Kinuachdrachd harbour is in a lush bay on the northeast tip of Jura, a lovely quiet spot. There is a small restored pier in the southern corner, for reasons I know not. The main and rather essential thing to do is walk for 30-minutes south to Barnhill. This is where the recently widowed George Orwell moved to from London in 1946 with his sister Avril and young adopted son Richard, and where he wrote Nineteen Eighty Four. He was already suffering from the TB which was to kill him in 1950. The book was actually finished in 1948 and so it is said by some that Orwell set it in 1984 by changing around the last two digits of the year. He surely couldn't have had the idea of such a dystopian novel here, about as far away as one can get from the press of people and traffic in the UK, and still have a roof over your head. Barnhill is the last but one house on the island, surrounded by fields and deciduous woods. Mind you, it is a fairly substantial house, but by all accounts it was not at all comfortable in Orwell's day.
However, it was very much where Orwell wanted to be, and where, meeting down-to-earth local people who still spoke Gaelic, he apparently shook off his longstanding prejudice against 'Scotchmen' (his real name of Eric Blair was perhaps too Scottish-sounding for him, hence the change to George Orwell in 1933). There is still no tarmac road so far north, just a cart track suitable for Land Rovers and the like. "It's quite an easy journey really, except that you have to walk the last eight miles" Orwell wrote to a friend (Orwell’s Island. Les Wilson, Saraband, Glasgow, 2023).
