The allure of Jura
It’s where David Cameron stalked stags, Orwell wrote 1984 — oh, and a pop band burned £1m in cash. With just 200 residents, one shop, and a lone hotel, what IS...
IT HAD been a long Hebridean afternoon for Yesterday’s Man. For miles, they had tramped and climbed. For the last 20 minutes he had all but crawled on his tummy, through wringing sphagnum moss. Now the stag was in sight, alert, but unaware.
The boy silently passed him the loaded rifle – a Holland & Holland .375, with Swarovski scope. The same youth he had overheard on the driveway earlier, asking someone who he was. He had affected not to hear.
Quiet, intent, he took aim, just above the beast’s foreleg and just behind it; squeezed the trigger rather than pulled it…
The stag dropped as if someone had just cut its strings, thrashed for several seconds, and was still.
It took a few minutes to reach. The lad was there first and already gralloching it: flash of knife, bloodied arms. Someone was already coming with a fat little pony.
‘What will you call this one, sir?’ inquired the head stalker last month. ‘Boris,’ said David Cameron, with his least nice smile.
Not for the Camerons the vulgar, freebie holidays, guests of some perma-tanned celeb, somewhere Mediterranean and hot so shamelessly enjoyed by the Blairs. They spend, instead, most years some weeks at Tarbert Lodge, at the northern end of the Isle of Jura in the Inner Hebrides and amidst goodly estate owned by Samantha Cameron’s stepfather, William Waldorf, 4th Viscount Astor.
They’re hardly slumming it. Tarbert Lodge boasts seven bedrooms, a large and Agacosied kitchen, a drawing room, a formal dining room, peace and quiet, shooting and stalking and fishing and grand views across the Sound of Jura to the coves, woods and hills of Knapdale.
But it is not much grander than any old Highland manse and, for only £1,325, you too could enjoy a week’s self-catering holiday there – if you do not mind rain, remoteness, and no nightlife save Jura’s only and somewhat distant bar.
For the Gael, it is a haunting desolation of a place. Despite the very poor land – most of Jura is mountain or blanket bog – more than 1,300 people once lived here. Then, though there were few forced clearances, Jura became a island that folk left. The population today on what is, after all, Scotland’s eighth-largest offshore island is just under 200 people, of which it is doubtful a dozen speak Gaelic – though some 6,500 deer roam Jura’s hills.
THE seas about it bubble, nevertheless, with seals, dolphins and porpoises; on a fine summer day all that moor is golden with flowers, busy with drowsing bees, alive with birds and butterflies. From Beinn an Òir, highest of the Paps of Jura, unfolds – on a fine day – perhaps the greatest view in Scotland: Skye, Mull, north Argyll, the Isle of Man and even Ireland.
The main community is Craighouse, some eight miles south of Tarbert and boasting the island’s only hotel, shop and church. Much more renowned is its distillery: Isle of Jura is a respected single malt.
It is also a remarkably difficult place to reach. Jura has no airport and no direct car ferry to the mainland, though a passenger launch chugs from Craighouse to Tayvallich, on the Knapdale Peninsula, in the summer. Most visitors arrive by the little vehicle ferry from Port Askaig, on Islay, which sails only twice a day; and Islay itself is served by flights from Glasgow or the two-hour ferry passage from Kennacraig, Kintyre.
For many, of course, Jura’s very isolation is part of its charm. The redoubtable Nancy Astor – the first woman to sit in Parliament and grandmother of the current William Waldorf – sat out the Second World War in Tarbert Lodge.
Her son, David Astor – his considerable personal wealth notwithstanding – became one of our most respected post-war newspaper editors and, famously, persuaded George Orwell to rent the still more remote croft of Barnhill, where the writer completed 1984.
Dark, gaunt, already ailing, draped in black oilskins, his sudden appearance in May 1946 frightened many local children. And Barnhill was austere indeed, without electricity or telephone or running water – though it did enjoy a small and determined population of rats. Orwell was soon joined by his sister, his young son and a sort of nanny, but they were plagued by visitors apt to land on Jura without notice and, over the summer, there were abundant rows, ‘scenes’ and walkings out.
The author nevertheless returned in 1947, heroically attempted a vegetable garden – ‘potatoes only the size of radishes,’ one crofter chuckled four decades later – and was fortunate to survive a boating trip in the Sound of Scarba, innocent as he was of the infamous Corryvreckan whirlpool.
But, when Orwell left Jura that winter, it was with a completed manuscript and he returned the following summer to revise and tighten the novel, though quite failed to entice any typist to an outpost so remote.
For David Cameron, Jura could not be further away from bleak dystopian fiction. ‘I fish and try and catch the odd sea trout or mackerel,’ he oozed in 2005.
‘It’s a wonderful place. And I love swimming in the sea off Scotland. I don’t mind cold water and there are really beautiful beaches up there. The quality of the peace and quiet you get is fantastic…’
For a former prime minister who must be shadowed by personal protection officers for the rest of his life, the lonely north of somewhat inaccessible Jura has obvious advantages.
But a Hebridean holiday is not as rare among politicians as you might think. Colonsay is a favourite bolthole for Alex and Moira Salmond, and a neighbour of mine in Harris cultivated so many senior Tories you were never sure which Cabinet minister you might bump into of a Saturday.
John Swinney and his lady enjoy cycling holidays in the Western Isles and a succession of Prime Ministers – Macmillan, Douglas
‘The quality of the peace and quiet you get is fantastic’
home, heath and even Margaret Thatcher – spent vacations on Islay, where Peter Morrison MP then had an estate.
Thatcher was never at ease in the Downton Abbey set – her annual weekend at Balmoral was a positive ordeal – and especially loathed their silly after-dinner games.
one night on Islay she instead left the house for a good bracing walk, unbeknownst to her Special Branch officers, who were relaxing in a nearby pub.
She returned in the gloaming, where an attendant police officer took alarm at this cloaked, sinister figure and set his Alsatian at her. The dog sent the Prime Minister sprawling.
how on earth did it dare? Per-haps by way of recompense, the Morrisons hastily organised a pic-nic, with the Astors, on Jura. They had a formidable head stalker, Neil McInnes, who led the party up a mountain at truly punishing pace.
At length, a particular patch of pleasantness was reached. Legs gratefully buckled. Rugs were laid; corks pulled; good things hauled forth. McInnes stood sternly by.
Thinking she ought to put him at ease, Mrs Thatcher purred, almost apologetically, ‘I don’t suppose you often have such excitements as this.’
‘I’m no’ so sure about that, Prime Minister,’ the highlander glowered. ‘We had the Britannia in last week.’
Mrs Thatcher is nevertheless remembered with real respect in the two islands. Pop provocateurs KLF emphatically are not. In 1994, they descended on Jura, with great pomp and film cameras, to burn £1million in cash. As you do.
KLF comprised the bitter and cynical ex-A&R man Bill Drum-mond, who had at least known some commercial suc-cess, and another musician, Jimmy Cauty, who never would.
They were, apparently, a ‘situa-tionist acid house band’ who had somehow made a fortune, in an industry they sneeringly despised, from the production of such appall-ing records as Doctoring the Tar-dis – and now, at Ardfin, just below Jura house, made a bonfire of some of the proceeds as an extraor-dinary outing in performance ‘art’.
Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid is still occasionally screened at the sort of cinemas frequented by pony-tailed men in black. But its showing in Craighouse village hall, some months after its completion, sickened islanders well aware of what good might have been done with all that money. And KLF were already in everyone’s bad books after a still nastier stunt in 1991 – again, at Ardfin – where they burned a huge ‘Wicker Man’ before an audience of 80 invited music journalists, all in saffron robes and at, of course, the midsummer solstice.
This 12,000-acre Ardfin estate, with Jura house and its celebrated walled garden, is these days in the hands of David Coffey, 48, an enigmatic Australian who made a colos-sal fortune as manager of a London hedge fund.
given to leather jackets and with dark shoulder-length hair, he was once dubbed ‘the sexiest man in banking’ and, amidst other eccentricities, is said to have ordered that a cup of coffee be brought to his office on a given hour every day – even when he wasn’t there. he dropped by one day in his helicopter, looked the place over, agreed laconically to buy it for £3.5million, and was away after just half an hour. Another bauble for his property portfo-lio, alongside the London townhouse, the Swiss chalet and at least two homes in his native Australia. Locals are wary of Coffey, who has built an 18-hole golf course, bought other Jura proper-ties to accommo-date assorted flunkeys, and imme-diately closed the Jura house gardens to the public – hitherto the island’s greatest tourist attraction. The mansion itself has been ren-ovated and extended; thousands of pheasants released in the grounds.
CoFFEY does – when he is there – mix to some degree with islanders. he drinks occasionally at the hotel and has donated to the village hall. ‘he’s clearly not going any-where,’ says one Jura native, ‘and, if he’s going to own a chunk of the place, it’s best to work with, not against, him. And make the best of it.’ As so often in the highlands, there are really two communities here – the folk who live and work year-round on Jura, and the assorted gentry and the moneyed, powerful, often very famous people they discreetly entertain. These visitors can be spotted landing by launch or helicopter in sleek dark glasses as if the hills were alive with paparazzi. But the true aristocrats are much respected, especially if they have a keen eye for a gun or can elegantly cast a fly – and are well regarded for that wonderful, unflappable and most English sangfroid. In october 1960, making for the mainland from Jura and gigha, MacBrayne’s mailboat Lochiel hit a reef in West Loch Tarbert as the latest, tweedy shooting-party returned from their holiday. They were sipping tea in the saloon when a hatch suddenly burst open and there roared forth an engineer, black with oil and drenched with seawater – ‘My god, we’re sinking!’ And he stormed away to the bridge. There was the dainty clink of cup on saucer. ‘I suppose,’ murmured someone, ‘we’d better see to the dogs.’