Muckdate 1: The Big Five
Hello dear friends, new acquaintances, and casual observers - warmest greetings from the Isle of Muck!
This is my third blog (the others have been about knitting and reading), but I haven't kept one in recent years as life has been fairly busy with having babies and writing books. I am still pretty occupied with both, but 2023 has brought a new adventure to our family: a temporary relocation to the small Hebridean island of Muck, so I thought I would restart blogging to share it with you. A friend suggested I call these 'Muckdates' and who am I to argue with a good pun?
I'll begin by addressing the Big 5: the Who, What, When, Where and Why.
Who?
Esther (a freelance writer and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews), my husband Tom (a Lecturer in Geography at the University of St Andrews), and our two small children - our daughter R who is 4, and our son K who is 3 months old.
What?
Have relocated from Fife to the Isle of Muck, one of the Hebridean Small Isles on the west coast of Scotland.
When?
We will be living on the island until April 2023.
Where?
Gallanach Cottage, Isle of Muck, with Rum (left) and Eigg (right).
Muck is the smallest of the inhabited Small Isles, measuring roughly 2.5 miles west-east and 1.5 miles north-south, and lying about 10 miles from the western edge of the Scottish mainland. Around 40 people live on the island, which takes about two and half hours to reach on the ferry from Mallaig. We are staying in one of the holiday cottages - the island doesn’t get much off-season tourism, which means we are able to rent Gallanach Cottage at the island’s northern end over the winter. As you can see from the image above, it is a pretty spectacular place to stay!
Why?
This is the biggie - why have we left our comfortable, familiar home in Fife for a tiny island where we know no one? There's no succinct answer to this - other than for the sheer joy and challenge of experiencing a different type of existence. The move is possible because my husband is on paid research leave from his teaching work at St Andrews University, which means we are free to be away from home but - crucially - still have our staple income. I am simultaneously on maternity leave (or at least in receipt of Maternity Allowance, being self-employed means there's no official period of leave) so as long as baby K is with me, I also have the freedom to be away from home. We did a similar thing when our daughter was a baby, moving to Tromsø in Arctic Norway for a summer so Tom could work at the Norwegian Polar Institute. The kids are still little enough to not miss friends or home life too much, so we thought it was a good time to have one more family adventure before the restrictions of school make this more difficult.
Watching the MV Loch Nevis arrive on the Isle of Canna, summer 2021
The reason we are on Muck specifically is a mixture of choice, chance and opportunity. We have had several lovely holidays on the west coast of Scotland, including stays on nearby Canna (2021) and Eigg (2022), and always leave wishing that we could stay for longer. The combination of research and maternity leave gave us a window of opportunity to try this, and a bit of Googling threw up the option of longer-term, off-season lets at reasonable prices on Muck.
The other critical factor is that Muck has a state-funded nursery, meaning that our daughter can not only continue her education, but also have other children to play with, something which is vital for her development (and, if I’m honest, my sanity). With her at nursery I have time to squeeze in a bit of writing (baby K is still at the sleepy stage), and that is how you find us on this blustery January day - typing this in the kitchen table with K asleep beside me, R at nursery, and Tom working at his desk in the spare room.
Snapshot of home life - there are some very distracting views out of that window!
I’m hoping to post semi-regular updates about what we get up to whilst we’re here but if you have any specific questions you’d like me to answer feel free to leave them in the comments below.
The header picture shows our cottage, perched above Gallanach Bay, catching the sunlight.
