Inner Peace
Get away from it all on Colonsay, the Hebridean island that locals claim to be the most isolated community in the UK. Jeremy Seal soon learns to love the quiet life. Conde Nast Traveller, November 2002
Get away from it all on Colonsay, the Hebridean island that locals claim to be the most isolated community in the UK. Jeremy Seal soon learns to love the quiet life. Conde Nast Traveller, November 2002
That first night on Colonsay brought wind, rain and an eerie press of highland cattle. The beasts crowded around our rented farmhouse, and put up a ceaseless lowing that woke me several times, once even with a choked sob of empathy, as if the mournful din had gotten inside my dreams.
‘They’ll have been missing their calves,’ Eleanor McNeill at the island estate office explained the following morning. ‘A transporter took them off on the return ferry that brought you over from Oban. I daresay they’ll have settled by tonight.’
Eleanor was right. The cattle grieved for a single night, as if they had long since resigned themselves to the annual removal of their young. It was evidently the way of things on this remote Scottish island which lies beyond the jigsaw jostle of the Inner Hebrides, with only Dubh Hirteach lighthouse between its western shore and Labrador - the offspring of cattle and humans alike leaving for the mainland on one-way ferry tickets. In common with other Scottish islands, Colonsay’s resident population has plummeted since peaking around 1,000 in the early 19th century to just 100. But what I heard in the nights that followed (with the cattle settled, our own kids succumbed to excitement-induced exhaustion, and once the buffeting Atlantic gusts had blown themselves out against the corrugated iron roof) went a way to explaining why visitors flocked here in the summer, swelling numbers to over 400, and why they raved about the place thereafter; a quality of silence so pure and deep you feared a return to the real world might prove beyond you.
Colonsay lies two and a half hours by ferry from Oban, but such prosaic positionings misrepresent the place. Better to say that it lies beyond the Firth of Lorn, past Scarba and the ship-sucking whirlpool of Corryvreckan. It has island neighbours, plainly visible to the south and east in all but the worst of weathers, but these are the unsettled wildernesses of Western Jura and Northern Islay. There’s a claim in common currency among the residents that Colonsay is Britain’s single most isolated community. More far-flung ones there may be, they’ll concede in the bar of the one hotel, currently under renovation, or in the one shop or over a cup of tea at Mae’s Pantry, but they’ll then explain that Colonsay stands alone where each of these boasts a neighbour; Tiree and Coll, say, or Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkneys. The first time I heard this, I confess I scurried to the atlas in Machrins, our farmhouse, and took no time at all in locating two better-qualified rivals to the title. Not that I ever got round to putting the islanders right; correcting the claim (Fair Isle and Foula, both in the Shetlands, for what it’s worth) seemed increasingly irrelevant as the week progressed.
Colonsay is a small place, but location, history, climate and circumstance have conspired to pack an awful lot into its nine miles by three; there are important early Christian ruins, numerous standing stones and sea caves, the remarkable subtropical gardens at Colonsay House, inland lochs and several magnificent beaches including the one at Kiloran Bay, with sand the colour of Cornish icecream, backed by enormous dunes and widely regarded as the finest beach in the Hebrides. There’s a golf course (no clubhouse, just eighteen holes arrayed across the machair which doubles as the emergency airstrip, and with a life-membership fee of £10). There’s excellent bird-watching, including rare choughs, golden eagles and corncrakes, seals and otters in abundance, and splendid walking. I bunked off before bathtime one afternoon, parked out at Kiloran Bay and hiked along the track which leads to the top of the island. Ahead of me a substantial rainbow formed, its arc-ends welded to the earth so that it seemed I was entering the island’s all-but deserted north by a shining tunnel. It led through rocky defiles and past marshland to a single farmhouse where the rainbow died with the track, and I crossed the machair, the cropped sward, down to Balnahard Bay. The tide was pulling gently at the skeleton of a shipwreck, all but interred by the sand, and the mountains of Mull were pink in the low sun.
Improbably enough, the island also has a publishing house and a bookshop. These two concerns may share modest premises at Port Mor on the island’s west side – glimpsed in passing through the open door, you might mistake the bookshop for a mere bookshelf - but few literary ventures can boast such ocean views. Throughout the summer, renowned island lamb is readily available and the kitchen gardens at Colonsay House supply a wide range of organic produce. At Scalasaig, the island’s port and main settlement, fishermen often land crabs and lobsters; the best time to buy off the boats, when seals gather in the harbour for tidbits, is around six in the evening.
We arrived in mid-October, which was cutting it fine for Western Scotland. The lamb was all gone and the kitchen gardens were down to their last few bags of (admittedly wonderful) mixed leaf. The summer entertainments such as regular ceilidhs in the village hall were over; the only scheduled get-togethers on offer took the form of church – one Church of Scotland, one Baptist - or the hotel’s Wednesday night pub quiz. Machrins, on the other hand, was spacious, homely, heated and a low-season steal. We could, moreover, always take comfort from the fact that we would at least have the driving rain all to ourselves, barring a few Edinburgh families on half-term breaks.
We got the weather all wrong. Fine weather followed hard on the heels of the rain; for two and a half days that will stay with us, captioned as Happy Times, cloudless skies even held sway over the island and the mountains of Donegal raised faint bumps on the southwestern horizon. We left Machrins one morning and walked down the glen to the shore. The tide’s retreat had revealed a vast expanse of sand strewn with shiny, weed-frilled rocks. By eleven o’clock, we were down to T-shirts. The children swam; we gathered driftwood. By lunchtime, a seal was patrolling the bay, its investigative whiskers a-quiver at the scent of barbecuing sausages.
Kevin Byrne, an Irishman who has lived on Colonsay for twenty years, has gorged himself on the island’s history and lore. Kevin used to run the hotel, establishing a enviable reputation which the new owners will do well to match. These days, he is merely piermaster, proprietor of publishing house and bookshop, island guide and boatsman, author of the island’s community magazine and the man responsible for Colonsay’s highly impressive website (www.colonsay.org), as well as being the island’s unofficial historian and genealogist. As such, he can tell you much about stone circles and iron-age forts, and that there are more Colonsay headstones in Bruce County, Ontario, focus of 19th century islander emigration, than on Colonsay itself.
And then there is Oronsay. Every low tide, for some two hours either side, Colonsay reclaims its southern satellite, briefly an island all its own, across an expanse of sandflats known as the Strand. We drove across, shells crunching beneath the tyres, and followed a track to the ruins of the 14th century Augustinian priory where St Columba is said to have landed but, since his native Ireland remained visible across the water, decided to push on until it was out of view and so reached Iona. Oronsay became a noted centre of stone-carving; there’s a specially fine display of 15th century headstones, featuring swords and galleys, deer and huntsmen, lapdogs and canons in fancy vestments, in the priory house. I walked back, filling my rucksack with mussels which clustered at the foot of exposed rocks. That was the evening we ran out of white wine, so we steamed them in a little Islay malt and water.
We visited the gardens at Colonsay House, where the vegetation underwent a remarkable transformation. The sheltered dell in which Colonsay House nestles – the Laird chose well back in 1722, when the earliest parts of the house date from – had caused the wind-whipped, salt-seared grasses, heather and bracken, the stuff of Colonsay, to give way to a sub-tropical luxuriance of rhododendrons and hydrangeas, myrtles and magnolias. And in the house’s formal gardens, as if inspired by such vegetable dissonances, an abandoned dalek seemed to stand; it was the old lens from Rhuvaal lighthouse on Islay, as further investigation revealed.
By our final evening we were running of short of supplies; there was nothing for it but oysters. I skirted the Strand in the late afternoon, heading for Colonsay’s southernmost point where Andrew Abrahams runs his one-man oyster business from a shed in a remote cove. Andrew had settled here twenty five years ago and had rarely left the island. ‘People travel more than they should,’ he said (with the certainty of one who has chosen the right place in which to stop traveling). ‘We’re below the transatlantic flight path here, and sometimes the vapour trails from the planes are so thick that the sky clouds over.’ This, however, was a glorious evening. ‘The water is warmer than it should be,’ said Andrew. ‘Good for the oysters’ growth but it could come to affect their purity.’ But not yet; the oysters cost a fiver a dozen, and they were magnificent.
On our last morning, as we were packing to leave, there was activity in the outbuildings opposite Machrins. ‘It’s the turn of the lambs to be put on the ferry,’ Eleanor McNeill told the children.
‘Are they going somewhere new?’ one of them asked.
‘They’re going to Aberdeen,’ Eleanor replied. It was an evasively eloquent euphemism. Later that same day, when we returned to the car deck as the ferry approached Oban, all that remained of Colonsay was the smell of island sheep, headed for Aberdeen on a closely packed transporter.
ENDS
FACT BOX.
Caledonian MacBrayne (reservations; 08705 650000) run three weekly services between Oban and Scalasaig, Colonsay. Returns from £17.60 per passenger and £85 per car. From 29th March to 19th October, there is also a Wednesday service leaving Kennacraig, Argyllshire for Colonsay, returning that same evening.
Isle of Colonsay Estate Cottages (01951 200312; [email protected]) have twenty self-catering farmhouses, millhouses and cottages, and eight self-contained flats in Colonsay House. Prices range from £180 to £290 low season, and from £295 to £935 high season. For details of other island accommodation, including more self-catering units, B&Bs, a backpacker’s hostel and the hotel, see www.colonsay.org.uk.
Island tours and boating trips can be arranged through Kevin Byrne, fauna and flora walks through his wife Christa ([email protected].uk).
Oysters and honey through Andrew Abrahams (01951 200365).
Reading: The bookshop at Port Mor keeps flexible hours, but is open most afternoons from 2-4pm. Recommendations are: The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee (House of Lochar, £8.99); American writer’s excellent account of his stay on Colonsay in 1969. Footprint Scotland Handbook (Footprint, £10.99); OS Map Jura and Colonsay (Landranger 61)
‘They’ll have been missing their calves,’ Eleanor McNeill at the island estate office explained the following morning. ‘A transporter took them off on the return ferry that brought you over from Oban. I daresay they’ll have settled by tonight.’
Eleanor was right. The cattle grieved for a single night, as if they had long since resigned themselves to the annual removal of their young. It was evidently the way of things on this remote Scottish island which lies beyond the jigsaw jostle of the Inner Hebrides, with only Dubh Hirteach lighthouse between its western shore and Labrador - the offspring of cattle and humans alike leaving for the mainland on one-way ferry tickets. In common with other Scottish islands, Colonsay’s resident population has plummeted since peaking around 1,000 in the early 19th century to just 100. But what I heard in the nights that followed (with the cattle settled, our own kids succumbed to excitement-induced exhaustion, and once the buffeting Atlantic gusts had blown themselves out against the corrugated iron roof) went a way to explaining why visitors flocked here in the summer, swelling numbers to over 400, and why they raved about the place thereafter; a quality of silence so pure and deep you feared a return to the real world might prove beyond you.
Colonsay lies two and a half hours by ferry from Oban, but such prosaic positionings misrepresent the place. Better to say that it lies beyond the Firth of Lorn, past Scarba and the ship-sucking whirlpool of Corryvreckan. It has island neighbours, plainly visible to the south and east in all but the worst of weathers, but these are the unsettled wildernesses of Western Jura and Northern Islay. There’s a claim in common currency among the residents that Colonsay is Britain’s single most isolated community. More far-flung ones there may be, they’ll concede in the bar of the one hotel, currently under renovation, or in the one shop or over a cup of tea at Mae’s Pantry, but they’ll then explain that Colonsay stands alone where each of these boasts a neighbour; Tiree and Coll, say, or Westray and Papa Westray in the Orkneys. The first time I heard this, I confess I scurried to the atlas in Machrins, our farmhouse, and took no time at all in locating two better-qualified rivals to the title. Not that I ever got round to putting the islanders right; correcting the claim (Fair Isle and Foula, both in the Shetlands, for what it’s worth) seemed increasingly irrelevant as the week progressed.
Colonsay is a small place, but location, history, climate and circumstance have conspired to pack an awful lot into its nine miles by three; there are important early Christian ruins, numerous standing stones and sea caves, the remarkable subtropical gardens at Colonsay House, inland lochs and several magnificent beaches including the one at Kiloran Bay, with sand the colour of Cornish icecream, backed by enormous dunes and widely regarded as the finest beach in the Hebrides. There’s a golf course (no clubhouse, just eighteen holes arrayed across the machair which doubles as the emergency airstrip, and with a life-membership fee of £10). There’s excellent bird-watching, including rare choughs, golden eagles and corncrakes, seals and otters in abundance, and splendid walking. I bunked off before bathtime one afternoon, parked out at Kiloran Bay and hiked along the track which leads to the top of the island. Ahead of me a substantial rainbow formed, its arc-ends welded to the earth so that it seemed I was entering the island’s all-but deserted north by a shining tunnel. It led through rocky defiles and past marshland to a single farmhouse where the rainbow died with the track, and I crossed the machair, the cropped sward, down to Balnahard Bay. The tide was pulling gently at the skeleton of a shipwreck, all but interred by the sand, and the mountains of Mull were pink in the low sun.
Improbably enough, the island also has a publishing house and a bookshop. These two concerns may share modest premises at Port Mor on the island’s west side – glimpsed in passing through the open door, you might mistake the bookshop for a mere bookshelf - but few literary ventures can boast such ocean views. Throughout the summer, renowned island lamb is readily available and the kitchen gardens at Colonsay House supply a wide range of organic produce. At Scalasaig, the island’s port and main settlement, fishermen often land crabs and lobsters; the best time to buy off the boats, when seals gather in the harbour for tidbits, is around six in the evening.
We arrived in mid-October, which was cutting it fine for Western Scotland. The lamb was all gone and the kitchen gardens were down to their last few bags of (admittedly wonderful) mixed leaf. The summer entertainments such as regular ceilidhs in the village hall were over; the only scheduled get-togethers on offer took the form of church – one Church of Scotland, one Baptist - or the hotel’s Wednesday night pub quiz. Machrins, on the other hand, was spacious, homely, heated and a low-season steal. We could, moreover, always take comfort from the fact that we would at least have the driving rain all to ourselves, barring a few Edinburgh families on half-term breaks.
We got the weather all wrong. Fine weather followed hard on the heels of the rain; for two and a half days that will stay with us, captioned as Happy Times, cloudless skies even held sway over the island and the mountains of Donegal raised faint bumps on the southwestern horizon. We left Machrins one morning and walked down the glen to the shore. The tide’s retreat had revealed a vast expanse of sand strewn with shiny, weed-frilled rocks. By eleven o’clock, we were down to T-shirts. The children swam; we gathered driftwood. By lunchtime, a seal was patrolling the bay, its investigative whiskers a-quiver at the scent of barbecuing sausages.
Kevin Byrne, an Irishman who has lived on Colonsay for twenty years, has gorged himself on the island’s history and lore. Kevin used to run the hotel, establishing a enviable reputation which the new owners will do well to match. These days, he is merely piermaster, proprietor of publishing house and bookshop, island guide and boatsman, author of the island’s community magazine and the man responsible for Colonsay’s highly impressive website (www.colonsay.org), as well as being the island’s unofficial historian and genealogist. As such, he can tell you much about stone circles and iron-age forts, and that there are more Colonsay headstones in Bruce County, Ontario, focus of 19th century islander emigration, than on Colonsay itself.
And then there is Oronsay. Every low tide, for some two hours either side, Colonsay reclaims its southern satellite, briefly an island all its own, across an expanse of sandflats known as the Strand. We drove across, shells crunching beneath the tyres, and followed a track to the ruins of the 14th century Augustinian priory where St Columba is said to have landed but, since his native Ireland remained visible across the water, decided to push on until it was out of view and so reached Iona. Oronsay became a noted centre of stone-carving; there’s a specially fine display of 15th century headstones, featuring swords and galleys, deer and huntsmen, lapdogs and canons in fancy vestments, in the priory house. I walked back, filling my rucksack with mussels which clustered at the foot of exposed rocks. That was the evening we ran out of white wine, so we steamed them in a little Islay malt and water.
We visited the gardens at Colonsay House, where the vegetation underwent a remarkable transformation. The sheltered dell in which Colonsay House nestles – the Laird chose well back in 1722, when the earliest parts of the house date from – had caused the wind-whipped, salt-seared grasses, heather and bracken, the stuff of Colonsay, to give way to a sub-tropical luxuriance of rhododendrons and hydrangeas, myrtles and magnolias. And in the house’s formal gardens, as if inspired by such vegetable dissonances, an abandoned dalek seemed to stand; it was the old lens from Rhuvaal lighthouse on Islay, as further investigation revealed.
By our final evening we were running of short of supplies; there was nothing for it but oysters. I skirted the Strand in the late afternoon, heading for Colonsay’s southernmost point where Andrew Abrahams runs his one-man oyster business from a shed in a remote cove. Andrew had settled here twenty five years ago and had rarely left the island. ‘People travel more than they should,’ he said (with the certainty of one who has chosen the right place in which to stop traveling). ‘We’re below the transatlantic flight path here, and sometimes the vapour trails from the planes are so thick that the sky clouds over.’ This, however, was a glorious evening. ‘The water is warmer than it should be,’ said Andrew. ‘Good for the oysters’ growth but it could come to affect their purity.’ But not yet; the oysters cost a fiver a dozen, and they were magnificent.
On our last morning, as we were packing to leave, there was activity in the outbuildings opposite Machrins. ‘It’s the turn of the lambs to be put on the ferry,’ Eleanor McNeill told the children.
‘Are they going somewhere new?’ one of them asked.
‘They’re going to Aberdeen,’ Eleanor replied. It was an evasively eloquent euphemism. Later that same day, when we returned to the car deck as the ferry approached Oban, all that remained of Colonsay was the smell of island sheep, headed for Aberdeen on a closely packed transporter.
ENDS
FACT BOX.
Caledonian MacBrayne (reservations; 08705 650000) run three weekly services between Oban and Scalasaig, Colonsay. Returns from £17.60 per passenger and £85 per car. From 29th March to 19th October, there is also a Wednesday service leaving Kennacraig, Argyllshire for Colonsay, returning that same evening.
Isle of Colonsay Estate Cottages (01951 200312; [email protected]) have twenty self-catering farmhouses, millhouses and cottages, and eight self-contained flats in Colonsay House. Prices range from £180 to £290 low season, and from £295 to £935 high season. For details of other island accommodation, including more self-catering units, B&Bs, a backpacker’s hostel and the hotel, see www.colonsay.org.uk.
Island tours and boating trips can be arranged through Kevin Byrne, fauna and flora walks through his wife Christa ([email protected].uk).
Oysters and honey through Andrew Abrahams (01951 200365).
Reading: The bookshop at Port Mor keeps flexible hours, but is open most afternoons from 2-4pm. Recommendations are: The Crofter and the Laird by John McPhee (House of Lochar, £8.99); American writer’s excellent account of his stay on Colonsay in 1969. Footprint Scotland Handbook (Footprint, £10.99); OS Map Jura and Colonsay (Landranger 61)
