This is the Scottish landscape I dream of

Scotland has a land problem - we lack ownership and we lack imagination. I have done nothing but imagine a different countryside for years - and this is what it looks like.

It's the Revive conference tomorrow – but I just can't face writing anything else about land reform. I have written so much about this, so many times I'm running out of things to say without repeating myself over and over. And, like the Council Tax, I can't bring myself to write about it because it is crushingly obvious the Scottish Government doesn't really want to do anything about it.

The immediate future isn't any more promising than the immediate past – we'll have a new land reform act designed to do as little as the previous two land reform acts, but we'll still have government policy supporting the rich to buy more land and then milk it for public subsidies.

But – and this is what keeps me going – change will come. The outrageousness of our land ownership patterns and the overwhelming public support for reform will one day find a legislative avenue not blocked by the cowardice of the present government. The next thing to happen will look like the old thing; so what about the thing after next? What about my own personal land utopia?

I've been thinking about this for years now; what follows is a highly personal view which I offer to see if it could shake us out of our assumption that Scotland will always be like this. I dream of a Scotland open, beautiful, productive, fair, shared.

I can't think of our land without thinking about how it looks, because I've lived in a rural area most of my life. Land is a very visual issue for me, and one which is obviously dominated by farming. The big, square patches of monocrop we assume will always be there may not always be there though. Technology changes. Let's make the most of it.

Automation is coming. There are already self-driving tractors and they are a very sensible way to manage land. There are lots of benefits. For a start, automation means devices can run 24 hours a day, and the time-intensive nature of doing farming in the right way to preserve soil and wildlife is unattractive to farmers. Automation changes that.

For example, an automated system enables much more accurate application of fertiliser and pesticides. AI-driven spot application of weedkiller and pesticides is already happening and it is inordinately better for the environment. But what interests me is what else that can mean.

For a start, tractors are giant in part because farmers want to cultivate as much land as possible in one go given that them driving the tractor is a big time input. That doesn't apply with automation where tractors (this isn't going to look like any tractor you imagine – or just perhaps it might...) will be smaller because they can run 24 hours.

This has implications. For a start, you don't need to have giant square fields of monocrops. Imagine, for example, that all planting was done in little 'coupes', an acre each and not a patchwork of squares, with planting round each one. Automated tractors would weave round little patches of hedgerow and shrubs and trees, creating a organic vista of little plots – without losing efficiency or productivity.

This is great for the environment, creating an enormously better habitat for wildlife with real diversity. But for me this is just, well, much more beautiful. Combine it with 'virtual fences' and the whole countryside changes. Virtual fences are collars that go on livestock which virtually map boundaries of imaginary fields and warn the animals if they are straying near to them.

Imagine a countryside of natural-looking pockets of a wide variety of crops surrounded by hedgerows with herds of grazing animals wandering apparently free across sprawling pastures in the landscape. No fences, just wildness. The animals might make a journey of miles over the course of a summer, grazing smaller patches and moving on as the farmer shifts the virtual fields (this, incidentally, is massively better for the soil).

If I'm being truly radical then I'd point out that the best way to manage such a system would be to have planting schedules managed nationally based on AI modelling of demand. You could rotate crops not just around a farm but around the country, again doing wonderful things for the health and productivity of the land.

So much routine work could be automated (animals fed, crops planted, tended and harvested – and no fences to mend) that farmers would need additional roles. They could become 'land stewards', still overseeing their farms but doing more than that, receiving a secure salary for their land and their work.

Because in this system the countryside opens up. What I really want to see is great avenues cut through the entire country. Cultivate, roll and seed it once and then have it cut by automated lawnmower and we'd create an entirely new walking environment around Scotland. These avenues could stretch everywhere, in all directions.

Each avenue would have some basic electricity and water running up it, and good broadband. Simply channels at the side of each would serve log cabins along their length with 'trickle power and water' which would fill up a battery and a storage tank to serve them without having to have expensive infrastructure added. A national app would let you book a cabin with a virtual lock.

I'd get Scottish manufacturers to design a number of off-the-peg cabin designs, each high performance, all lovely looking. I'd get planning permission to pre-approve these and have a liberal regime of permitting them so long as they are near an avenue.

“Right now, hope lies in our imagination”

It would then be for landowners, supported by the National Investment bank, to cultivate and populate their own avenues. Having lived my whole life in rurality I can tell you that those of you who never leave a road are missing some of the most beautiful parts of Scotland. The beauty is everywhere – a loop in a burn that runs past a little hill, a sudden clearing in the woods where deer gather...

Who knows these places? Farmers. They should design the avenues that pass through their land, creating paths on the least productive land and woodland that capture all of these moments of beauty.

We could have hundreds and hundreds of miles of these avenues, thousands and thousands of cabins. Were I not a home owner I'd dream of spending a year, packing my stuff into a backpack and heading off to my nearest avenue. I'd wander until I was tired and book a nearby cabin. I'd spend time there, working via high-speed broadband by day, exploring in the evenings.

(I'm not a luddite though – only cabins with a TV I can stream on because I've got what feels like two hundred years of TV to catch up with.)

When it was time I'd just pack my things, wander on until I felt like stopping. I'd be a digital nomad in an overgrown utopia of startling beauty. And all the way round I imagine finding communities, so many little kinds.

If I was a landowner then I'd find a nondescript little hillock and I'd dig it out and put a small, buried nightclub in it. I'd put a hundred little cabins in. People would come for hedonistic weekends, dancing at night, staying over, eating together to recover.

Or perhaps I'd create a little community of writers and artists. On the side of a hill, in a clearing in the woods, on the banks of a little burn, I'd build 20 cabins and some bigger cabins for studios. If I had money I'd let people stay for free as long as they were writing, but it could also be an inexpensive way to support young artists.

Another thing I yearn to do (channeling the medieval Englishman in me...) is to build a wooden pub in the woods with great pies, somewhere with a delightful walk just before it, perhaps a couple of miles winding past waterfalls or a little glen. People would park up, wander through the scenery, arrive at my pub where they'd get a beer (or two) and a fine pie and some great company.

What excites me about this is that these are my things (hedonistic dancing, communities of writers, pies...) and everyone else will have their own. What do I want land reform to be? I don't know, I want to know what you think it will be. I want to know what you'd build on a couple of acres if there was a tree-lined, grassy avenue going right through the middle.

I imagine visitors from all over the world coming here, becoming digital nomads, perhaps travelling from the borders to the highland over three months as their fancy takes them each day, working when they work, relaxing when they relax. I imagine us falling in love with our country again, with the smells of our soil and our plants, the sounds of our wildlife, returned and thriving.

I dream of children squealing with delight not because of something that happened in Minecraft but because it's become normal for the family to disappear into the wilds for a weekend, and there are two baby deer nosing at the door.

I would love to see a rural Scotland revived by this, with little businesses serving the people who pass through. It doesn't all need to be pies – little shops might act like village stores in popular areas, with home baking and homemade jams and big pots of stovies (OK, that's a me thing again). I imagine avenues winding up hills, little 'hobbit homes' dug into the sides.

To be honest with you, I can imagine a world in which I choose to live permanently in a cabin. Roads are overrated – you'd need to plan ahead to make a journey to the nearest village which might be an hour's round trip or more. But what an hour, and how much better than a supermarket in a retail park.

We don't need to be like this, trapped in little sprawling concrete urban blobs, divorced from the wild, an increasingly industrialised countryside slowly dying as the miasma of pesticides wipes out our bees and our own mental health gets worse and worse.

This other world I describe actively incentivises the rewilding of land, the cultivating of planting to make our world beautiful, the decentralisation of our lives, a slower pace, a reconnection with the things we know improve our wellbeing.

Perhaps this vision isn't for everyone, but it would make our land something which is there for everyone – when they want it. My guess is that people would come to want it very much indeed.

Scotland is a mess. There is no getting round it. We need to start to imagine something more than this. We need to inspire people not just to moan but to change things. Perhaps I am just recreating my childhood, spent on hills, in burns, up trees, stuck in mud. It was a world of invention and creation and magic, so I want it for you and for your children too.

But that is what I imagine when I see the land outside our windows. And now all I can think off is a night of wild dancing inside a hill, a pie to see me through the hangover, and a family of deer to keep an eye on the whole thing. Right now, hope lies in our imagination.