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.

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

Donald Ewan Darroch looks up at me from the haunch of venison he’s in the process of quartering. I’m a slow butcher, he says, with a wry smile and, though I have no way of knowing if he is slow or not, I agree, mostly because it’s such a pleasure to watch him work – as I have done all morning,
ever since I left my car by the ferry and walked half a mile along the shore to his house, passing the big, wind-thrawn rowan tree on the beach by the
sailors’ graves and stopping now and then to pick a citrus-coloured shell from the white sand, the solitary, elm-green deer larder always in view as I
negotiated a path through the rocks and the dark, brown trickles of water and peat spilling on to the sand from the slopes above.

I am on the Isle of Jura. I came here to write poems and stories, beneficiary of one of those invaluable retreats that contemporary writers, like the
monks and mystics of old, can hardly do without. Here, I can sit all night over a paragraph and not worry about the morning. Here, I can walk all day, crossing the fairy-haunted hills, with the place-names ringing in my head – Cróm Dhoire, Beinn Shiantaidh, Leac Fhola – and waiting for the image that will capture the local and specific now, of which, according to Emily Dickinson, forever
is composed.

That different time is everywhere on Jura. In the walled garden of Jura House, where one of the gardeners wraps a slice of elm wood in a sack and fastens
it to the sluice for a month, so the water will flow through and season the wood. In the way people here think about the dead, not letting them slip
forgotten into the past, but talking about them, always, as if they were still present. People here characterise the mainland as a buzz of noise and
impatience, a place they visit reluctantly, and from which they are glad to return…..

John ends his article with a nice poem:

The old days were better for mourning;
better for tongue-tacked girls in ruined plaid
climbing a hillside to gather the rainwashed bones
of what they had lost that winter to the cold;
and men in the prime of their lives, with dwindled sight,
gathering rowans to lay on an empty grave
and thinking of the dead, away at sea,
who dream of nothing more than Leac Fhola

It’s been a while since Scottish Book Trust told me that I was going to the Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat for some precious writing time between mid-August and mid-September, and I knew I was looking forward to it, but I didn’t know how much was going on at the back of my mind. So, when I finally got here (after a three-day sojourn on Islay, because the Jura car ferry had broken down) I had so much work – so many promising notions – to be getting on with, I didn’t know where to start. At which point, of course, the place to start is by calming down and reminding yourself that there’s plenty of time. A whole month, more or less (car ferry notwithstanding). And also to take a look around and see where you are. In Jura. I didn’t know it would be such a beautiful place.

What I do know is that a beautiful place has beautiful place names – and when Catriona Mack, the housekeeper of Jura Lodge, brought me a pile of local interest books, the one I seized upon was Place Names of Jura: A Guide, by Calum McArthur. It’s not a big book – 16 pages, in fact – but it’s full of treasures. Beinn nan Capull, for example, which means “peak of the horses”, or Tom na Pioghaide, which translates as “hillock of the jackdaws”. The name “Jura” could originate in old Norse (meaning something like “deer island”) and the Vikings certainly were a presence here. The island is full of voices. All islands are. Everyone who passed by, or passed through, left a voice behind, their own individual sound, indelible, among the rocks and rivers and hill trails.

The holy grail, I suppose, is a process of distillation. Cask strength, at its best. Surely the right metaphor to end on, after a month of living and working next to a distillery. At night, or in the early morning, when I was about my business, the people who worked over there – a yard’s width away – were at theirs. Found that heartening, reassuring. We were both engaged in the business of making something – hopefully, what I was making might warm somebody, or inspire a good conversation, or close out a solitary evening by the fire almost, though not quite, as well as the water of life. So no goodbye to Jura – and one day, I trust, a return.