Jura. Your sort of place?

The Prime Minister, David Cameron, and I have something in common – we’ve both taken holidays on the Isle of Jura – him this year, me in the summer of 1985. Jura is a big island with a small population – just 200 people – tucked away in the inner Hebrides. It’s one of the remotest, most unspoiled places in the UK. The walking there is wild and tough, mainly trackless, consisting of mountain, bog and heath in equal measure. The only industries are whiskey and deer-stalking. The only road is an alarmingly narrow, single track affair that skirts the eastern coast, linking a string of blinkingly small communities and lone crofts.

The west is entirely uninhabited.

On the downside, I remember the island was infested with sheep ticks, several of which I brought home still attached to my elbows and the backs of my knees. Tiny things, like baby spiders, once attached, they suck your blood and swell to the size of pea. I also remember dead rabbits in the hedgerows – myxomatosis was rife. And I saw deer with their heads sawn off. Life was clearly different there. Simpler. I wouldn’t have lasted a winter, but the emptiness, and the sheer silence of the place impressed me deeply.

The PM was the guest of the Astors, to whom he’s related by marriage. The Astors feature large in the history of British movers and shakers. They own estates there, and several hideaways, including the impressively remote shooting lodge of Glenbatrick, approachable only by sea, or on foot via a six mile hike through tick, bog and cleg infested hills. I remember the clegs in particular – a breed of aggressive, carnivorous horsefly, capable, I’m sure, of penetrating even the hide of an Angus bull. There are clouds of midges too, most of them the biting variety, but after the sheep ticks and the clegs I stopped bothering about the midges. I’m painting a bleak picture aren’t I? Well, Jura can indeed be impressively bleak, but also breathtakingly beautiful.

George Orwell was another friend of the Astors, and one time resident of Jura. Recently widowed, he moved there in 1946, to Barnhill a remote farmhouse where he hunkered down to a kind of monastic self sufficiency while rattling out the manuscript for 1984. Some sources suggest he’d calculated that if the Russians dropped their Atom bombs, Jura was remote enough for Armageddon not to disturb his work.

For such a quiet place, a lot happened to me that week, but my memories are mostly dominated by the characters I met, all of them friendly, and interested in knowing you. There was a Welshman singing classical opera in the hills – a fine tenor, stags braying in accompaniment. He was looking for otters, like me. Perhaps, like a fakir, he meant to enchant them into stillness for our cameras. We saw none. Then there were three more Welshmen in a boat. They’d sailed from Anglesey, and shared with us their racy tales late into the night, accompanied by a bottle of the local whiskey. And there was the ghillie with a missing front tooth who rowed me over the glassy waters of Loch Tarbert early one morning. When I timidly suggested to him I thought his boat was leaking, he calmly agreed and passed me an empty paint tin so I could bail. Then there was the old and delightfully eccentric Glasgow doctor with the trilby hat, the button down Mackintosh, and WW1 binoculars and an old world charm that still makes me smile.

There were standing stones, and curious geology – raised beaches and volcanic rills, and always, always that breathtaking silence. There was brown bathwater from the peaty hills, brown peaty water on the dinner table, yet seawater of the clearest crystal.

What I saw and felt that summer impressed me deeply. In particular my story “The Singing Loch” borrows much of its scenery and atmosphere from Jura. I’ve promised myself I’ll return one day, but it’s not the sort of place to impress the current Lady Graeme, who prefers not to stray too far from modern convenience. I’ll probably have to wait until the next life, remembering of course to bring with me a fresh pair of legs and a large bottle of “Bug-off”.

The UK is a place of dramatic contrasts. If our bustling cities represent the rational, the material, the ego, then Jura, and its little Hebridean neighbours represent the stillness of our deepest soul. It’s a queer sort of idyll, but an idyll indeed for those with an eye for the simpler things. If you’re the PM needing an escape from the Punch and Judy of politics, I can think of nowhere better. But even if you’re just an ordinary bod with a pair of well-worn boots, and taste for the lonely,…

It’s going to be your sort of place as well.