ENCHANTED ISLANDS

An ivy-covered castle, camping by the seashore, and the power of a six-year-old's imagination: Leslie Jamison and her daughter find themselves transformed by a sojourn in southwestern Scotland.

- Leslie Jamison

AT FOUR IN THE MORNING, far from civilization on an island in the Inner Hebrides, I woke to the drumming of rain on the canvas roof of my tent. Wind whistled between the tethers, and waves crashed just below. My daughter slept beside me under a thick duvet, two stacked sleeping bags, and a pair of wool blankets: a Scottish August. We were perched on a cliff on the Isle of Jura, and through the tent's small window, I could see the sea glimmering in the moonlight—elegant, indifferent, vast. It felt like the edge of the world, or at least one of its thin places, where the boundary between the tangible and the sublime had grown porous.

Seventy-five years earlier, George Orwell wrote his iconic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four on this island, as one of its only residents, in a whitewashed farmhouse four miles down the coast from where we were. He came with his young son, and was grieving the death of his wife. It felt fitting to me that one might imagine a dystopian future while retreating as far from the dystopian present as possible. Orwell called the island “un-get-at-able.”

Indeed, it was not exactly easy for my six-year-old daughter and me to get there—we’d traveled by air, land, and boat. It seemed somewhat miraculous, this cluster of tents overlooking churning waters bobbing with harbor seals and gleaming black great cormorants, nestled between rugged hills dotted with red deer, wild goats, bog cotton, and foxglove. It was as if we’d found ourselves inside an illustration in a book of fairy tales.