Orwell came to Barnhill and Jura for the isolation.
The whirlpool was impossible to make out as the small motorboat I travelled on sailed north from Craighouse to visit Barnhill on waters as still as a boating lake. It was two hours before father and son were rescued by a passing lobster fisherman. They lost the boat and had to swim to a remote cove. A whirlpool amid the coastal waters three miles north-west of Barnhill, it almost took the writer’s life when his boat got sucked into it while on the water with his son. “We all teach newcomers about the island and to be especially careful of Corryvreckan.”Ĭorryvreckan is a name that plays a small but vital part in the story of Orwell’s time here. “Everybody does know everyone else’s business on Jura – but it’s a protective thing,” she says. “I came from Newcastle six years ago to live here with my then boyfriend, who is a local, and it has a charm that really gets under your skin”, she says. But, as Rachael explains, true understanding of the island requires more than a daytrip from Islay to sip the malts. Tasting tours of the peaty Jura whiskies are one of the main draws for visitors, alongside trout fishing, deer-stalking and, of course, the landscape. “Life moves slowly here, even by Hebrides standards,” says Rachael Jones, visitor centre manager at Jura Distillery, as we stand outside the entrance to the low, white-brick building whose chimneys dominate Craighouse, the main settlement. Swathes of the island are barely touched by man the mossy corries, lumpy fields of peat, the occasional shadow of a golden eagle flying overhead, the crags, gullies and lochs all contribute to an atmosphere of glorious–yet–eerie emptiness. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesĮven on the sunniest days, there is a brooding, melancholic air to Jura. George Orwell at his typewriter in the mid 1940s.
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