by Roger Deakin
Everything on Belnahua was ruined, except its wild beauty. There were two rows of dilapidated slate cottages carpeted in long grass with just their walls and fireplaces left. Holed and half-demolished by the winter storms, what was left of their windows framed dramatic views of the Garvellachs and the distant Paps of Jura across the sea. Bits of derelict machinery lay everywhere: cogs and pulleys, shafts, spindles, wheels, gears, cranes, pitted bollards and rusting fragments of narrow-gauge track. The beaches were all silver, black and grey, with fine black sand and all denominations of the island’s slate coinage, some flecked with a starry night sky of fool’s gold, others striated with the finest random white pencil lines of quartz, the doodling of mermaids. The tides had sorted and screened them by size, stacking them like books end-on in flowing lines and whorls that traced the eddies and turbulence that clamoured over them.
We swam the length of the quarry in relatively warm, sheltered water, whose utter calm was a complete contrast to the inner turmoil of the surrounding sea. Entered down a shelving beach of slates, the enormous pool was about 300 yards long, with two narrow grey-green islands almost dividing it in two. At the far end, we reached a big black sun-soaked radiator of hot slate. Little spiders, their fine webs spun across the fissures, greeted us, and the hot rock felt delicious to my chilled hands as I climbed in and out diving. Then I went exploring. I stood before the hearth in one of the quarrymen’s cottages, under a roof of sky, and climbed to the top of the island, where the views were unsurpassed. The central ridge, shaped like an old concrete air-raid shelter, must have afforded some natural protection from the westerly weather to the Belnahuans at work in the quarries, or on what little land there is. The houses all stood on the south coast of the island. It must have been a bleak life quarrying slates in winter.
Belnahua’s black beaches are rendered nearly unswimmable by the subtle ferocity of the running tides, except perhaps at slack water. There are several beaches, separated by black rocks, each with a distinct character: one a mass of warm, black paperweights; another, a hoard of the slate money combed into watery patterns, clustered around rocks. I bathed in the shelter of a rocky inlet. It was colder than the sheltered quarry pool, but startlingly clear, magnifying every detail below. Beyond the rocks, the rising tide was running fast enough to snatch away even the strongest swimmer. It rose rapidly up the shore, continually dragging and sifting the island, every grain of black sand, in its anxious, restless tugging. It sucked and rattled the teeth-chattering pebbles in rhythms and counter-rhythms. We listened to it as we picnicked in the grass beside the quarry pool, and looked across to the white lighthouse tower on Fladda, less than half a mile away, with an overgrown walled garden the keepers used to tend. When we put out in the boat, the tide was running our way, and we sped home to the mainland, like a skimmed ducks-and-drakes pebble. Looking back at Belnahua in the sunset, I thought how like a desert island atoll it was, set incongruously in the Hebrides. And I have something to declare: a tiny cargo of slate pebbles slipped into my rucksack, that now sit, like small islands, on my desk.
23
ORWELL’S WHIRLPOOL
Jura, Hebrides, 22 August
PORING OVER THE map of Jura in the library back in Cambridge, with its bewildering choice of swimmable water, I had nearly resorted to planning my journey by throwing darts blindfold at the map. To know the island as I do is only to realise how much more there will always be to discover of its beauties and difficulties. It resists you at every step. For a swimmer, it combines heaven and hell. It has delicious water and dramatic beaches, but also a menacing whirlpool and some of the fiercest tidal currents in the British Isles. There is only one road, almost no footpaths (just deer-tracks), it rains a good deal, and in summer there are midges. It is really a tawny desert, with less than 250 people on 160 square miles of island. This is why you can wander on the face of Jura for days without meeting a living soul, and it is probably why George Orwell came to live here in April 1946.
Orwell had first visited Jura in September 1945, at the suggestion of his friend David Astor, whose family owned an estate on the island. It hadn’t occurred to anyone that the trip was more than a holiday, but when the writer heard that a remote farmhouse near the north coast was available, he decided to move in. His wife, Eileen, died suddenly that winter, and he temporarily abandoned the plan, but by April 1946 he was moving into Barnhill. The house was twenty-five miles from the nearest shop. It had no electricity and no telephone, and only the roughest of tracks leading up to it for the last five miles, but Orwell was anxious to get out of London, and wanted his three-year-old son Richard to grow up in the country. What could be better for a small boy than a wild island? He set about farming and gardening in a small way, went fishing, planted fruit trees, bought a rowing boat with an outboard engine, and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four. The hardship and the adventure of the place must have appealed to him. But as desert places, the Western Isles were also where the Celtic saints retreated to hear the voice of God in the silence. Orwell, writing his prophetic novel about politics and the human soul, needed somewhere silent to hear himself think his own special brand of common sense.
It was late afternoon by the time I arrived on the remote white sand beach of Glenbatrick Bay on the far west coast of Jura. On the neighbouring island of Islay I had enquired amongst the fishermen on the quayside for a boatman and was told, ‘If it’s Glenbatrick you want, that’s your man.’ They pointed out a commanding figure loading up a sleek rubber-hulled powerboat who turned out to be the laird himself, Lord Astor, the nephew of Orwell’s friend, fetching provisions for his solitary island cottage. He had readily agreed to take me over the Sound of Islay with him and entertained me to tea when we landed.
I dived into the loch in the calm, clear sand-warmed water of Glenbatrick Bay. It is a wild, enchanted shore fortified by a succession of steep rocky ridges running out from the high ground like breakwaters to the sea, each sheltering a sand or a pebble beach. I swam on the rising tide, keeping an eye on my rucksack, like a milestone on the beach, as I drifted perceptibly up the loch. Two seals watched me idly from one of the rocks that stand out everywhere like crocodiles’ teeth until the tide conceals them. There were otters here too. The dazzling sun burnt a furrow straight down the loch, and shone on the heathery pelt of the island, which looked easy walking from out in the sea, although I knew it wasn’t. I turned and struck back towards the beach, with the white stone cottage at its edge, and a backdrop of the three rounded summits of the Paps, curiously striped with streaks of white quartzite as though gigantic prehistoric birds have roosted and shat on them for millions of years. The tallest of them always seems to have a white cloud hovering just above it, like Kilimanjaro.
I made my camp in good time, about six o’clock, before the midges came out to play, choosing a heathery level patch near one of the raised beaches that abound along this coast. When I had first seen the words ‘Raised Beaches’ on the map, recurring like an incantation, forming a ribbon along the western shores of Jura, I immediately wanted to tramp over to this wilderness and explore them. These ridges of big, smooth, pale-grey, purple-veined pebbles, like curling stones or loaves, rise to between ten and thirty feet above the seashore along most of the windward side of the island. They are a monument to centuries of giant waves roughing up the island, trying to flip it over like a pancake. The island responded by throwing up huge wet-stone ramparts. On top of them, generations of ants founded ant-hills that grew to the size of small tumuli as they built on the ruins of their forebears. Heather, moss and bilberries took root in the fertile soil, and deer nibbled them to a close-cropped topiary, like green thatched roofs.
As the sun began to sink, I lit a small fire of flotsam and dead heather between two rocks to keep away the midges that come out of nowhere and can make life unbearable for all but the most leather-skinned. By piling on handfuls of dead bracken, I found I could make it smoke in their faces, and mine. Meditating on the sea, I remembered the best
solution to the problem, slid stealthily into the cool loch, and circled about in the pink and purple wavelets. Midges respond to the heat of the body, so cooling it is a sound strategy. It is only the female of the species that bites, and only when she is carrying eggs and in need of protein. The males are innocent, and vegetarian, and during most of the year midges keep themselves to themselves, eating decayed plants and nectar. Culicoides impunctatus has probably done as much as anything for nature conservation in the Highlands and Islands, by deterring the holiday hordes. It must cost the country millions in lost tourist revenue. When I came out I made a dash for the towel and my clothes, piled more bracken on the fire, and sat drying off in the smoke like a kipper. I dined on bread and sardines, watching the smooth lanes and tracks of subtle turbulence beneath the surface of the sea. From inside the tent I could gaze straight across to Colonsay on the horizon and I watched a small boat emerging out of the dusk as, at ten to nine, the sun touched down on the little island.
There was an immense silence, with only the sound of the sea breaking gently on the pebble beach just below, and the throb of the boat’s engine. As night fell I heard an anchor drop in the bay, and the splash of dinghy oars, voices, and the crackle of a beach fire a few hundred yards away. All I could see was the boat riding at anchor. A breeze got up and the midges evaporated. I lay with my head out of the tent gazing wakefully at the full moon silvering the sea, heart thumping in the sheer elemental drama of this island.
I woke in the first light to the sound of a fishing boat setting lobster pots in the loch. When I put my head out of the tent, deer were watching me from the hillside. Red deer are the island’s prime population; they say there are 5,000. Theirs are the only tracks through the rough terrain, and there is not a moment when you are not being watched by them, usually from high ground. ‘Jura’ is said to be a Chinese-whispers version of the words for ‘Deer Island’ in Old Norse: Dyr Oe.
After a spartan breakfast of burn water, biscuits and an orange, I packed up and lurched up and down the steep sides of a series of ferny, bracken-filled ravines that run down to a thousand hidden coves along the shore. Loch Tarbert almost cuts the slender island in two at this halfway point, pinching it like a wasp’s waist. I veered inland on the switchback deer tracks and climbed steadily until I was level with the first of a string of swims that winked in the sun, stretching in an imaginary ley-line across the island. Feeling no modesty before the deer, I entered the ineffable softness of Lochan Mic-a-phi and crossed straight over it. If some of the Fen rivers were gin clear, this was like swimming through single malt whisky. It was deep and refreshing, but by no means cold; somewhere in the mid-sixties fahrenheit. The loch turned my body to the dull gold of a carp, and bore me up as if in water-wings, as I returned across two hundred yards of the finest water in the world, tasting it at intervals. To feel its balmy softness in every limb, at every stroke, was a kind of heaven.
An hour later, the combined effects of loch swimming and hard walking were going to my head. For many people, parboiled and half-dissolved in daily hot baths, the ecstasies of cold water or hill-walking must seem a long way off, probably bracketed with S&M, but I was getting hot, and searching for the Liundale River on its way to the loch. Suddenly, round a bend in the deer track, I found what I was looking for. An eighteen-foot waterfall tumbled off the moorland into a deep peat-brown basin just above the beach. Filtered through moorland moss, the river turned my body back to amber as I pushed out into deep water twenty or thirty feet across. The pool was walled round three sides with perpendicular rock. It was probably jumpable from above, but thankfully there were no members of the Kirkby Lonsdale Flying Corps here to try. I swam under the waterfall, dived through its deafening turbulence, and came up behind the curtain of white water. It was gaspingly, shockingly, ridiculously cold. This was water straight from the mountain that sends your blood surging and crams every capillary with a belt of adrenalin, despatching endorphins to seep into the seats of pleasure in body and brain, so that your soul goes soaring, and never quite settles all day.
Swimming in the deepest part of the pool, I felt the updraught of cool air drawn across the surface and up the rock chimney by the falling water. There were dozens of rainbows in the spray, in that misty aura in which the waterfall atomises and evaporates into the surrounding air, a border territory between the elements where naiads play. And indeed I swam in the company of a tame water ousel. These dainty incognito river spirits are usually quite timorous, flying nervously from rock to rock, always keeping to the limit of your field of vision, so you sometimes wonder if they’re really there at all. But this one just carried on minding its own business, hunting amongst the wet stones for aquatic insects or snails like the robin by my compost heap. Perhaps it was more used to the company of saints; St Columba must have known this shore, not so far from Iona. Not much has changed here since the eighth century, when it was easier to travel by water than by land, and probably safer. People here still talk about being joined by the sea to the other isles, and to Ireland, not separated.
Two minutes’ scramble down the steep river gorge to the sea, and I was swimming out in a cleft between two walls of rock. But the tide had turned and was racing out alarmingly fast, like a river, so I returned to the waterfall and sat tingling with elation, drying off in a sunny corner on a grassy ledge, observing the comings and goings of dragonflies and butterflies. The dipper curtseyed and flew off.
The deer-paths led me up a steep incline to a point where I could soon see a much larger sheet of water, Maol-ant-Sornaich, dammed forty feet above the sea by a spectacular wall of pebbles perfectly graded in a wide curving sweep of bay from the size and shape of eggs at one end to rounded loaves at the other. The grey- and purple-striped stone was polished smoother than skin and still glistened from the receding tide that now raced down Loch Tarbert like mountain rapids. I made my way across this great, dazzling, pale-grey, ankle-challenging desert. In the sunshine each pebble cast a dramatic, sharp shadow on the next. I plunged in and crossed the lochan, now ruffled by a gathering breeze, to some cliffs on the other side. Sunshine and clouds chased each other across the surface, and I soon hastened back, feeling uneasy at the scale of things – the looming cliffs and the giant natural dam – after the intimacy of the waterfall pool.
The next swim, from the wooden landing-stage of a boathouse on a little trout loch nestling in a purple bowl of hills, was a sheer delight. This loch had a shallow end, where the burn flowed in, and a deep end where it was dammed by a stone wall and flowed down a salmon ladder into the sea. Each time the wind blew a wavelet in my face I gulped it happily. Trout jumped four feet out of the water as I sat reading outside a fishing bothy, propped against an upturned boat. Perhaps this was one of the places Orwell had in mind when he wrote in a letter to his friend Celia Paget:
We went for some wonderful picnics on the other side of the island, which is quite uninhabited but where there is an empty shepherd’s cottage one can sleep in. It is a beautiful coast, green water and white sand, and a few miles inland lochs full of trout which never get fished because they’re too far from anywhere.
I crossed the giant mantrap that constitutes the majority of the land surface of Jura, sidestepping off the deer-paths to avoid disturbing fat mother-spiders in their webs. Walking on Jura is not for the faint-hearted. You really need hooves, not boots. And always there are the deer on the skyline, watching, with their ears up like leaves. I swam in two more lochs, one with white waterlilies, before I eventually reached the road at four o’clock, just in time for the post-bus on its afternoon run, delivering provisions and gossip, schoolchildren and the mail, up and down the island. Alex, the driver, took me north to Ardlussa, where Orwell’s neighbours, Mr and Mrs Nelson, used to live. Having cooled off in the sea, swimming from the tiny bay there with a seal, I set out to walk the seven miles up the track to Barnhill and the two more on to the Gulf of Corryvreckan.
It was a testing journey for Orwell to make contact with t
he outside world. But then he liked hardship, and had always enjoyed testing himself, posing as a tramp in the Kentish hopfields, down and out in Paris and London, fighting in Catalonia, running a village store in Wallington, keeping goats in the outskirts of Marrakesh, or farming on Jura. He tried a variety of transport on this track. First there was a motorbike, which constantly broke down. He would often carry a scythe on the back to cut down the rushes which sprang up in the middle of the road – and still do – and spent many hours sitting beside it, tinkering with the engine, hoping someone might come by who could help. Although practical in other ways, he was no mechanic. Later there was an unreliable lorry, a temperamental pony, an old Austin truck and a fishing boat to collect visitors and supplies from Ardlussa in good weather.
As I walked the last few miles, beginning to feel the weight of my rucksack, I imagined Orwell’s life here: collecting wood, lighting a peat fire, rolling a cigarette, planting potatoes, typing in an upstairs room above the kitchen, swimming in a clear, green, sandy bay on the wild side of the island. He was certainly a swimmer. At Eton he swam in the Thames with his friend Bobbie Longden, the great love of Cyril Connolly’s youth, and, later, headmaster at Wellington College. In a radio interview in 1960, Orwell’s friend Denys King-Farlow said he loved swimming, ‘but never bothered about swimming or diving with any style’.
It was on a bathing and camping expedition to Glengarrisdale Bay, on the uninhabited side of the island, that Orwell’s natural taste for adventure nearly ended in tragedy. It was the long, hot August of 1947, and Orwell set out in his boat accompanied by Avril, his sister, his little son Richard, two teenage nieces, and a nephew in his early twenties, who had come for a holiday. The trip round the coast was uneventful, and after two days’ swimming, fishing and hiking, camping by the bay, they headed back for Barnhill in the boat. Avril and one of the nieces elected to walk home.
