We drove to Craighouse, and camped in front of the Jura Hotel by Small Isles Bay. When we disembarked, we were greeted by several red deer grazing the shore. The crossing between Islay and Jura takes just five minutes. ![]() The ferry journey to Islay takes just under two hours and is a chance to view the land and seascape from a different vantage-point.ĭuring our outward and return voyages, we saw dolphins, a minke whale, divers, guillemots and armadas of livid jellyfish, all framed within a vista of scrolling mountain coastline. Getting to Jura was the first revelatory part of our holiday. The road then follows the shoreline of Loch Fyne and Loch Tarbert, eventually leading to the ferry at Kennacraig. It took just over four hours to get to Glasgow, where we stocked up on a week's food.īeyond Glasgow, the landscape soon intensified at Loch Lomond, engulfing us within jaw-dropping mountain ranges and immense lochs. We had investigated travelling by air and by train, but calculated that, between the three of us, the car was the most affordable, efficient means of getting there. I finally journeyed from Bristol to Jura this August by car with two friends. With Orwell's house circled in pencil, my map of Jura has been on the bedroom wall for two years as a pledge that I would go. Isolated on the north west coast, he wrote 1984 as his health deteriorated toward an untimely death. After the sudden death of his wife at the end of the second world war, Orwell left London and travelled to Jura with his adopted son. Roger Deakin's excellent Waterlog contains a chapter focussed on his attempt to swim the whirlpool of Corryvreckan - from the moment I read the Gaelic name of this place, I knew I had to go there.ĭeakin's book was also the first place that I learned of George Orwell's connection to the island. In a recent email, she told me that she believes the story of Scylla and Charybdis endures in the public imagination because, “It’s a way of representing, instantly, the impossible dilemma.” Navigating between those two monsters is impossible without supernatural aid, so Odysseus is forced to choose which one to confront.Being drawn to a place is often a subtle, instinctive experience, but what took me to the Isle of Jura in Scotland's Western Isles was a particular mix of literary influence and geographic fascination. It has made it wonderfully clear how little of Homer I’ve actually understood. Her translation of The Odyssey made me see this story I’ve read a dozen times-and the art of translation itself-in an entirely new and brighter light. Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “The day I finally reached the cave and found the red figures,” the latter told me, “moving there in the scant light, deep inside the mountain, I wept for feelings I still cannot name.” Pregnant with death? I suspect both Orwell and Macfarlane would agree. Three rows of crowded teeth, pregnant with death. With a gruesome head on each, and in each face She has twelve dangling legs and six long necks “In the case of Kollhellaren, certainly, it is hard to imagine that the cave’s proximity to the Moskstraumen Maelstrom was not considered part of its power as a place of making.” “This place, now, is one of the thinnest I have ever been,” he writes. Macfarlane, a braver man than I, traveled on foot. ![]() It was there that “practices in the painted caves may have been rites of passage, permitting mortal movement-through the membrane of the stone-to the cosmic underland or overland.” The cave is accessible by boat, but that would mean passing through one of our planet’s fiercest whirlpool systems, the Moskstraumen. “The cave’s modern name is Kollhellaren,” he writes, “which translates roughly as ‘Hole of Hell.’” Two entrances to the underworld, then, hard by one another one opening into rock, the other into the ocean. ![]() That section is called “Red Dancers (Lofotens, Norway)” and in it Macfarlane describes a near-death experience of his own while attempting to visit the site of some Bronze Age painted figures in a remote sea cave. “Undoubtedly the cave of the Red Dancers in Arctic Norway,” he told me, “to which I made what became a shockingly arduous solo winter journey.” I asked Robert Macfarlane via email what had been his most potent experience in such places while writing his magnificent Underland: A Deep Time Journey. I recently returned to Orwell’s Diaries because I’ve been interested in the idea of thin places, where the membrane separating the real and extra real can feel tenuous, where one’s religious or spiritual communions with nature are most likely to occur.
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