Locked down on our PARADISE Scottish island
Islonia declared independence a decade ago, has its own flag, passports and, er, laws. So what happened to the McWhinney family (the tiny island’s only residents) when the Covid hit?
WHEN lockdown came on March 23, the drill was crystal clear: stay at home and away from others. Mix only with members of your own household. Well, when home is a remote Scottish island and your household accounts for its entire population, there is a certain simplicity to upholding coronavirus restrictions.
Indeed, you might say no one in Scotland can do social distancing quite like the McWhinney family in Wester Ross. Self-isolation? Perhaps not the most onerous challenge in a four-acre island kingdom where no one else lives.
So, as Scotland hunkered down through the first months of the pandemic, Dry Island, the place the McWhinneys like to portray as their own private microstate, did likewise.
Naturally, it closed its borders to visitors to protect the resident population of Dad Ian, Mum Jess, daughters Iona and Isla, son Finlay and pet dog Dubh.
It also introduced a programme of home schooling on weekday mornings. Attendance, not surprisingly, was 100 per cent.
But there was no furlough scheme. Afternoon found all or most of the five islanders at work on ‘infrastructure’ projects such as painting the family fishing boat or mending creels.
To mainlanders gazing over the 100-yard ribbon of water from Badachro Bay to Dry Island, there must have been something idyllic about the scene: Scotland’s answer to the Swiss Family Robinson in splendid isolation, pulling together as a team – an oasis of selfsufficiency in a society reeling in the midst of a global pandemic.
And, to be sure, you did not have to look far on Dry Island for bliss. ‘The weather here was absolutely amazing,’ says Mr McWhinney, 53. ‘And, though I shouldn’t really say it, the kids were having a whale of a time. This really isn’t the kind of place where you’d ever say there’s nothing to do.’ But, just as no man is an island, so no family truly can be either.
For a decade now the McWhinneys have jocularly marketed their home to visitors as ‘Islonia’, an independent state with its own flag, passport, legislative body (Mum and Dad) and even royal family (all five of them).
THE truth, of course, is their independence is a flight of fancy. Like the vast majority of us, they are utterly dependent for their income on the wheels of society turning. When those wheels came to a juddering halt on March 23, the charmed life they had carved out for themselves ran aground. Instantly, every income stream was blocked.
‘We had a Finnish wood-fired hot tub delivered here on the 21st of March,’ recalls Mr McWhinney. ‘I managed to get it over to the island which, you can probably imagine, was a task in itself with various boats and levers – and we got it installed in one of our self-catering properties on the 22nd.
‘Then we got locked down on the 23rd and I had just spent the best part of £4,000 at the start of the season, when times are pretty tough, on something that couldn’t be used. Hindsight is a wonderful thing.’
For the McWhinneys, 2020 should have looked a lot like 2019, when a Channel 5 documentary team made several visits to Dry Island to depict the family’s extraordinary version of normality.
The resulting programme formed episode two of the series City Life to Country Life and was broadcast on Sunday. It captures a delightful family at peace with themselves, at one with their breath-taking surroundings as they picnic together, make the morning boat journey to the tiny school in nearby Gairloch and fish for mackerel for dinner.
It also details the various sources of revenue on which life on this detached i dyll depends. Mr McWhinney, whose ancestors have been on the island since the 17th century, still catches seafood by the traditional creel method, but he also takes paying guests out on his boat, the Zephyr, for what he calls Shellfish Safaris.
Some of the catch is sold straight off the boat, some from a wooden hut on the mainland, where the McWhinney daughters have started acting as sales staff, and some from nearby Poolewe market on Tuesdays. The rest goes abroad or to top London restaurants. Gordon Ramsay is said to be a fan. But none gets sold at all during lockdown. Nor do visitors line up for Shellfish Safaris.
Then there is the self- catering accommodation arm of the business, a crucial income stream provided by the three island rental properties, each of which has recently been upgraded to include glamping ‘must-haves’ such as hot tubs, wi-fi and Netflix. At a stroke, all were mothballed. Indeed, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivered his ‘stay at home’ speech on that day in March, Dry Island appeared aptly named. Income completely evaporated.
‘It was a surreal time,’ says Mr McWhinney. ‘I was so ignorant – we all were to a certain extent – that I thought we’d be shut down for a couple of weeks and we might as well treat it as a holiday. Then the reality kicked in.
‘Unfortunately, with everything I do, I’m self-employed. I don’t get furloughed. At the start there were lots and lots of grants available but, for the first tranche of them, we seemed to slip through the net for everything for some reason.’
There was no slipping through nets where bills were concerned. They were mounting. The annual insurance for the boat was due, though it sat idle for months, and its liferaft hire charge had to be paid for. Electricity bills typically ran to £700 a month.
Then there was the small matter of the deposits which a dozen guests had paid for staying on Dry Island in the forthcoming months. If their visits were cancelled, they would want the money back, surely.
While Iona, 14, Isla, 11, and Finlay, five, basked in what many might consider perfect childhoods during the spring and early summer, then, behind the scenes lay grave concerns for the sustainability of their island paradise.
NOT that Dad let it show. Mornings were s et aside for school work but afternoons were the time for the family to be together, making repairs, repainting, upgrading.
The footbridge to the mainland, which Mr McWhinney built with his own hands in 1995 when he was the sole occupant of Dry Island,
needs regular maintenance, for example. He grows misty- eyed when he thinks how fundamental it is to his children’s lives today.
‘Sometimes I get emotional when I see three little figures walking over a bridge I built 25 years ago,’ he says. ‘I think it’s a nice legacy to leave them.’
He was five years old when he moved from the mainland to live with his grandmother Betty Mackenzie on Dry Island after his parents divorced. Save for brief spells in Edinburgh and Stornoway, he has lived there ever since, much of that time on his own after his grandmother’s death in the early 1990s.
Luxuries in the early days were few. His forebears would redecorate the family home by sticking new wallpaper on top of the old wallpaper with a layer of newspaper in between as insulation.
‘You could strip it back and read about the Boer War,’ he says. ‘It shows how long it had been there. There was no double glazing, no electric heaters and just one coal fire, it was all pretty basic and it was just myself and my grandmother I never here. went I out didn’t to go the out pub at all. to socialise.’
In the water, yards from their front door, fish stocks were declining and, it seemed, every year brought a poorer income than the one before.
That is one of the reasons sustainability is such a key issue to Mr McWhinney on his fishing outings today. It is why he is a creel fisherman whose catch is alive when it is hauled onto the boat – allowing him to throw much of it back. It was the downturn in the fishing which prompted him to diversify. And it was the arrival in his life of Oxfordshire- born Jess, 43, which accelerated the process and, at length, turned his solitary i sland experience i nto a family one. She grew up in suburbia but took a job as a nurse working on the Isle of Skye in her early 20s. The couple were i ntroduced by a mutual friend – and before long Dry Island’s population doubled. After their tongue- i n- cheek declaration of independence from the rest of the UK in 2010, Dry Island – or Islonia as they marketed it – became a remote playground for couples and families in search of the ultimate get away from it all experience. Visitors’ adventure began on the shore with a dinghy trip across the water, captained by the welly-booted ruler of the kingdom.
Guests were awarded honorary ‘citizenship’. So, too, were those who went on a Shellfish Safari or even, as Mr McWhinney joked, bought him a pint.
There was something of the fairy tale about the family’s gilded existence. In one scene in Sunday’s documentary, it is revealed that Isla liked to dawdle on her way back from school.
Why? Because she was taking in her incredible surroundings, she says. Because she was singing to the seals on the foreshore.
Yes, her older sister Iona teases. That’s why the seals moved away.
Isla says she dreams of becoming a ‘fishergirl’ and spending half her year in Hawaii and the other half at home on Dry Island. And, as she enthuses about her future, it is clear her unique home environment has influenced both the shape and scale of her dreams.
HERE, with water between them and their mainland pers, the McWhinney brood have groen up with an appreciation of outdoor pursuits which puts mobile phones in the shade. They are learning to play traditional Scottish music and to sing in Gaelic.
More fundamentally, they are learning the ropes of running the island they will one day inherit.
If 2020 has proved anything for Dry Island it is that a positive working relationship with the mainland is the bedrock of its
success. Of the 30 or so groups who had booked to stay on the island during the spring and early summer, not one asked for their deposit back. All offered the kingdom of Islonia financial breathing space by rebooking their breaks for later in the year, or next year.
And, though the prospect of a bail- out grant may have looked bleak in the beginning, Highland Council eventually came through with a £10,000 rescue package.
‘I’m eternally grateful to all of them,’ said Mr McWhinney. ‘It has been a very positive experience for us. Luckily we do live within our means. When they were filming here last year, my car was 14 years old. I have a van as well but it’s even older.’
And so, for three months, Dry Island was its own exclusion zone – a no go area for all but the five who lived there. And, if you squinted, it may have looked like a version of paradise. There could, hardly be a family in Scotland better shielded from the virus than the one on their own island.
But it was with a palpable sense of relief that they welcomed their first guests back in July. Even in October, they are still arriving.
‘I was just settling down to watch the programme about us on Sunday night when new guests arrived ,’ says Mr McWhinney.
‘They phoned at a minute past seven se and I had to collect their luggage lu by dinghy and get them settled set in, so I saw the tail end of it. You do wonder how you come across.’ acr The T consensus from the flood of m messages he has received since the programme aired is that the family fam are a credit both to their kingdom and the wider country. Much of their charm owes to their the own appreciation of their paradise. par It never wavers. ‘I know they go on about the fall in America but here it is just absolutely stunning,’ says Mr McWhinney. ‘Come in for a passport and a cup of tea next time you’re up,’ he urges. ‘ I’m always up for having new citizens. We’re past 13,000 now. I just hope they don’t all come back at once!’ City Life to Country Life episode two on the My5 player. Continues tomorrow at 7pm on Channel 5.