Three conical quartzite peaks of Jura.
A single-track road runs up Jura’s east coast from the car ferry slip at Feolin, opposite Port Askaig on Islay, and goes almost nowhere else; much of the island has no road at all. About 260 people live here against an estimated 6,000 red deer, and the skyline is dominated by the Paps, three steep hills of quartzite, a hard pale rock, of which Beinn an Oir is the highest, pathless and scree-covered enough to make for a serious day’s walk. Nearly everyone lives around Craighouse, the only real village, home to the Jura Distillery and, in summer, a passenger ferry across to Tayvallich on the mainland. Much of Jura falls within a National Scenic Area, protected as much for its emptiness as for anything in it. George Orwell rented the remote farmhouse of Barnhill, at the island’s northern tip, and wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four there between 1946 and 1948; the walk in is long, and the Corryvreckan whirlpool that nearly drowned him in a boating accident in 1947 churns in the strait just offshore.
