Jura, Scotland: The Hebridean Island is home to wild landscapes, great literary history and a gin distillery

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Jura, Scotland: The Hebridean Island is home to wild landscapes, great literary history and a gin distillery

By Luke Slattery
Jura's three "paps" – the slightly mammary-like peaks that define the island.

Jura's three "paps" – the slightly mammary-like peaks that define the island. Credit: Alamy

Lussa Gin, from Scotland's Inner Hebridean island of Jura, is a concoction of herbs found in the woods at remote Ardlussa. This almost Druidic potion of juniper, coriander, bog myrtle, orris root, water mint, sea lettuce, Scots pine needles, elder leaf, wild rose and lemon thyme undergoes a process of alchemy, after a wave of the distiller's wand, into a zesty, sherbety spirit; an emblem of the wild island.

In Jura, the balance between civilisation and nature weighs firmly in favour of the elements. All year round black storms come crashing in from the North Atlantic and in summer 14 degrees with showers is a balmy day. The Jura community of 230 souls clings for the most part to a narrow strip of land on the more protected east coast and is in any event far outnumbered by some 5000 resident red deer.

I visit Jura's only gin distillery at the end of a daylong tour of the island to which George Orwell retreated, believing it the end of the earth. Barnhill, his spacious whitewashed cottage on Jura's northeast, is certainly at the end of a potholed track. The cottage, nestled in a fold with views to the mainland, sleeps eight and can be rented for £1000 a week.

An otter in Jura, Scotland.

An otter in Jura, Scotland. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo

My tour is led by long-time resident Alex Dunnachie and Rhua, his black Labrador. The hound sits placidly beside Dunnachie as he tootles around in his white van, past rocky coves, crests with commanding views, and pocket-sized crofts.

When we reach the long white beach of Corran Sands – in appearance Bahaman; in reality rather more Baltic – he parks the van, flings a ball for Rhua, and explains how the island, between 1700 and 1900, saw its great leave-taking. The clearances in Jura were relatively soft – at least compared to the Highlands. After rumour spread that land across the North Atlantic was fertile and could be worked "unmolested by taskmasters", America's southern states became an El Dorado for island folk seeking a better life, or simply bread on the table.

Dunnachie intones a "farewell" to Jura written in 1871 by a local woman, Jessie Scott, as she sailed for North Carolina. "No more I'll climb the mountains high," he begins in a solemn tone: "To view the meeting sea and sky/The stately vessels passing by/On every side of Jura."

These days, the island is a lure for hardy, industrious souls such as flame-haired Claire Fletcher. One of three women who banded together in 2015 to make Lussa Gin, she came to Jura from London, and while she loves it like crazy she concedes that island life is scarcely a bed of the rose petals that perfume her gin. She loses animals to the cold, remembers 100 days of maddening rain in a row, and would rather it didn't take an hour or more for her daughters to get to high school on the neighbouring island of Islay: the big smoke.

"Life here is hard," she says. "But then my kids grow up with cows, pigs, goats, bees – animals are always moving in." As if on cue, two girls stroll past, each with a young goat for company. They go to fetch a sack from the barn and the goats spring up as if on pogo sticks to snaffle the feed. Two kids, it occurs to me, are playing with two kids.

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Orwell wrote 1984 at Barnhill. The manuscript was completed in 1948, two years before his death from tuberculosis; he simply flipped the last two numerals for his title. But the island on which he penned his sobering masterpiece is, if anything, a benignly reimagined Animal Farm. The road downhill from the Lussa distillery spins past a fishing lock swollen by recent rains. Lower down, a herd of tawny cows graze drowsily on rich pasture. In the next field a wild herd of red deer, beautiful and proud, scatter nervously as we approach. In the cove below, mouth of the Lussa River, a white swan and a cygnet are preening themselves on a stretch of sandy beach.

A few minutes later we drive beside a thin strip of pebble beach and a glowing grey sea. There, about 20 metres out, an otter hunts for an afternoon snack. I'd been told on previous trips to the Western Isles that these elusive creatures were by nature "crepuscular" – glimpsed only at dawn or dusk, and then only briefly. But this chap is frolicking about in broad daylight: the sun will set a little before midnight. He dives, disappears for what seems like an age, and surfaces like a champion with a crab in his claws. With splendid nonchalance he feasts while floating on his back.

Almost a year ago to the day, I slid past Jura's western fringe on the ferry to Islay. It was a clear day graced with fine views of Jura's three "paps" – the slightly mammary-like peaks that define the island. I resolved there and then to visit next time I was in the neighbourhood.

Isolation is a slippery concept. A man can live an isolated life in a Manhattan apartment, and enjoy rich company among the Inuits. Jura's remoteness is not so much geographic – in clear view to the southeast are the uplands of Islay, with the Kintyre Peninsula and the peaks of Arran behind them – as atmospheric.

The short ferry ride from Port Askaig, on Islay, seems like the grandest of adventures though it lasts barely five minutes. Jura is that kind of place. From Jura's ferry terminal of Feolin the road dawdles across poor peat-sodden land strewn with fern and bracken. Tucked away in a copse, almost out of view, is a 3000-year-old standing stone named Camas an Staca, rising to a height of 3.6 metres and as proud as an obelisk.

Dunnachie points out, in stark contrast, one of the island's newest features: a private 18-hole golf course and luxury lodge built by Australian hedge fund manager Greg Coffey, the so-called Wizard of Oz. Coffey has upscaled a 200-year-old baronial stone villa, the former Ardfin House, into a virtual Hebridean Versailles.

A few minutes later the road curls into the sheltered cove of Craighouse, home to the Jura distillery and the centre of island social life: the Jura Hotel standing on a strip of bright lawn beside the shore. The hotel is a weathered white with a black trim, the same austere livery as the Jura distillery. The bar inside, with a canopy of deer antlers fixed to the ceiling, is the island's living room. From here the view of the harbour and its mossy stone pier, the sheltered waterway, and the mountains beyond, changes little as the hours pass.

The sky, in contrast, is in constant flux on the day of my visit. The leaden clouds lift and part; minutes later they regroup, lay siege to the sun and overpower it. The shifting cloud cover draws out a medley of greens from the landscape: a tweedy pale green flecked with heather along the wind-battered shore, moss green on the moors, and uplands cloaked in emerald – the green of Ireland's Antrim coast, 60 kilometres away as the crow flies.

After lunch at the Jura Hotel – venison and beef burger with chips and salad – I struggle into a set of waterproofs and join Robert Henry, of Jura Boat Tours, on one of his zippy ribs, or rigid inflatable boats. Within clear view of the Jura Hotel is a scrag of rock, home to a colony of grey Atlantic seals, and we're headed in their direction. The seals have been basking in beds of kelp and are as grubby as, well, grubs. As we approach they wriggle and wobble and propel themselves inelegantly from their kelp day beds into the black waters below. They return to the surface, lifting their puppyish snouts disdainfully as we motor past.

Further on, above a rocky promontory, a white-tailed sea eagle is suspended like a hang glider on the stiff southerly breeze, its wings the span of Jura's only road. For a minute or so it hangs in the sky, unmoving. It's said in Jura that if you spy a raptor overhead and can't decide if it's a buzzard or an eagle, then it's probably a buzzard. But when you see an eagle you're never in doubt.

The eagle's partner had been standing sentinel on the highest cliff, and now takes to the air. When the two birds are united they weave through the grey sky like partners in an aerial waltz.

Further along the coast I'm reminded of another predator when we reach a squat, treeless and uninhabited island named Am Fraoch Eilean. The first Lord of the Western Isles, Somerled, ruled the sea lanes from this rocky redoubt in the early 12th century. A castellated keep stood on the eastern end – its foundations are still visible – and the strongman and his descendants, the Macdonalds, would dispatch men in longboats to harry passing vessels and extract a fee for safe passage.

When it's time to return to Islay, I take an evening ferry. The sky lightens. The current runs swiftly. And the peaks of Jura mass powerfully along its forbidding western coast. I say my own "farewell" to Jura knowing that, unlike poor Jessie Scott, for me the wild isle's remoteness is a state – though a welcome one – of mind.

TRIP NOTES

Luke Slattery travelled to Jura with assistance from Visit Britain.

Loganair has daily flights flies from Glasgow to Islay. See loganair.co.uk

SAIL

A local ferry runs hourly from Islay's Port Askaig on Islay to Feolin on Jura. For timetables, see calmac.co.uk

STAY

Accommodation inquiries regarding Orwell's Barnhill should be sent to Damaris Fletcher, damaris@escapetojura.com

Bed and breakfast at Jura Hotel, from £100, see jurahotel.co.uk

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