Enjoying life after the war-zones
I could see it in his eyes; too much horror, too many deaths
ON Youtube there’s a promotional video for Argyll’s extensive Kirnan Estate. Towards the end there’s a brief scene of the estate’s co-owner, half in the water, half out, wrestling a salmon on to the river bank and laughing at the unconventional way he has gone about it. “He’s on the bank and I’m in the river,” he says of his catch.
The man might look familiar to television viewers, for this is Ross Appleyard, formerly a senior correspondent with Sky News, forever renowned as the first reporter to broadcast from inside Iraq after the Allies’ ground war got under way in 2003.
Appleyard spent a decade with Sky, but covering brutal conflicts is something that can come at a price. By his own admission, he was “close to burn-out” after working not just in Iraq but in Kosovo and Sierra Leone too. He left Sky and, at length, he and his wife Diana, a novelist and freelance journalist, traded their 12-acre farmhouse in South Oxfordshire for a sprawling 500-acre estate in Argyll. It’s flourishing today, with a flow of visitors.
First things first. Appleyard was born in Dundee. From the age of 11 or 12 he knew he wanted to be a reporter. He was 17 when his mother spotted an advertisement in the Dundee Courier for a sub-editor on DC Thomson’s Commando comic, and applied on his behalf. “I went for an interview and they offered me a job but I said I wanted to be a reporter on The Courier, so they said, ‘Okay, start on Monday’,” he recalls. He gave up a place at university to become a fledgling journalist.
His subsequent career path took him to Radio Tay, to the BBC for 10 years, then to Independent TV. He was Sky’s Midlands correspondent for six months before they got him down to London. “I was only in my early 40s when I left Sky,” says Appleyard, who is now 57. “It was about a year after I came back from Iraq.
“I had a very close friend, Terry Lloyd [of ITV], who was doing exactly the same thing in Iraq as I was, in that he was a unilateral reporter [unilateral reporters strive to take objective views of a conflict, often at considerable personal risk; embedded reporters are on official placements with military units]. I got over the Kuwaiti border into Iraq the day before Terry. Terry got over the following day but he was killed by the Americans [on the road to Basra].
“The point about it was, my daughters knew Terry. So although I’d been in war-zones before – Kosovo and Sierra Leone – and they were used to seeing me in crazy
places, with bullets and bombs going off in the background, it was never actually brought home until Terry was killed, and they didn’t want me to go back and do the war stuff. I didn’t want to come back and [report on] skateboarding ducks, and cats up trees, and high courts, and rubbish like that. I thought, I’ll do something completely different.”
In previous interviews, Appleyard has spoken of some of the horrors he witnessed while covering conflicts: in Kosovo, an eightyear-boy who was unable to rescue his baby sister from their home, which had been set alight, because he had been shot in the elbow and so could not carry her to safety; in Sierra Leone, the endless wash of people who had been punished by forfeiting one or more of their limbs.
Diana wrote last year that, after Iraq, she knew her husband could not go on. “I could see it in his eyes; too much horror, too many deaths. Soldiers are trained to deal with the effects of war, yet many still fall victim to PTSD. Journalists tend to swagger in and swagger out, reliant on derring-do and the camaraderie of drinks in the bar, but no-one
witnesses the horrors of war at close hand, over and over again, without it taking its toll.”
Appleyard was just 43 when he left Sky. Despite such horrors, was it in any sense a privilege to have been a foreign correspondent bringing news of overseas conflicts into British living-rooms? “Yes, and you get to see things that nobody else is allowed to see,” he says. “For example. I’d covered Richard Branson’s balloon trips in Marrakesh every year, and I’d got to know him really well.
“I remember being in Kosovo on the day of the liberation, when Nato forces went in, and I got a phone call on my mobile. It was Branson, and he said, ‘We want to come out and see what’s going on’
“I said, ‘Well, there’s no way you can get in here. It’s closed; it’s only journalists who can get in. You’re not going to be able just to fly into the airport – the airport’s all closed off’.
“It struck me that I was doing a job that allowed me to be in some place that even someone like Sir Richard Branson couldn’t get into. That makes it such a privilege to be able to do that sort of thing.”
Does he miss the job? “Yes, of course, it’s a massive adrenalin rush, to be able to go to places like the ones I went to. They say you’re never as alive as when you’re close to death, which is absolutely true.
“But I still have friends at Sky who come up here for a holiday. When they arrive they’re so full of adrenalin and stress, and then I see them go home again the next Saturday and they’re all chilled out; but I know that they’re going back to it, and I’m not. So that brings it home that [leaving] was the right decision.”
It took a while for the Appleyards and their two daughters to make a success of Kirnan; suffice to say that when things did turn around, Appleyard was, in Diana’s words, “a man reborn.”
“We were both journalists and we knew nothing about business, nothing about the holiday industry. We bought this huge barn of a place and it needed a lot of work doing to it. I had no income, having left Sky;
Diana was writing for national newspapers, so she was able to bridge the gap. And now things have turned around in that the holiday business is doing so well that she’s able to step back a bit from the journalism.”
“The big thing these days are hot-tubs - it’s the number-one Google search for luxury holiday cottages in Scotland. We have four of them now.
“We have 500 acres”, he continues “There’s salmon fishing. There are three B&BS in the main house, plus three cottages and three log cabins. My day is taken up with things like marketing, taking bookings, looking after guests, helping out with making breakfasts. I love cooking. There are a lot of living ingredients here. We’ve got a little flock of sheep. We’ve got a couple of pigs, so we make our own sausages and bacon. We’ve got wild deer on the hills, so we cook a lot of venison.”
Kirnan can accommodate up to 32 people at any one time. The guests have included Leonardo Dicaprio’s mother, Irmelin Indenbirken .
Diana’s belief that the venture’s success has made Appleyard a man reborn evidently strikes a chord with him. “You very rarely get two chances to have two separate careers,” he acknowledges. Indeed: it’s not often an award-winning metropolitan broadcaster can go on to become a successful, estate-owning entrepreneur in one of the most picturesque parts of Scotland. He seems happy, too, the more so because he is able to give free rein to his passion for fishing – even if the odd salmon ends up on the river bank while he splashes around in the cold water. http://www.kirnancottages.com