Teacher required: Must have stout walking boots (or boat!)
Its church was burned down by a hippy and it always rains, but tiny Scoraig needs to woo a new teacher for its five pupils. Softies need not apply.
LEGEND has it that Scotland turned its back on one of its most remote communities on the day an ardent hippy settler registered his protest at getting the brush off from a Scandinavian lady hippy by burning down the church. Over in ‘civilisation’, on the other side of Little Loch Broom, Highlanders are said to have shaken their heads in dismay as smoke billowed from the ancient building.
‘Hell mend them,’ legend has them muttering as they stalked away across the heather. No one living now on Scoraig, a bony finger of land on the North-west coast, can speak with first-hand knowledge of that unhappy incident. It was back in the 1960s, shortly after the ‘founding fathers’ of modern Scoraig arrived with hippy ideals and paraffin lamps.
The 70 or so ‘Scorracks’ living on the peninsula today want you to know they are definitely not hippies – not really, even if their lifestyles may seem to some of us a little, well, different.
‘Most people here would consider themselves either spiritual or philosophical,’ is how 26-year- old Chisha Paszczyk, a resident of three years, puts it. ‘I would be the philosophical sort.’
The people of Scoraig also want you to know that they are reaching out to the same nation which all but ostracised their community half a century ago because they desperately need a new teacher for their municipal primary school, where the roll is only five.
If that teacher has a partner, so much the better. Single people can struggle on Scoraig, especially in winter when the spectacle of rain travelling in horizontal sheets is often obscured by the lack of light.
If they have a boat, that is good too – handy things to have on a peninsula with no proper roads, no pub, post office or shop and a muddy walk of six miles from the school to the nearest point where anybody can park cars. No biggie, though. There is an informal ferry service.
Some knowledge of alternative energy may also be an advantage. Scoraig is too out of the way for the National Grid, which means wind and solar power – and back up generators – are all that keep homes out of the 19th century. Oh, and on the evidence of this week, pack midge repellent. Lots of it.
But why would anyone with the requisite teaching qualification dream of turning their lives upside down to throw in their lot with these ‘alternative lifestyle’ folk? Aren’t they a bit scary? Some have been known to spit roast their livestock. Word came over the water a few years ago that one of them even cooked a pony.
Then there is the isolation. People are so cut off from the rest of the country that even those born here speak in the middle-class English tones of their settler ancestors rather than the Highland accents of their nearest neighbours across the water. And yet, ever since the people of Scoraig decided to do their own publicity drive for a new teacher, to replace the last one who left after a year, candidates from across Britain and far beyond have been thinking the previously unthinkable. Could it be time for something completely different?
To many, it sounds like an idyll – a break from the mainstream they should have made years ago. Ask almost anyone on Scoraig why they came to live here and they will reflect those very thought processes while shuddering at the memories of towns and traffic and queues and regular jobs.
‘We just wanted to get away from the rat race,’ says John Sangster, 51, a former gas service engineer from Manchester who settled on Scoraig 20 years ago with his partner Mary- Jane Allan.
Now they have a son, Jack, seven, who swims in the loch after school with fellow pupil Nathaniel, ten, even in September. Sometimes they see dolphins; more often it is jellyfish, but they know how to spot the ones with the worst stings.
It is amazing, say parents, to watch children become ‘streetwise’ to their rural environment.
Mr Sangster adds: ‘You can make your own schedule here. Nothing has to be done at the minute. As long as you know what needs to be done then eventually it gets done but there’s no pressure to have it done today. So you’re your own boss; you make your own agenda.’
He remembers paying only £1,000 for his first permanent home on Scoraig in 1996. ‘It was falling to bits, but it was worth much more than that just because it was somewhere to live on the peninsula.’
Now making a modest living from crofting and the odd gas repair job, he says life is rarely luxurious – merely practical and all the better for it. In the winter, residents wait for calm days then make a break across the loch to their cars and set off for supermarkets in Ullapool or Inverness to stock up on six weeks of supplies.
Back home on the peninsula, long hours are spent on problem solving and sourcing expertise among neighbours. No community in Scotl and, perhaps, i s as skilled in self- sufficiency as Scoraig. And it soon rubs off on the children.
‘They see it all around them,’ says Mr Sangster. ‘Parents launch their own boats to get across the loch, making decisions about t he weather.
‘If a piece of equipment breaks they are generally able to repair it, and they have access to a broader group of people who are pretty practical. You have to be because you can’t just phone up a mechanic. You scratch your head and you work out some way around it. Kids see this and they think that’s how you have to be.’
A year ago, young Jack’s only fellow pupil at Scoraig Primary was Rafael, now six. His Polish father Wojciech, 35, says he appreciates a lifestyle in which laws, lawmakers and law-keepers rarely intrude. On
‘You make your own schedule. You’re the boss’
‘They thought the people were complete nutters’
Scoraig, where police are sighted only when gun licences fall to be renewed, the community itself, it seems, is the real law.
He talks of the extra educational benefits of living at the outermost fringes of Scottish society. ‘My son is learning where food is coming from, where heat is coming from, where electricity is coming from,’ he says. ‘He sees wildlife. If he ends up in a remote part of the world, he will know how to get on with it.’
He says the two-bedroom home he shares with wife Chisha and their son is a rented property which is up for sale. There is an outside chance a teacher moving to the peninsula may buy it, leaving the family homeless. But the child’s mother says these are worries for another day.
The priority now is finding the right teacher – and perhaps clarifying some of those enduring miscon- ceptions about Scoraig’s ‘ hippy’ community. No one, she says, tries to push any ‘hippy stuff ’ on others.
‘OK, maybe one person does,’ concedes Mrs Paszczyk, ‘But we don’t take it on board. What do you think about this place? Has it got a hippy feel?’
The easy answer may be yes. The questioner’s hair is long, tousled and black as coal – and there is a ring through one nostril. In another lifetime she could easily be a 1960s flower child. Instead she is a former English teacher, born in the US of Russian parents, who now makes jewellery. Her background, she admits, was ‘all very weird’.
With his shoulder-length silver locks, giving him that distinct latter day Billy Connolly air, Mr Sangster could also be a hippy. For a while he lived in a workers’ cooperative in Edinburgh, practising tai chi and meditation. There is, however, little of the self-indulgence of the hippy lifestyle on Scoraig. These people survive in some of the most inhospitable conditions Scotland has to throw at them. And, whatever their hairstyles, that takes work. Mrs Paszczyk says: ‘We really don’t give a s*** what we look like on Scoraig. We don’t check to see if our shoes match our hats or anything like that. We just roll out of bed and get on with life. People have this idea of us sitting doing nothing, collecting social money and that’s not the case, people work their a*** off like you on t he other si de can’t imagine.’
Talk of ‘the other side’ of the loch is frequent. It has been, perhaps, ever since the early 1960s when the last of the indigenous, Gaelic-speaking population moved out and the first ‘hippies’ moved in.
Like most on Scoraig, Mrs Paszczyk is familiar with the old legend: ‘When the church got burned down that’s when they kind of ostracised themselves from the rest of the Highlands. Everybody got very cross and thought the people here were complete nutters – and since then I think that Scoraig has earned itself a very bad public image.’
None of which, happily, is deterring applicants to Highland Council for the teaching post – or new arrivals on the peninsula.
One of those is father-of-five Luke Richards, 33, who says he moved to Scoraig a year ago because the Isle of Wight, where he grew up, was getting too crowded. With him he brought his children, Tyler, 13, Nathaniel, ten, Meredith, nine, River, six, and Finnian, two. And his wife Pixie, a holistic therapist and body piercer (she will fit right in), is pregnant with a sixth.
Little wonder the family were welcomed so enthusiastically. Their arrival more than doubled the primary school roll and brought the promise of more pupils to come.
The parents also add to the community’s eclectic skill- set. There are stonemasons, an archaeologist, a wild forager, a wind turbine expert and a violin maker.
The last of these is Alan Beavitt, 76, who arrived on Scoraig from Northamptonshire with his wife Jill back in 1975. These days, he rarely leaves the place, and hopes that, as he grows older, he never has to.
But the future Scoraig must avoid, says Mr Beavitt – or Bev as Scorracks know him – is that of ‘old folks’ peninsula’. The Richards family bring hope that won’t happen.
‘The Isle of Wight started to feel less like an island,’ says boat-builder Mr Richards. ‘It became busy, with lots of people and traffic. We were looking for somewhere a few years ago to relocate to, so I came here on the recommendation of a friend.
‘We brought the kids one summer, then I came back for a winter on my own to see the difference. I didn’t want to bring everybody here if I couldn’t hack the winter.’
His son Nathaniel, who has just entered P6, is the school’s senior pupil. So what does he think of it? ‘It’s the best school I’ve ever been to,’ he says. ‘There are only two really annoying things about it. All of us are in different years and the only girls there are my sisters.’
It is typical of Scoraig’s attitude, to work together to fix the teacher issue before winter makes ferrying in supply staff too difficult.
The job pays up to £35,000 a year, which, incidentally, would make the successful applicant one of the best off people in the neighbourhood.
The reality, of course, is this is not just a new job but a new life on ‘the other side’ – a daunting, enchanting and, yes, alternative place.