4/14/2024 0 Comments My family tree by two jura version![]() Nevertheless, it’s hard not to think of him here. Barnhill is not open to the public, and no one among the island’s 235 residents remembers Orwell. My purpose was to drink single-malt on Islay, the island to the south, and enjoy two nights of indulgence at Ardlussa House, where Orwell’s landlord had lived. I came to Jura after a two-week backpacking trip across Scotland. Today, life on the island is only a little less difficult than in his time. The conventional wisdom is that Jura killed Orwell. When he left it for the last time, in January 1949, he never again lived outside a sanatorium or hospital. Although he rented Barnhill and didn’t own it, he put in fruit trees and a garden, built a chicken house, bought a truck and a boat, and invested numberless hours of labor in what he believed would be his permanent home. He left periodically (mostly in the winter) to do journalism in London and, for seven months in 19, to undergo treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis. Orwell lived here for parts of the last three years of his life. It was June 2, sunny, short-sleeve warm, with the midges barely out, and couldn’t have been more beautiful. The house, called Barnhill, sits near the northern end of Jura, an island off Scotland’s west coast in the Inner Hebrides. This was where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Far to the right, a boat moved along the shore, its sail as bright as the house. Behind it, a stone wall cut a diagonal to the water like a seam stitching mismatched pieces of green velvet. A half mile in the distance, far back from the water, was a white house with three dormer windows. We rounded a curve and looked down a hillside to the sea. The land was treeless as prairie, with wildflowers and the seedless tops of last year’s grass smudging the new growth. The road was two tracks of pebbled dirt separated by a strip of grass. ![]() Does a writer need to live in misery and ugliness to conjure up a dystopia? It’s hard to know what would be a good place from which to imagine a future of bad smells and no privacy, deceit and propaganda, poverty and torture. Orwell's friends were appalled when he moved to Jura, fearing for his health, but the writer quickly took to life in its harsh environment.
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