Barnhill, beyond Ardlussa in the north end of Argyll’s Isle of Jura is under siege. It is the house where George Orwell stayed when he wrote his then futurisrtic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, predicting the surveillance-obsessed and restrictive legislations of David Blunkett and Jacqui Smith.
With no central heating and no generator, Barnhill is too cold and dark to be let in the winter but it is a holiday home on the market from May to October. People renting it are regularly finding Orwell-obsessives peering trough the windows and wandering around this very remote property where they had expected peace and privacy to be guaranteed.
Just how remote Barnhill is and just how much effort the Orwell-experience stalkers are prepared to put in to satisfy their habit is clear when you realise that a rough track beyond Ardlussa delivers you 4-5 miles short of the house. And the usual route to Jura involves a ferry to neighbouring Islay, a drive across that island to take another short ferry to the south of Jura ,with a long and difficult drive to the north end still ahead.
Kate Johnson’s family own and rent Barnhill, marketing it as a widerness experience in an island with around 200 people and 6,500 red deer. Mrs Johnson says: ‘People appear here from all over the world. They usually start walking up here in April although you even get them walking up in the winter time. … It’s a private house and if it is let out and people are there for a holiday they don’t want people poking their noses through the windows’.
But they are doing just that and its an eerie echo of the always-under-scrutiny world Orwell envisaged in the novel.
