'It takes a good three weeks to get it up and running after a bleak winter,' says Annabel. Given the nature of Jura's climate, The Glen does not just present itself out of the mist each year. 'Each of my designs is symmetrical,' says Sue, 'but the pattern often developed as I went along and, inevitably, became more ambitious.' Sue discovered a dealer in Cornwall who shipped shells up by the sackload. Initial experiments fixing locally found shells on a door were frustrating because there was not the variety of shells available to create interesting patterns. Because it is a 'fair- weather' retreat, only so much can be achieved in any one summer, and guests are roped in to help - Lucinda has painted rooms while Sue discovered a talent as a shellwork designer. 'This is very much a DIY place', says Annabel.

The house has evolved over the years to what it is today - a charming, cosy retreat, where the fires always roar at night, sofas are deep and comfortable, delicious food abounds and the drinks room is always stocked, and where books, pictures, rugs and fabrics create a happy, civilized oasis in the untamed landscape. But in the end it defeated us – spare parts became impossible to obtain - so we switched over to electricity a year ago.' They converted all the gas-lamp fittings to electricity and reinstalled them. They then piped the house for gas lighting, which Annabel says was 'wonderfully atmospheric, the gas hissing gently in the background. For the first 10 years, candles and hurricane lamps were the only forms of lighting. MAY WE SUGGEST: The intricate art of shellwork is having a renaissanceĪnnabel and William built an indoor bathroom and installed an oil-fired boiler that finally allowed them to have hot water and hot pipes for drying damp clothes. We had a chemical loo in a hut tacked on to the stables,' laughs Annabel, whose relaxed approach belies a gift for pulling together projects - be it a derelict croft or the flourishing furniture company OKA she set up in 1999 with Sue Jones and Lucinda Waterhouse. When that broke, as was its habit, 'we just had to take it in turns to bring the water down in buckets. Floors on different levels were made of concrete and there were a few pieces of furniture brought down from the main house - that was it.' Running water was a priority, so the Astors installed a tiny hand pump which brought water down from the Batrick.

'The first job William and I undertook - about 20 years ago – was to knock it right through. 'The house consisted of three small cottages,' says Annabel. As stalking became increasingly popular, The Glen was used as a bothy or shelter for stalkers, whọ kept their ponies in the stables. It may seem a touch whimsical to quote the Reverend Francis Stewart when he wrote, in 1793, 'that the appearance of Jura is very romantic and calculated to raise sublime emotions in the spectator's soul – but he does get it right.īuilt in the 1850s, when Jura's population may have numbered as many as 1,300, The Glen was originally an occasional dwelling for an islander, with a nearby stable for ponies, then the island's only form of transport. Beyond is beach and sea, with the island of Colonsay breaking the distant horizon. The dry-stone-walled enclosure in front of the house constitutes the garden originally, it kept out foraging sheep. A nearby stream, the Batrick - the water supply - gurgles into the ocean. The Glen, as it is known by the family, sits in the middle of a gently curving bay, with he Paps rising behind. There are six private estates on the 28-mile-long island, one of which has been in the Astor family for over a century. Pollution is not an issue here - the main accident risk to the few cars on the island is red deer, which outnumber the 200 or so local residents by 25 to one. Jura has just one road, the Long Road, which winds its way down the eastern and southern coasts. “Then it can be weeks before another sighting. 'We may be lucky to catch a glimpse as they cross the bay in pursuit of sea trout,' says Annabel. It is said that there is a pair of otters for every other mile of the 115 mile-long coastline - though sighting one is another matter. Standing as sentinels over this, and dominating the seascapes, are the scree-covered Paps which rise to over 760 metres. Jura is still a wild, isolated, trackless place of great beauty, with moors, forests, cliffs, hidden caves, rocky inlets and pristine, white-sand beaches. Arriving at The Glen, William and Annabel Astor's magical Scottish lair, after train, plane and car journeys and finally a high-speed inflatable boat ride in horizontal rain, I can safely - and thankfully - confirm that over 50 years later, Orwell's description remains true. George Orwell, who wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-four in a remote farmhouse on Jura, once described the island as 'an extremely un-getable place'.

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