Beautiful Island of Eigg is Preparing to Switch to Its Own Electricity Supply

By WORDS: ALAN TAYLOR

WHEN Keith Schellenberg, owner of the Hebridean island of Eigg from 1975 to 1995, finally departed after a decade of headlinegrabbing turbulence, he turned to the crowd that had gathered on the pier to cheer him on his way.

"You never understood me, " he shouted as the boat swung out to sea. "I always wanted to be one of you." Schellenberg, who was originally from Yorkshire and who in a former life had been an Olympic bobsleigher, was Eigg’s seventh owner and one of its least lamented. Nevertheless, at his departure he managed to articulate a feeling common to those who fall in love with an island on which it is so hard to survive and make a living.

There are people presently on Eigg who came for a day trip and stayed forever. Four years ago, a young canoeist from Birmingham paddled across from Arisaig, a journey not for the faint-hearted. "If you go to Eigg, " he was warned, "you’ll never return." And nor has he.

Marie Carr, who was born and brought up on Eigg, says it is not the inability to leave that troubles her, but the thought of not being able to get back.

The kidney-shaped island measuring just five miles by three and with a population of little more than 80 is one of those magical places capable of exercising an extraordinary pull on the heart strings, leading people to endure discomfort unimaginable to city- dwellers in order to live there.

In about a fortnight, however, one of those hardships will be removed, as Eigg enters a century which most people in the Western world recently left. For the first time in its remarkable, bloody history, one of the jewels of the Small Isles will receive mains electricity. At the click of a switch, heating will come on, hot water will flow, freezers will be stocked without fear of food defrosting and going to waste, and there will be enough light by which to read the West Highland Free Press. What the rest of us take for granted has come about through the ingenuity and sheer doggedness of Eigg’s resourceful, multi-tasking residents and GBP1.6 million gleaned from a variety of public bodies. Moreover the energy produced will be greener than a packet of peas, created through a combination of water, wind and solar power backed up by generators.

"No-one has integrated the three renewables anywhere, " says John Booth, the unpaid director of the electrification project, who with his wife Christine came to Eigg from Oxfordshire at the turn of the millennium. "So that’s novel." Getting to Eigg at this time of year is an unpredictable business. My first attempt failed when the weather turned nasty and Caledonian MacBrayne decided that the sea was too rough for the Loch Nevis to sail. But a week later the ferry crosses the 12 miles from Mallaig to Eigg as smoothly as the skating minister gliding on Duddingston Loch. Far to the east you can see Ben Nevis, an ermine stole draped round its summit. Over Eigg’s long sandstone ridge looms Rum and beyond it lie Canna and Sanday. On the horizon you can just about make out Barra and South Uist. To the south is Muck, almost pancake flat; to the north the awesome Cuillin of Skye, smothered in snow.

Among the few passengers on board the Loch Nevis are the men from Scottish Hydro whose job it is to electrify Eigg. On deck is a young man who I later learn is called Chainsaw Dave, smoking a rollup and keeping warm over the kitchen vent, the ubiquitous dog at his feet. He is on his way to Rum where, he says, the population may soon drop to 24, which is dangerously close to untenable. He, like everyone else in these parts, makes a living by juggling several jobs. As his name suggests, he is a dab hand at sculpting wood with the use of a chainsaw.

When not doing that he’ll turn his hand to whatever needs done, including stalking deer.

After little more than an hour we berth. On an island which depends for its existence upon the regular running of the ferry, this counts as an event.

Virtually everything Eigg’s inhabitants need comes by sea from Mallaig, including fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. At the quayside, a gaggle of locals huddles around Landrovers. The only shop on the island is open and the cafe is doing brisk business in bacon rolls. In winter, this cafe, which is owned by the islanders, only opens when the ferry comes in and on Friday and Saturday evenings when it metamorphoses into a bar. Tales are swapped of parties that started mid-afternoon and ended who knows when. One man has lost his front teeth, perhaps in a septic tank. He does not look unduly concerned.

Appearances do not count for much in these parts. Maggie Fyffe, the sole employee of the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust, introduces her daughter, Tasha, who has been taking a course in Indian head massage, which involves days at college in Inverness. Among other services she provides are age delaying, mind relaxing, stress releasing and "zest restoring". Like the rest of the islanders, Tasha cannot wait for electricity to come, when she will be able to switch on the washing machine without giving it a second thought.

It is said, remarked John McPhee, the New Yorker essayist, "that if you sneeze in Balnahard [on Mull] people will hear moments later in Machrins that you have pneumonia, and soon in Oronsay that you are dead". Nothing electronic, as McPhee intimated, can outmode the gossip circuitry of a small island. What is true of Mull is surely true of Eigg where what one says to one person is swiftly transmitted to another, not always faithfully. For good or ill, islands are like that: claustrophobic, selfprotective, walled communities where strangers may wait decades before they are accepted.

Eigg is no different. But its community is made up these days largely of incomers who for one reason or another wanted to step out of the rat race and fall back on their own resources and ingenuity.

One of the myths of island life is that it is easy: long days spent ruminating on stalks of straw or drinking yourself comatose with hooch. In many respects, nothing could be further from the truth.

On Eigg, for example, unemployment is unheard of, as is crime, and everyone who lives here can turn their hand to jobs which they have trained themselves to do. For example, Stewart, the driver of the minibus Minibus Stewart mentions that he put its new engine in himself. Is he a trained mechanic?

He laughs at the absurdity of the question. He did it, he says, because there was no-one to do it for him.

On an island such as Eigg, independence of mind is taken as read. This is a can-do sort of place. It’s all the more surprising, then, that the idea of the locals buying the island for themselves did not take hold until they were driven to it by the eccentric and neglectful attitudes of a succession of landlords who ruled Eigg like a tiny feudal state.

Schellenberg bought it from the Runciman family, for whom it was little more than a holiday home.

His own first visit was an inauspicious harbinger.

Arriving by plane, he left the vehicle in the care of an incredulous islander who he instructed not to press a certain button. Temptation proved too much: the button was pressed and the plane was a write-off. As Camille Dressler, Eigg’s historian noted: "The new ownership had started with a bang." Initially, however, Schellenberg’s takeover was greeted enthusiastically. He wanted, he insisted, to make the island self-sufficient, primarily through tourism and farming. In his mind’s eye, he saw a craft centre with metal workers, jewellers, weavers, potters and woodworkers. Among those who were attracted by this were Maggie Fyffe and her husband Wes, who arrived on Eigg with their infant son in 1976. In their house at Laig, with its spectacular views to Rum, Fyffe cackles with laughter as she recalls those naive days when Schellenberg was promising the moon. In hindsight, she says, "the biggest problem is that he wouldn’t give people security".

Consequently, people lived in fear of losing their livelihoods and their homes. As Christmas approached in 1994, Colin and Marie Carr received a letter threatening them with eviction from Kildonnan House and its adjacent farm. Maggie says Schellenberg had a knack of saying things that could set alarm bells instantly ringing. Once, she recalls, he said to her, "I hear you still have a house on the mainland. I wouldn’t give it up if I were you."

BACK in those not so far-off days, many islanders lived in caravans or the meanest of bothies without the most basic of utilities because the owner would not allow new homes to be built or old ones to be renovated. Schellenberg was ensconced in the Lodge where every August his friends, relatives and guests gathered to frolic. One Lodge guest recalled: "We spent our days as if we were Somerset Maugham characters, sunbathing or playing croquet on the manicured lawn." Today, the Lodge, which has been taken on by a young family, is in dire need of repair.

Such Gatsby-esque goings-on could not continue indefinitely. In 1988 Margaret Williams, Schellenberg’s ex-wife and Eigg’s half- owner, raised a court action to the effect that the estate was losing value through mismanagement. Williams wanted Eigg to be sold so she could have her share. The court case dragged on for two years. Eventually, a ruling was made in Williams’s favour and its inhabitants waited anxiously to see who would buy what was then described as "probably the most expensive piece of bracken in the world". It was four more years, however, before it was put on the open market, by which time concerns over the concentration of land ownership in Scotland had grown and the Isle of Eigg Trust had been formed, with the aim of buying the island for islanders.

Meanwhile, Schellenberg clung on, while the Isle of Eigg Trust attempted to raise funds in readiness for when the island would be put on the market again. Things now began to get nasty. John Chester, the Scottish Wildlife Trust warden, was given a month to get out of his house. The Carrs were told to be out of theirs by January 1, 1995. All this did, though, says Maggie Fyffe, was to stiffen the islanders’ resolve.

"Over the course of the next few months, " she says, "a variety of rumours were in constant circulation. Eigg was up for sale, was about to be sold, had been sold. Stubbornly, I refused to believe the stories, convinced that if something so significant to the people of Eigg had happened, we would surely have been told. No so. In March, 1995 we learned from the press that we had indeed been sold for GBP1.6 million to a mysterious German artist who called himself Maruma." Thus began another extraordinary chapter in the Eigg saga. Who, everyone wanted to know, is this Maruma? It was not easily answered. Maruma, like Schellenberg, descended from the heavens, albeit in a helicopter: a podgy, odd-looking 41-year-old wearing jeans, a red shirt and a black beret. He was an artist who let it be known his work sold for half a million pounds. Among his hobbies was fire-worship. Apparently, his real name was Marlin Eckhart.

He had been given the name Maruma, he said, when a guru had seen it while staring in a muddy puddle in Abu Dhabi.

Maggie Fyffe was recovering from a particularly hectic birthday party when Colin Carr brought Maruma to her door. Offered a can of beer, he was not impressed. Eigg, he said, might have to consider opening its own brewery, potentially the most popular suggestion ever made by one of its owners.

But, as with many of other owners’ ideas, it came to nothing. His only tangible achievement was to clear the island of rusting wrecks and other unbiodegradable garbage, which continues to blight Eigg and neighbouring islands because of the prohibitive cost of removing them.

By now, though, Eigg was rarely out of the headlines, a constant source of mirth and outrage.

Maruma’s wealth, it transpired, was non-existent;

the purchase of Eigg had been underwritten by a loan from a German bank. Inevitably, the island was put up for sale again and the islanders determined to buy it. Yet again, though, events seemed to be conspiring against them. Among the bidders, it was reported accurately says Colin Carr was Luciano Pavarotti, who wanted to turn it into a centre for budding opera singers. But there was to be no parachuting in of the tent-sized Italian tenor. The Isle of Eigg Trust launched a worldwide appeal and the response was overwhelming. Funding expected from the National Memorial Heritage Fund was denied but the wherewithal to meet the eventual asking price of GBP1.5 million came from a mysterious and still anonymous female benefactor whose identity is known only to Maggie Fyffe. And, no, she says, with her trademark cackle, she is not about to reveal the donor’s name to the Sunday Herald. All she will say is: "I got a Christmas card from her." The date Eigg became owned by the islanders is tattooed on their collective memory: April 4, 1997.

Many predicted that the harmony that had been realised by shared loathing of individual owners would disintegrate in the cold, half- light of a wintry dawn. This has not happened. Nor have the inhabitants of Eigg fallen into an alcohol-induced stupor of indolence which various media reactionaries insisted would happen when they were left to their own devices. Progress may at times be painfully slow and there may be interminable meetings over minutiae, and individuals may veer towards selfinterest on occasion, but the common good usually prevails and the momentum is clearly forward. Key to that is the improving of the infrastructure, including the provision of broadband, and the maintaining and increasing of the population, which the coming of electricity cannot but help.

Looking forward to the day he can have light and heat at the flick of a switch is John Booth, who has put work aside on his own house a red-roofed derelict former shooting lodge, whose view takes in Arisaig, Moidart and the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

It is like walking into an igloo. The walls and floors are bare, the rooms covered in stour. Booth, formerly a biochemist and industrial relations consultant, and his wife Christine, who had a nursery school, first heard about the house in 2000 when their daughter spotted it in the Daily Telegraph’s property section. "It was the featured property of the week, " says John. He travelled to Eigg alone to inspect it. "What if I like it?" he asked Christine, who gave him the green light to buy if he fell in love with it. "We always do something totally different every 20 years, " she says. She dreams of taking a bath. They have turned a watering-can into a shower. Two cans, says John, are quite enough for soaping and rinsing purposes In a cluttered backroom, a parrot flies freely.

BEING so directly involved in the electrification project has knocked back his own renovation plans by about two years.

The house was once inhabited by a Church of Scotland minister who was tried by his presbytery when he was believed to be sharing a bed with two women. The case fell apart because the proceedings descended into drunkenness. John savours the thought, then supplies details about the electrification of Eigg which you’d need a PhD in something useful to follow. A company called Eigg Electric has been formed to maintain, monitor and service the equipment and make sure bills are paid. A connection charge of GBP500 per household has been set, GBP1000 for businesses. After that, electricity must be paid for before it is used.

Sarah Renny, who is wintering in a holiday bothy which would be perfect for a dramatisation of The Cotter’s Saturday Night, would happily do that. She is 27, and studied sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art. She came to Eigg as a volunteer working for the wildlife ranger, counting birds, butterflies and moths. As she talks, her recently acquired puppy takes the opportunity to attack her butter.

"In the beginning, this was just a little holiday, " she says, "and then I never left." She gets by doing odd jobs. Light comes from bottled gas, heat from a wood stove. Dressed in a mini-skirt and Hunter wellies, she appears not to feel the cold. She is never bored, she says. There is plenty to do during the day and when it gets dark she curls up by the stove.

Some nights, she says, it gets so hot that she has to open the bothy door. Recently she was awoken by scratching and shone her torch upon a rat a common problem in the islands and tracked it until she found the hole it was using to get in and out and blocked it with chicken wire.

Such bugbears apart, life for Renny on Eigg is pretty much bliss, as it is for most of the people I meet here. In time she may return to the mainland and look after her family’s farm at Newtonmore.

But not yet. "I’m going to keep living here, " she says.

"I will definitely stay. It’s great." Renny’s enthusiasm is infectious. That must be due in large part to the spell cast by Eigg, which was once compared to a Van Gogh painting. But you cannot hang an island on a wall. There are those struck by islomania a love of islands and those who cannot wait to get off them and away from the omni-presence of the sea, which is at once a moat and a means of escape.

On an island, as in a marriage, there is a point where many people begin to itch to leave. Some say it comes after two years, others after four. If you manage to stay longer, the chances are you’ll be there for life. Summers are not so bad but, as one young islander tells me, winters can be "evil", with little to do but surf the net and watch television.

If you can survive several winters, you probably have the temperament to make a go of it. Electricity will make life for Eigg’s inhabitants easier but, as the boat takes me away after a few intoxicating days, I can’t help but reflect that those I am leaving behind are there because they want to be. And whatever they have or do not have, they will stay.

Originally published by Newsquest Media Group.

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