Living on the Isle of Rum
Life on a remote island in Scotland isn’t for everyone; it has its charms
ISLE OF RUM, Scotland — No doctors. No restaurants. No churches. And worst of all for some: no pubs.
Life on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides is not for everyone.
But Alex Mumford, one of the approximately 40 people living on the Isle of Rum, says he loves it, although he admits getting a drink could be an adventure, with the nearest pub on the neighboring island of Skye.
“We thought about kayaking across and dropping in for a drink and then kayaking back,” Mumford said. “But it’s 10 miles over and 10 miles back, so it’s probably not ideal.”
Despite all the challenges of making a home here, the island has seen something of a recent population explosion, at least in percentage terms.
Just a couple of years ago, this isolated outpost had fewer than two dozen residents left, and only two students enrolled at its school. So islanders, heavily outnumbered by Rum’s deer, appealed for newcomers to apply to join them.
Several thousand emails arrived expressing interest. From around 400 applications judged to be serious, four couples were selected, most with young children.
Rum’s widely publicized search for new faces drew attention to what is a wider problem across Scotland’s more than 90 inhabited islands, many of which are experiencing similar existential crises.
“Over the last 10 years, almost twice as many islands have lost populations as have gained,” said a 2019 Scottish government document, which warned that projections suggest they were “at further risk of depopulation.”
That has been averted in Rum, at least for now.
Despite torrents of rain when they arrived in the winter of 2020, then a summer plagued by midges — persistent biting flies — the newcomers are still here, the families in four new, Nordic-style wooden homes rented at attractive prices.
Mumford, 32, who moved here with his partner from Bristol, a city with more than 460,000 people at the other end of Britain, works both as an administrator at the village school and as a visitor services manager at the Bunkhouse, a hostel for visitors.
People called their decision to move “crazy,” Mumford said. “I think that the people who are crazy are the people that live box to box with people in flats and cram on trains in rush hour. For me, it was an obvious, easy choice.”
Most other new arrivals have kept jobs they already had, working remotely thanks to Rum’s broadband internet access, installed by a salmon farming company that employs one islander full time and brings in other workers periodically.
What the island lacks in restaurants and pubs (its lone cafe opens only in summer), it makes up for in natural beauty. At sunrise, Rum is bathed in red light, while seals bob along the waterfront and herons swoop overhead.
Stags loll nonchalantly
around the outskirts of Kinloch, the only settlement, while eagles inhabit the island’s volcanic peaks.
Yet if this is an alluring island, it’s also one with a difficult history. In the 19th century, the Gaelic-speaking population was evicted during the so-called Highland clearances, when landlords created big sheep farms.
By the end of that century, Rum was the playground of George Bullough, an eccentric English tycoon who built a hunting lodge known as Kinloch Castle, complete with a menagerie that reportedly included a pair of small alligators. Strangers were discouraged from visiting, and rumors spread of louche parties behind the castle’s walls.
None of the island’s
current residents have lived here more than three decades.
Fliss Fraser, 50, is one of the longest-tenured residents, having arrived in 1999. She now runs the Ivy Lodge bed-and-breakfast.
She conceded that the island’s appeal could be hard for some to appreciate.
“Some people come here and look around and say, ‘It’s misty, it’s muddy, it’s raining, there’s nothing to do, why would you be here?’ ” she said as she looked out onto a scenic shoreline from which she swims even in winter. Rum, she added, “either grabs people or it doesn’t.”
The arrival of new families has rejuvenated the school, boosting its roll to five from two, according to Susie Murphy, 42, one of
two teachers taking turns to come from the mainland.
The school, which was once a small church, teaches children up to age 11 or 12. Older students have to go to a high school on the mainland, returning to Rum on weekends, weather and the ferry permitting. The lodging for visiting teachers is a wellequipped trailer home, or caravan.
Rum has no real agriculture, something one of the arrivals, Stephen Atkinson, 40, hopes to change by keeping some pigs. He has yet to secure permission. The village is owned by a community trust and most of the rest of the island by NatureScot, Scotland’s nature agency, so decisionmaking can be slow.
Though he said winter nights can be depressing, Atkinson, who moved to Rum from northern England, isn’t deterred by the rain.
“We live in a world now where people associate sunny and hot weather with positivity and happiness and rainy and dark as negative,” he said. “But there is beauty in everything, and I quite enjoy cold, windy and stormy weather.”
With so few people, the social interactions that do occur can be intense, Atkinson noted, with a short trip to the village shop stretching into an hourslong outing with all the requisite stops to chat.
“We always say that in some ways it’s not remote enough,” joked Atkinson, who moved here with his partner and young son.