Getting to Know Jura

I spent last night at Glenmora, Mrs. Logan’s house that’s halfway between the A846, the only road on Jura, and Keils cemetery, one of several cemeteries on Jura. Mrs. Logan’s is one of the few newly built homes here, finished a few months ago. It’s specifically designed for B&B service. My cozy en suite room, plush bed, and personally cooked breakfast were particularly welcoming after a week of shared space at the Inveraray hostel.

This morning I moved into the second lodging for this island stay: The Manse B&B down the road. Most homes in the UK are named and they often reflect their former purpose—The Old Schoolhouse, The Old Brewery, The Forge, etc. I was surprised, then, to discover that The Manse is not only a still-functioning home of the island’s pastor (“Baptist flavor with Pentecostal influence”), but that the pastor and his wife were my hosts!


Because I arrived on a day when they had no other guests, I got to select between two rooms. I accepted the larger one—a twin and double bed, sofa to sit on, more spacious overall. It has throw blankets for cozying up on the bed, and biscuits with tea. I like that. Margaret and George are the proprietors. The view overlooks the water at the east and promises some lovely sunrises.

Took a leisurely walk into town a little after noon and watched an oystercatcher pick at something in the wavelets. It got done and sauntered away with an air of utter contentment. If an oystercatcher had chops, it would have been licking them. I went to see what had occupied its time. A crab almost as wide as my palm was exposed on the sand, its body neatly flipped open like a compact, all legs still attached to the bottom half. Every bit of flesh in the dish—the part that none of us eat because it’s so unpalatable—was gone.

A wander around a tidal beach uncovered a large spiral shell about 2.5 inches long. A break was in its side, as if the shell had been dropped to get its owner out. I counted the ridges on the spirals—57. Do ridges on spirals indicate age for a sea critter, like trees and their rings?

I met Ani—the Tibetan Buddhist nun directly responsible for my side trip to Jura—and her granddaughter, Lauren, for lunch at the pub at Jura Hotel, the only place to eat out on the island. My venison burger was local red deer. I enjoyed being in Ani’s company again; she’s grounded, gentle, direct, dry-witted, inspiring.

I stopped after lunch into the Jura distillery across the street, where I sampled the Superstition smoked barley whiskey and got two mini bottles, a little bigger than the size they serve on airplanes.

I had planned to bus to Ardlussa to see the north end of the island, and then bus back this evening, but Ani met a friend in town, and we went to visit him and his wife instead. Lauren and I walked back to town to the only store—the Spar—for milk and bread and ice cream sandwiches.

The Spar is compact, functional, and cramped, with waist-high freezers in the center of the store for frozen foods and ice cream, ceiling-high shelves for canned and boxed goods, a stack of produce bins with sad-looking fruit and vegetables, and a standing glass-front refrigerator for meats and cheeses. A narrow staircase at the back leads to an attic shopping space full of hardware, stationery, maps, gardening tools, and other sundries. I almost got locked in there last night when I inadvertently shopped at the store right before closing.

I fell into line at the grocery counter behind a slender, unshaven, unbathed, unlaundered old man who was wobbly on his pegs. He was buying a quart of whiskey, a super-size can of beer, and a box of 100 cigarette tubes that had spilled on the counter. These are cigarettes without any tobacco, just filters attached to paper tubes. A hundred for 99p. It requires a special machine to stuff them. The young female clerk was collecting the tubes and repacking them in the box, trying not to crush them. The old man took his beer and booty on credit, and I breathed fresher air once he was gone.

“A short but cheerful life” proclaimed a lady waiting behind us, with a nod toward the old fellow through the door. Indeed.

When Lauren and I got back to the Rob’s house, we sat in the kitchen for tea with Rob’s wife, Christine, and their two dogs, a chocolate lab named Brea and a collie/something mix named Sophie. We talked and talked and laughed and talked some more when Ani and Rob and Christine’s daughter, Catriona, joined us with her fiancé, Willie. Christine’s daughter is getting married in August and Ani is doing the flowers.

Christine drove us to the north end of the island, giving me a tour of the island. It took almost an hour to get there from Craighouse. Although the road on Jura is an “A” road—what would often be a very busy highway on the UK mainland—here it’s barely a single lane with occasional pullouts for passing. It’s potholed, cracked, winding, and bumpy, and driven at least twice a day by Gwen in her minivan bus. Many homes are far from town, and many islanders don’t have cars, so Gwen also delivers milk and bread Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and groceries Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

Christine gave a wonderful personal commentary of the island, including a bit about the area called the Tarbert, a thin spit of land over which ships were once dragged to get them from one side of the island to another. For all its land (about 29 miles by 7 at its longest and narrowest points), Jura has only five or six landowners, and it’s still a layered tenancy.

Some of the coves and bays are owned by the Asters (as in The Asters), and some archaic rules of inheritance are still in force—for instance, precluding children from inheriting unless they’re married or have a son. As recently as a generation ago, landowners could walk into a tenant’s kitchen with no “by your leave” and lift the lid from a pot to check if the food inside had been poached from the land.



The views, however, are spectacular. Red deer wander the wilds, and we saw several small herds on the way back. It’s stag hunting season now. The waters are calm this time of year, but Christine says the weather can be ferocious in other seasons.

Everyone I’ve met here knows about blogs—and some of the folks have wifi in their home. Jura is the most out-of-the-way place I’ve been yet on this trip, and they’re the most Internet-savvy people I’ve met. Go figure.