofters were faced with the prospect of their land being sold off in seven different lots as the Ostgota Enskilda Bank of Stockholm tried to get some of its money back from Assynt's owners, the bankrupt Scandinavian Property Services Ltd.

It was all too clear on Eigg, where the islanders discovered that their island had been used as collateral for loans amounting to a total of #500,000, raised in 1995 at a punitive 20% rate of interest from a clothing exporter in Hong Kong by the name of Hanz Reiner Ehrhardt, and from a Liechtenstein company, Agrarconsult-Anstalt.

That was Maruma at work, before the Pavarotti Foundation and its 3000 operatic students were to carve out their place in the mythology of Eigg, not to mention Farhad Vladi, the ''island broker'' from Hamburg, or the Stuttgart hotelier Zimmerman.

But Knoydart has little to learn about exotic owners. One of the most notable was the Nazi sympathiser Lord Brocket, whose stewardship inspired the second-last land raid in Scotland, the Seven Men of Knoydart in 1948.

Controversy continued to attend Knoydart in recent years. In 1985 Surrey property dealer Philip Rhodes bought 58,000 acres of the once 80,000-acre estate for #1.2m. He proceeded to sell it off in parcels and in 1993 sold the last 16,500 acres to jute company Titaghur for #1.7m.

Titaghur's chairman Reg Brealey had been the first Briton to be charged with insider dealing but the case against him collapsed in 1991. His company, Titaghur, had six jute mills near Calcutta which employed some 17,000 people and was being pursued by the Indian authorities for tax and pension arrears.

Titaghur was also reported to be carrying an accumulated loss of #67.5m. Brealey's plan was to use Knoydart as a Back to Basics adventure training school for the deprived of Britain's inner cities. It was bitterly opposed by the 70-strong community in Knoydart, and council planners refused planning permission anyway.

The establishment of the Knoydart Foundation - with the help of neighbouring landlords such as Sir Cameron Mackintosh and environmental groups such as the John Muir Trust - to launch community-led bids has so far come to naught.

Brealey decided that Knoydart's future should again lie in the hands of Hinchliffe and Harrison. Their respective roles as chairman and finance director of the Facia retailing empire, which collapsed in 1996 with debts of more than #100m, and their role in at least one other company, Boxgrey, has aroused the authorities' interest.

On April 11, before The Herald first connected these two with Knoydart, the Times Business Section profiled Hinchliffe, and the legacy of his immediate commercial past: ''While Sears - whose chief executive, Liam Strong, was forced to resign for trusting Hinchliffe - fights to retrieve some of the #70m it lost through its involvement with Facia; while many of Facia's 5000 former employees study jobcentre windows in hope of finding work; while estate agents around the country and in Germany try to find new tenants for shops formerly occupied by Facia brands . . . ; while investigators from the Serious Fraud Office pore over files and interview former associates of Hinchliffe stretching from Tel Aviv to Tooting; while DTI lawyers prepare court papers for this autumn's hearing at which the DTI will apply to have him disqualified as a director; Hinchliffe continues to enjoy a glamorous and opulent

lifestyle.''

Part of that lifestyle will now be weekends with chums at Inverie House. Hinchliffe has told the people of Knoydart that he is the power in KPL, that the buck stops with him. KPL's main creditor, the Bank of Scotland, appears content with his and Harrison's involvement in KPL despite its reported debts of #1.4m.

Knoydart is no longer for sale, so it would appear that the winds of land reform are not to blow through Loch Nevis, for a while yet. But it can't be left there. The Community Land Unit established by Brian Wilson at Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Highland Council, and the Scottish Office should now study every syllable of compulsory purchase law with a view to intervening and selling Knoydart on to the Foundation at a reasonable price.

The taxpayer wouldn't lose and it would send out a very important message that in the future more than a helicopter will be required to own land and communities in the Highlands and Islands.

It was 125 years ago that between 400 and 500 people were evicted from Knoydart's townships and forced to take up the offer of paid transport to North America and Australia made by Josephine MacDonell, mother of the seventeenth Chief of Glengarry. Sixteen families took to the hills rather than go but one woman resisted so strongly that the factor's men had to beat her hands with sticks to make her loosen grip on her the door-post of her cottage. The new owners' grip will not be so tight.