In May 1946 Orwell, still picking up the shattered pieces of his life after he became a widower, took the train for the long and arduous journey to Jura. He told his friend Arthur Koestler that it was “almost like stocking up ship for an arctic voyage”. It was a risky move; Orwell was not in good health. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the coldest of the century. Barnhill, overlooking the sea at the top of a potholed track, was not large, with four small bedrooms above a spacious kitchen. Life was simple, even primitive. There was no electricity. Orwell used Calor gas to cook and to heat water. Storm lanterns burned paraffin. In the evenings he also burned peat. He was still chain-smoking black shag tobacco in roll-up cigarettes: the fug in the house was cosy but not healthy. A battery radio was the only connection with the outside world. He was working at a feverish pace. Visitors to Barnhill recall the sound of his typewriter pounding away upstairs in his bedroom. Then, in November, tended by the faithful Avril, he collapsed with “inflammation of the lungs” and told Koestler that he was “very ill in bed”. Just before Christmas, in a letter to an Observer colleague, he broke the news he had always dreaded. Finally he had been diagnosed with TB.

By mid-November, too weak to walk, he retired to bed to tackle “the grisly job” of typing the book on his “decrepit typewriter” by himself. Sustained by endless roll-ups, pots of coffee, strong tea and the warmth of his paraffin heater, with gales buffeting Barnhill, night and day, he struggled on. By 30 November 1948 it was virtually done. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949 and was almost universally recognised as a masterpiece, even by Winston Churchill, who told his doctor that he had read it twice. Orwell’s health continued to decline. In October 1949, in his room at University College hospital, he married Sonia Brownell, with David Astor as best man. It was a fleeting moment of happiness; he lingered into the new year of 1950. In the small hours of 21 January he suffered a massive haemorrhage in hospital and died alone at the age of 46.

The fact that Orwell wrote his book in Barnhill, situated in the north of Jura, is a reason for some to undertake a pilgrimage to the Isle of Jura and follow into the footsteps of this famous writer. Barnhill still is a very remote place, cars are not allowed and to get there you have to leave your vehicle four miles before Barnhill on the side of the road, or better track. From there it’s a beautiful walk into solitude and remoteness, following the same track George Orwell had followed in 1945 for the first time.

On the website orwell today you can find a travel report of a couple who made a pilgrimage to Barnhill in August 2004. It’s interesting to read that almost nothing has changed in the last six miles or so and only little has changed in the journey from Kintyre to Jura. I’d like to quote a paragraph from the travel report:

We walked to the car – put our boots in the ‘boot’ – and then began the drive up the island to where the road ends and the walk to Barnhill begins. Two miles after driving past the manor house at Ardlussa – and opening and closing two gates to keep the cows contained – we came to the end of the road for cars and parked in the space available there. Just beyond the point where the trail to Barnhill begins a solitary white horse was watching us. I went up to try and pat him but he walked away before I reached him. He didn’t seem to want his picture taken.

My feelings as we began the walk to Barnhill are hard to explain. I kept thinking of the words written on a biscuit tin I’d used for years, “The road to a friend’s house is never long”. I felt that I was truly going to visit a friend, a friend who I very much wanted to see. We weren’t in any hurry and stopped a few times to take photos. The weather was absolutely perfect with glorious sunshine but not too hot. My husband walked ahead of me most of the way but sometimes we’d walk side by side and talk about Orwell. After walking for an hour and a half or so we made a bet to see who would be the first to spot Barnhill. Not long after that we came to the crest of a hill and there it was! It appeared all of a sudden and all at once!

Barnhill image by Alan Gerrard licensed for reuse Creative Commons Licence

For two years now, the makers of the island’s single malt have run the Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat programme in collaboration with the Scottish Book Trust to furnish authors with a nip of what Orwell consumed so deeply during the composition of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Three writers a year are invited to work for a month at the retreat in Craighouse, with a remit that their writing should address, however tangentially, the experience of living on Jura. The fruits of the first two years’ harvests — including works by Will Self, Janice Galloway and John Burnside — are now published in Spirit of Jura: Fiction, Essays, Poems from the Jura Lodge.

Will Self,who spent much of the 1990s isolating himself on Orkney to work, says “The great thing about islands is that they are worlds entire. They’re very appealing to novelists because they’re rather like novels themselves: they’re discrete, they have their own narrative, they’re fully apprehensible by an individual in a way a country is too big to be. The communities are different from those of us who live in mass society. They get into the habit of viewing the outer world as if it were a bit like where they are. They assume you’re completely alien because you’re outside the community and that the outside world is as aware of them as they are of the outside world. They’re full of foibles. We mainlanders joke about islanders being in touch with the fairies and so on”, says Burnside, “but on Jura there’s a very real sense that they are in touch with that aspect of things, to things that are no longer listened to in the bustle of mainland life. They remember their dead on Jura.”

Janice Galloway is no ‘Orwell fetishist’, though, so she didn’t make it to Barnhill, the house in which Orwell lived during his two years on Jura, getting only as far as the rough five-mile track at whose end the house sits. The same track, impassible by motor vehicle, deterred Burnside also. Orwell, he says, was one of the reasons he started writing fiction. But he didn’t want to look inside the house. ‘I’ve done that before with other writers and it’s always an overwhelming disappointment. I’d rather continue to imagine the room than go there and notice that Orwell’s trees aren’t there any more.’

‘I’m as much of an Orwellian as most people,’ says Self. ‘I’ve read all the books, I know about the life and the Jura connection. I was fascinated to go to Barnhill and to be introduced to the family who own it. But most places have a literary connection if you scratch beneath the surface. Jura’s is perhaps one of the most celebrated, but Orwell wasn’t writing about Jura, he was imagining a dystopic version of London.

John Burnside went for cross-island hikes with David Faithfull, who illustrated Spirit of Jura; with his amateur interest in the art of butchery, Burnside spent some time with the man who processes much of Jura’s deer for export. ‘And Stephen, the man who runs the newsagents in Craighouse, turned out to be a very good literary critic,’ Burnside adds.

The full article published in the Times Online is available from this link

The distillery’s partner in this promising venture is the Scottish Book Trust who have established the Jura Malt Whisky Writers’ Retreat Programme, of which this book, ‘Spirit of Jura’ is the first manifestation to reach its expectant public. Consisting of several short stories and poems by such as Liz Lochhead, Kathleen Jamie and Romesh Gunesekera, this is an adventurous and praiseworthy volume that seeks to do exactly what it says on the tin. Sandwiched in the centre of this feast of poetry and prose, is a series of ‘oak gall’ landscape drawings by David Faithfull. According to the accompanying text, oak gall ink was revered by calligraphers and artists for centuries, illuminating the pages of the Book of Kells around 800AD.

‘Spirit of Jura’ is a wonderful little volume that can be dipped in and out of as the mood occurs. None of the essays or stories are so long that the reader need settle down in one of the capacious leather armchairs that inhabit the Lodge, while the contents will provide a taste of the island just warming enough to necessitate a visit. Delightful. brian palmer

Spirit of Jura can be purchased from C &E Roy on Islay or from the distillery shop on Jura

With no central heating and no generator, Barnhill is too cold and dark to be let in the winter but it is a holiday home on the market from May to October. People renting it are regularly finding Orwell-obsessives peering trough the windows and wandering around this very remote property where they had expected peace and privacy to be guaranteed. Kate Johnson’s family own and rent Barnhill, marketing it as a widerness experience in an island with around 200 people and 6,500 red deer. Mrs Johnson says: ‘People appear here from all over the world. They usually start walking up here in April although you even get them walking up in the winter time. … It’s a private house and if it is let out and people are there for a holiday they don’t want people poking their noses through the windows’.