Same again folks. Back to the Isle of Jura. For all that it’s good to see new places, it’s also great to have ones that stay in your mind – and that you are part of.
We had been away three years. I couldn’t quite believe it was that long, but we added it up. However, Jura has been ‘abandoned’ by me before – but there’s always the opportunity to pick up again.
Jura is now one of two places that I have known and returned to since early childhood. The other is my granny’s house in Edinburgh. As people and places move on, and as I do too, being somewhere that is so familiar can be a great relief. Going there on holiday is continuity – not just with my past, but with my family.
We have family connections with Jura going back several generations. Although it’s about 4 generations back that direct family actually lived there, I become part of the subsequent story – the families who retained the link, who went there in their holiday time, and so on.
When I was a child, there was a lot of effort involved in going there – driving up from whichever part of England or Scotland we were in, breaking the journey with our aunts in Greenock who own the cottage. From there on, every part of the journey is mapped – enough of the excitement is in passing the places along the route that also have their own connections, or maybe just attraction.
As a child, driving up a hill called the Rest and Be Thankful had a huge impact on the imagination. Passing Inverary, where we had had separate visits – and where I could see the remains of a little tower on the hill that Dad had climbed up to.
Driving alongside the Crinan Canal, sometimes seeing sailing ships passing along, above the height of the car. Coming into the painted enclosure of the harbour at Tarbert – and remembering the one overnight drive to Jura, where we woke up in Tarbert, and had sandwiches for breakfast, overlooking the pier.
For a child mostly living fairly far inland, access to a beach was a big attraction. But also to ferries – the big one and the small one. To seals. To red deer. To a coastline where each little part had its own name – and a story that, if it didn’t belong to me, belonged to another family member.
There is a point on the big ferry, heading out from Kennacraig, where you pass the opening of the headland, and come out to run alongside the Mull of Kintyre. Behind you is green, fairly flat – and ahead of you, an island – your island! With its distinctive three main hills, the Paps, it is a key moment.
Why take so long to tell all this? Normally I would get to that view and cry. This year, for the first time, it didn’t happen. I had returned to Jura more as an adult – somehow thinking more about others’ responses to the island than my own recollections.
Going on holiday allows you to keep an idealised view of a place. Not everyone gets to go to an island on holiday – even with Britain as it is – and to a cottage that ‘belongs’ to them.
This time I saw the life on Jura perhaps more as it really is – hard work at times for the locals, what with rough seas cutting off ferries, pot holes that the council seems to avoid filling, new attempts to fill the main additional ‘shop’ with a business venture that will last.
And in this era of being seen to be holidaying in Britain, spending to support the (local) economy, and so on, returning to Jura feels not just a logical choice, but one that contributes to more people’s future than my own.