Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
superstitious stuff going on here; some distillers really do insist that when coppersmiths
replace an old still - they only last about fifteen years or so with all that heating and bub-
bling, even with repairs and riveted-on patches - they deliberately make exact replicas of
the old stills, down to the dents they received accidentally, and even down to the patches
and repairs themselves … But hold on; what about the way the whisky they made tasted
before
they had the patches? And are these patches cumulative? Do they all add? Will
future copies of these stills be so accreted with patches summed from all their many gen-
erations of ancestors that they look like patchwork quilts but in copper?)
Oh well; who knows and never mind. Following a very pleasant look round the dis-
tillery, the hotel across the road and the wee village of Craighouse - all resplendent in the
sunshine - we stock up on a few snacking supplies at the village shop and head off to see
Orwell's old place.
After a little negotiation - there is a locked chain guarding the last few miles of the
road, and permission to proceed beyond is far from automatic - we take the rocky road
to Barnhill, where George Orwell wrote
1984
. Five deserted, dwelling-free miles of sheer
vehicle torture ending in a gentle, shallow glen of rock and heather, stunted trees and
newly flowered whin, the rich yellow blossom yet to exhale the buttery coconut scent of
early summer. The old, white-painted house forms a shallow U-shape when you include
the one-time byres and stables on either side. (The track winds on over the hill to one last
house further north, the final outpost of humanity before the Corryvrecken.)
We are greeted by two honkily suspicious geese - possibly the remains of a flock that
was here in Orwell's time - and a view down across the unkempt remains of garden and
lawn over a slope-damp meadow of reed and coarse grass to the still bare trees above the
rocks and the shining curve of bay. The rugged shore of mainland Argyll lies in the dis-
tance under the haze, more an implication than a presence.
George Orwell - Eric Blair, as he was born - came here to write, not die. I had the im-
pression, before reading the latest biography,
Orwell
, by D. J. Taylor, that he'd slunk here
like some wounded animal dragging itself off to breathe its last, but this was not really
what happened, and nor was Orwell as alone as I'd thought, either. Orwell knew he was
unwell, even if he was loath to admit to his friends that he might be suffering from tuber-
culosis, but the diagnosis was made after he'd come back to Jura following an earlier stay
at Barnhill and a subsequent return to London.
There was a stigma to tuberculosis at the time; people knew it was infectious, and I'd
thought that Orwell had exiled himself to a determined solitude which even then, when
Jura had a few more inhabitants and the road was better (… surely. I mean, he drove a
motorbike down
this
? With lungs close to collapse and haemorrhage?), must have been
close to complete. The air was purer than anything in the cities - though, given that Or-
well was a chain-smoker, this would not have made that much difference - there was little
