MY SIDE OF THE ISLAND
Escape to a Bothy on Ulva
Led by:
My Side of the Mountain
Jean Craighead George
Sitting alone at a remote bothy on a Scottish Island, a half-remembered book from my childhood pops into my head.
the story of Sam Gribley, who runs away to live with the animals in My Side of the Mountain.
Do some powerful stories, absorbed at a tender age, sit in our unconscious and guide us in our adulthood?
Was I here because of Sam Gribley?
May 1st.Distance from Ferry Quay to Bothy: 3.3 milesWalked through broadleaved woodland, and a herd of stubborn Highland Cattle.
Tom, who manages the bothy, offered to haul my kit on his 4x4 quad bike. Declined. The purist in me wanted to earn the isolation. A mistake.
Dragged a cheap, two-wheeled "festival trolley" laden with a week’s rations and a surplus of wine. Looked less like a sojourner in nature and more like a broken medieval peasant. Two miles out, the plastic axle gave up.
Left the wreckage stashed behind a basalt boulder. Shouldered one groaning rucksack and two Tesco bags the rest of the way in.
Cresting the hill, the south side of the island stretches out before me. My home for the next week is a dot in the distance at the end of a path that twists through the ruins of highland clearance villages.
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May 2nd.NEIGHBOURS: First Light.
Wind: SW LightOpened the front door: two Blackface sheep sleeping on the stone step. They stare at me with pure offence, convinced they owned the lease. Down in the bay, a skein of barnacle geese banked low over the water, startling three seals off the skerry. Over winter, this coastline belonged entirely to them. Here, the whole south side of Ulva is mine, but I’m outnumbered.
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May 4th.Domestic MechanicsWe talk about "stripping back" as a luxury.
Luxury might not be the right word.
Notes on survival:
- Power: Zero
- Light: Candelabra. Wax drips on book pages.
- Water: Amber-tinted hill run-off. Boil before drinking.
- Heat: An eccentric cast-iron stove that groans if fed more than two logs at a turn.
- Privy: Walk around the exterior wall to the Island side. Needs a bucket of Atlantic brine hauled up the shingle to flush.
Tom buzzed by briefly on the quad with seasoned birch logs. "People come here to step away from the busyness," he yelled over the engine, "and have real experiences." Carrying salt water uphill in the rain to flush a loo is certainly a real experience.
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May 6th.Reverie.The sky is azure; the earth is cool. I’m outside my own private bothy, in a week of unseasonably warm weather. I breakfast watched over by white-tailed sea eagles, The island’s south side is mine. I’m away with the sheep, swimming in the same water as the seals, tracking a deer.
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May 6th.Revelation. the ‘My Side of the Mountain’ neuron fires in my head.
I feel like a character from a half-remembered childhood book—Sam Gribley in My Side of the Mountain—waiting to befriend an eagle so my defection from the human world could be complete.
I;m not so much escaping from the modern human world and escapoing to something - half remembered from my childhood. The non human world.
I want to tets my mettle, catch fish, forage, oys of laying down a thick stock of firewood before winter arrives.
e is not running away so much as running toward something—discovery of land, place, and self. The novel is his first-person account, filled with musings and sketches written on scraps of papery birchbark.
It certainly was mine: a chorus of voices, us plus the birds singing, and the wind rippling through the trees—a wild music of us, all together.
’m always struck by Sam and his openness to the world. He’s at an age we’re told to abandon the comforts of stuffed animals and stories of animals, and to graduate to the sphere of human exceptionalism, but he defies that push. Instead, he comes into deeper community with the creatures around him: Baron the weasel and a cross-eyed raccoon, Jessie Coon James. He names chickadees for the people on Third Avenue, and he calls the nuthatch Barometer for its ability to predict the weather. And, of course, Frightful, the young falcon he nicks from her nest.
—a desire for self-sufficiency, yes, but also their yearning. To live differently, to share their thoughts, to find healing in the more-than-human world.
read evening pages by the guttering light of a candelabra, and spent nights in the attic hammock staring into a darker sky.
The whole of the island’s south side is mine, and the animals. I’m away with the sheep, swimming in the same water as the seals, tracking a deer.
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May 7th.The visitor.While i’m boiling drinking water. A woman comes into the kitchen and startles me. She wonder sif she can have a cup of tea. I tell her its a private bothy but make her a cuppa anyway. We sit in the sun talk Scotland, the sea and her sons adventures.
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May 6th.Realisation.MAY 5 — THE LUXURY OF BOREDOM Mobile signal: Zero bars. Occasionally one, if standing on a cairn. No doomscroll. No notifications. The world’s ambient panic, carried in a pocket rectangle, has gone quiet. I wonder what Thoreau would make of our modern tether. At noon, I caught myself waiting for something to happen. It didn't. Time stretched out until it bordered on acute boredom. Then the mind downshifts. Boredom turns into presence. You stop checking the watch and start watching the tide line. Update reports are delivered by a pair of white-tailed sea eagles quartering the cliffs, or where the sheep have drifted along the brae.
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MY SIDE OF THE ISLAND
Escape to a Bothy on Ulva
Led by:
My Side of the Mountain
Jean Craighead George
Sitting alone at a remote bothy on a Scottish Island, a half-remembered book from my childhood popped into my head.
Do these powerful stories, absorbed at a tender age, sit in our unconscious and guide us in our adulthood?
Was I here because of Sam Gribley ?
I open my front door to find two sheep sitting on the step, thinking they had the place to themselves. In the bay, a skein of geese scatters three seals from a tiny island at first light.
As the first visitor to Cragaig Bothy in May this year, I am news to the wild congregation of animals who have lived on this rugged stretch of Scottish coastline over the winter.
Two hours from the ferry quay, carrying a week's worth of food and wine. I bought a lightweight festival trolley for the walk, which turned out to be a mistake. After wrestling it through mud and ruts, I abandoned it behind a rock and carried on.
Life here is certainly a ‘real experience’. No electricity. Water that runs off the hills and has boiled for safety. An eccentric wood burning stove that sounds like ts going to explode when I put more than 2 logs in it, And an outside toilet on the opposite side of the house that you have to walk around the perimeter to access and after a few days needs to be flushed with buckets of water from the sea.
We often talk about ‘stripping back’ as a luxury, but it’s really a transaction: with comfort traded for the primitive salve that a bothy offers.
Cragaig Bothy lies on a remote, beautiful coastline. No wifi and a single fluctuating bar of mobile signal force presence.
Time here can also be boring. That, too, is a novelty. Boredom is a kind of luxury now — something that only appears once we stop trying to fill every moment.
In the hills, wildness is often a pursuit—a trail to run, a mountain to be scaled. But a retreat is different. Once you arrive, there is no physical effort left, only the invitation to drop familiar habits. As the days of silence mount, the ‘noise’ I usually carry around began to feel unnecessary.
I wonder what Thoreau would make of our current era, where we carry the world's collective anxiety on devices in our pockets?
On Ulva, the daily scroll was replaced by the daily seal watch. Updates were found in the movement of the tides or where the sheep had wandered off.
A stay in a bothy will ask what you consider essential in life—a good coffee and a nod to nature is one of mine.