Notebook: Stranded on Isle of Colonsay, gin galore

To Colonsay and back, eventually. Thanks to windy weather and the resulting fluctuations in the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry service, a three day half-term break to the remote Scottish island just beyond Jura turned into a Whisky Galore style enforced exile of a week. We started smoothly enough with a two hour ferry journey from Oban

“Look,” I told my son on the journey as we surveyed the view from the observation deck, “there’s the bottom end of the Isle of the Skye.” No, said my wife, consulting a map, that’s not Skye. It’s Mull. Of course it was. Stupid me. The truth about most of us central belt Scots is that for all we bang on about the peerless beauty of the Highlands and Islands we have a shamefully limited conception of their true geography, and I say that as someone who has travelled the country – up munro, along loch and into inns of varying quality – quite a bit down the years.

Having booked into the Colonsay Hotel, the sole hotel on the island, we began with a blithe approach to the question of a return journey. The winter ferry reduced timetable (several times a week rather than daily) wouldn’t let us down – surely? – and although the hotel was at the end of the season, and we were booked in for the last three nights, we arrived in such a state of extreme excitement that the thought it would be difficult to get off the island never occurred.

Off the ferry, the Hotel is a 300 yard drive up the hill. Go past the kirk, and tucked in on the right is heaven. Drop your bags, take a comfy seat by one of the wood-burning stoves and order tea and cake, or try one of the local gins distilled just down the hill. Then read and snooze. Then gaze at the view. Walk on vast, deserted sandy beaches, return to Hotel, eat seafood in the restaurant. Repeat the process the next day.

Go to Colonsay if you get the chance. Actually no, don’t go, or not too many of you, or not all at once.

***

On the evening of day two, our stay got considerably less restful. The pub quiz at the Colonsay Hotel is a relaxed if high-minded affair, with tough questions set by one of the teachers at the local school (an establishment with no more than five pupils, I think.) The quiz was in full swing when my son came downstairs to report that there was a heated domestic argument going on in one of the rooms. It’ll be fine we all assured him. Just high spirits among the guests. You’re on an island. What can possibly go wrong?
The answer was that a workman, who had come to do repairs, ended up in an appalling series of violent altercations with his partner. Throughout the night terrible drama unfolded in the Hotel’s corridors and law enforcement (the coastguard) had to be called.

Crime is extremely rare on Colonsay. The next morning, news of the incident, handled efficiently and sympathetically by the hotel staff, spread across the island in short order. “Terrible, terrible,” one of the locals told me the next morning. “But they were not islanders. The people involved were from Glasgow.”

***

Island life got more complicated from there. On the Friday we waved off a car ferry from the pier, fully expecting to board another 24 hours later. Two hours later came the message from the mainland that our Saturday ferry was cancelled. Monday’s sailing looked doubtful too. We were stuck and the hotel was closing for the season. Thanks to the laird and the hotel staff an alternative billet was found at Colonsay House.

For years, I’ve listened to friends from the Western Isles complain about the endless failings of Caledonian MacBrayne, the nationalised ferry service run as a fiefdom of the hopeless SNP-run Scottish government in Edinburgh. If you want to to get the lyrical people of these parts as furious as a London cab driver just mention CalMac. I see what they mean now.

The cancellation seemed to make no sense. Why had the ferry company not alerted those on the Saturday ferry that they should board the Friday service as there was a good chance Saturday service would be cancelled? Why wait a couple of hours after the Friday sailing to announce that there was no way off the island – unless you hired a plane – until Monday, or maybe Wednesday?

A nice and helpful press officer from CalMac, contacted via wobbly wifi, denied that our Saturday ferry had been cancelled because so few passengers had booked on it. The weather was to blame, the firm said, and it was always the captain’s call whether to make a journey or not. The Saturday as it turned out was perfect weather, and Sunday too.

CalMac had unwittingly done us a favour, of course, trapping us for precious extra time. That meant we could walk the mile or so to Oransay. The journey across the sand takes you past the beekeepers house (Colonsay black bees are protected by their own Act of Parliament) and on to the adjoining smaller island of Oransay, which is only accessible for a few hours at low tide, and some days not at all.

On Oransay is a restored priory, established in the fourteenth century and abandoned a couple of centuries later after the Reformation. As we walked the temperature rose, the air was still, and the sky turned a perfect, clear blue. Ten of thousands of feet above our heads were the vapour trails of passenger jets, the noiseless planes just visible if you looked carefully, heading out on the main flightpath across the Atlantic, destined for New York or some other metropolis. On board those planes they would be serving the first drinks of the flight. Here was the perfect reminder that we should get moving off Oransay before the tide came back in. Time to head for a late afternoon sharpener, trying more of the Colonsay gin range.

***

The CalMac cancellation farce meant I was out of London and, mercifully, missed Chancellor Philip Hammond’s Budget. We had access to television and to Andrew Neil’s excellent coverage for the BBC. But from that distance the entire affair in the Commons – the silly braying on the Tory benches, the suck-a-lemon head-shaking disapproval on the Labour and SNP side, the detachment from gathering economic storm clouds – has never looked more fake and remote.

***

What should I find in the Colonsay book shop – which shares a building near the harbour with the brewery and botanicals gin distillery – but a fine copy of a book I have always hoped to locate. Eric Linklater’s “The Prince and the Heather” (published in 1965) is an account of the flight of Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, after the defeat of the Jacobites on the battlefield at Culloden in 1746. With the assistance of loyal aides and supporters the Prince island-hopped, with the Hanoverians in fruitless pursuit. A bounty of £30,000 was put on the Prince’s head, but only one attempt was made in five months by islanders to capture him and claim the money. A minister of the Church on Harris, Aulay Macaulay, great grandfather of the future Lord Macaulay, the historian, sent word to Stornaway that the Prince had landed. A raiding party was put together to capture Charlie and take the prize. They were seen off by Donald Campbell who respected the laws of hospitality and would have no part in betrayal. There is also a reminder in Linklater’s concluding chapter of one of the oddest aspects of the Jacobite campaigns that had lasted for the best part of fifty years. The defeated Prince was exiled, obviously, but he managed in 1750 to sneak back into Hanoverian London to hang out for a while and see faithful friends. Even then, he still didn’t get caught.

***

“Still playing Robinson Crusoe?” asked a dear friend in Edinburgh, in an email that made it through on day six. Going a little stir crazy by this point, in replying sharply I objected too forcefully to his good-natured dig. It had been a joke, he pointed out, a jocular remark of the kind that people in urban society make in a lighthearted fashion in conversation.

It was time to go home to London, and we were second in the queue the next morning for the unscheduled service sent by CalMac to rescue the stranded hotel staff and other locals at dawn. We watched the sun rise with Jura in the distance and drove aboard with suitably mixed feelings (renewed enthusiasm for life in the throng and regret at leaving paradise.)
We’ll be back on Colonsay next year, as long as we can get a ferry that works. I don’t think I heard the words Brexit, Irish Backstop, or People’s Vote, for the entire time we were there.