Orwell came to Barnhill and Jura for the isolation. The whirlpool was impossible to make out as the small motorboat I travelled on sailed north from Craighouse to visit Barnhill on waters as still as a boating lake. It was two hours before father and son were rescued by a passing lobster fisherman. They lost the boat and had to swim to a remote cove. A whirlpool amid the coastal waters three miles north-west of Barnhill, it almost took the writer’s life when his boat got sucked into it while on the water with his son. “We all teach newcomers about the island and to be especially careful of Corryvreckan.”Ĭorryvreckan is a name that plays a small but vital part in the story of Orwell’s time here. “Everybody does know everyone else’s business on Jura – but it’s a protective thing,” she says. “I came from Newcastle six years ago to live here with my then boyfriend, who is a local, and it has a charm that really gets under your skin”, she says. But, as Rachael explains, true understanding of the island requires more than a daytrip from Islay to sip the malts.
Tasting tours of the peaty Jura whiskies are one of the main draws for visitors, alongside trout fishing, deer-stalking and, of course, the landscape. “Life moves slowly here, even by Hebrides standards,” says Rachael Jones, visitor centre manager at Jura Distillery, as we stand outside the entrance to the low, white-brick building whose chimneys dominate Craighouse, the main settlement. Swathes of the island are barely touched by man the mossy corries, lumpy fields of peat, the occasional shadow of a golden eagle flying overhead, the crags, gullies and lochs all contribute to an atmosphere of glorious–yet–eerie emptiness. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty ImagesĮven on the sunniest days, there is a brooding, melancholic air to Jura.
He would recognise the place instantly if he were to step through the door today," Orwell Society member Damaris Fletcher told The Guardian.George Orwell at his typewriter in the mid 1940s. "If you stay here, you’re really treading in Orwell’s footsteps.
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The cottage is still owned by the family that rented it to Orwell and the four-bedroom house is rented as a holiday cottage, remaining in virtually the same condition it was when the author was working on Nineteen Eighty-Four: a generator supplies electricity, the small refrigerator is gas-powered and heat is provided by a coal-fired Rayburn. Since Orwell's death in 1950, Barnhill has been a site of interest for many who are familiar with his life and writing. Orwell left Jura in January 1949 to get treatment at a sanatorium at Cranham, Gloucestershire and never returned. He completed his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, at Barnhill.Īccording to a BBC report, Orwell was spending months on the island "to escape the daily grind of journalism and to find a clean environment which doctors thought would help him recover from a dangerous bout of tuberculosis". The house was rented by the essayist and novelist George Orwell, who lived there intermittently from 1946 until January 1949. It stands on the site of a larger 15th-century settlement, Cnoc an t-Sabhail the English name Barnhill has been in use since the early twentieth century. Barnhill with the Sound of Jura and the Scottish mainland behindīarnhill is a farmhouse in the north of the island of Jura in the Scottish Inner Hebrides overlooking the Sound of Jura.
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