A tour of Orwell’s Jura, where he wrote 1984
The house where George Orwell penned his masterpiece, published 70 years ago today, has hardly changed, nor has the brooding and remote Scottish island he loved
The black typewriter gives a satisfying “clack” when I hit its keys. The antiquated contraption sits on an upstairs windowsill in a house where there is a view on to a bay of graphite-coloured water that laps the shore. Above are tumbling slopes of bog cotton, bracken and foxgloves.
In the late 1940s, Barnhill, a stout, white-washed house, on the Scottish island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides, was exactly what George Orwell was looking for: a remote retreat unreachable by vehicle. He described it as “in an extremely un-get-atable place”; somewhere he could write what would be his final work – 1984.