Journey's end

Published on Friday 14 December 2007 19:16

WHO LIVES IN A HOUSE LIKE THIS? Achamore House – The Big House, to locals – is a rambling baronial mansion full of warm wooden panelling and vast, airy rooms, set amid 52 acres of gardens belonging to the community of Gigha.

Built in the late 19th century for the wonderfully named Captain William Scarlett, 3rd Lord Abinger, it was designed by John Honeyman (the Glasgow architect employed a trainee, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose stylistic tics, already pronounced, can be seen in the leaded glass windows on the upstairs landing.

By any standards, Achamore is impressive. But on Gigha, comprising roughly 150 souls – many of whom have been contending with substandard housing – it also stands out because it has always been a stronghold for the Laird. And not all lairds have endeared themselves to the natives. In 2002, having stumped up 4.5 million, the locals bought the 3,400-acre isle.

Part of the money came from grants from the Scottish Land Fund (SLF) and the Highlands and Islands Enterprise's community land unit. A condition of the deal was that the Isle of Gigha Heritage Trust would repay 1m to the SLF by March 2004. To accomplish that, they'd have to sell Achamore.

Rumour has it that in the 1970s Mick Jagger fancied the place. That deal never went through, but this month marks the fourth anniversary for Don Dennis, an American who bought the house, four acres of land, the ten-acre island of Craro just to the south, and the title Baron of Gigha, all for around 640,000. He sold the title ("Good riddance!") to a gentleman from Malta, but remains very much in residence. How did a third-generation Californian wind up living on a small Scottish island? Has it been a culture shock? Island communities are famously tight-knit, and having come through the buyout, you'd expect this one to be tighter than most. How hard or easy was it fitting into island rhythms?

Dennis, 51, admits that he can be obsessive when his interest is piqued, and I believe him. We settle into the spacious environs of the drawing room, in oversize sofas inviting guests to curl up while nursing a dram, and do not emerge for more than two hours, so thorough are his answers. He's from Palo Alto, an affluent enclave 35 miles south of San Francisco, known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley. His father is a successful venture capitalist specialising in the computer industry. "He knew Hewlett and Packard," he says.

"My parents are remarkable people. My mother took my brother and me on one of the very first protest marches in San Francisco against the Vietnam war. My father was quieter, but I remember him saying, 'Bombs make no sense whatsoever in the economy. We put all these resources into making something that has no purpose but to explode.' "

The youngest of four, Dennis was determined not to fight, but was not quite sure what he did want to do. "I found it appalling that everyone I knew went from high school straight to college without thinking. I only wanted to go if I could see a reason for it. At 18, I couldn't." He'd been "radicalised" reading A Little Kinder by Ira Sandpearl, one of the founders of Kepler's bookstore.

A legendary California institution in nearby Menlo Park, Kepler's was a gathering place for the intelligentsia. The Grateful Dead and Joan Baez played there. Sandpearl and Baez also toured extensively, advocating pacifism and an end to the war.

Many of us can name a book that changed our life, but I'm startled when Dennis wells up while talking about his. He was moved by Sandpearl's description of an encounter with defence analyst Daniel Ellsberg just before he went public with The Pentagon Papers, which rocked Washington to its core. "Ellsberg took a hell of a risk. He only escaped jail because the government got caught breaking into his psychiatrist's office. I wanted the easy way out until I read that chapter. Ira's book took the social conscience that exists in everybody and set it alight in me. Talking with him over the next several months was wonderful. He would talk about Socrates and Plato as if they were old friends. I'd never been exposed to this kind of thing."

Nor had he been exposed to religion before a summer spent in Tennessee with acquaintances who were Christian Scientists and part of the back-to-the-land movement taking hold in the state's north-eastern corner. With very few outside distractions, their social life consisted of going to church.

"When I got back I told Ira what I'd learned about God." Dennis chuckles. "He didn't say much but he mailed me Think on These Things, by Krishnamurti, the anti-guru guru who was also very anti-religion. (It] said that the violence out there in the world is within each one of us, and if we really want to change things we need to address what is within ourselves. I'd never thought of that, either."

Dennis, who seems to have spent his early years in search of mentors, enrolled at Brockwood Park, the school Krishnamurti founded in Hampshire, and studied everything from yoga to physics.

"My last two years at American high school allowed me to do a great deal of drama. I wanted to become an actor until Krishnamurti talked me out of it. His first comment to me was, 'You know, I used to know Greta Garbo.' When I said I liked acting he said, 'Oh what a horrid profession.' It killed off my ambition."

After university Dennis returned to Brockwood as faculty, and met his future (now ex) wife, Kirsty. Their seven-year marriage produced three children, Jennifer, 21, Ava 19, and Stewart, 17. When teaching no longer appealed he moved on to woodturning, evidence of which is found in the rustic bowls dotted about Achamore. He also started a timber company, but it wasn't a roaring success. He learned how to lose a lot of money in a short space of time. But there was one triumph. "I became involved in sustainable forestry and helped found the Forest Stewardship Council. That's the one thing I'm proud of out of my years with the industry, this programme of certifying timber from well-managed forestry operations."

After selling out to his biggest creditor for 1, Dennis returned to a subject that had long fascinated: flower essences. Brockwood's head gardener first told him about them, indicating that Krishnamurti used them. That was all Dennis needed to hear. He bought a full set, but left them languishing on a shelf. Years later, a trip to Morayshire's Findhorn spiritual community rekindled his curiosity and after a bit more of his trademark obsessive research, he launched International Flower Essence Repertoire. Two years after their divorce, Kirsty and the children returned to her native Scotland, settling in Edinburgh. Dennis grew increasingly disenchanted with the Home Counties around the time he was contemplating new premises to accommodate residential workshops. "I was driving from Inverness to Gordonstoun for parents' day and felt so damned good in the landscape. The sense of space and elbow room had never struck me before. I had a sense of well-being I wasn't experiencing down south. I found myself toying with the idea of relocating my business up here."

A three-day reconnaissance mission failed to turn up a suitable property at a price he could manage ("I hasten to say the Halifax own the majority of this house!"), and Dennis resigned himself to southern living. Then he chanced upon an article about Achamore House in the Observer.

"I flew up straight away. I had to meet the committee of the island's board of directors and get their approval; then they would recommend me to the community, who would vote. I gave a presentation about myself. At the time I didn't understand the situation and was actually embarrassed to say, 'Do you mind if I bring a business with me?' The fact is, jobs are few and far between here, and the economy needs development. A great strength of my offer was that I wanted to run the house as a B&B. There was a shortage of spaces for visitors. They voted 38-0 in my favour, with two abstentions.

"One of those said he did it as a matter of principle, because he was opposed to idea of the community selling the big house. He wanted them to run it as a hotel. But they had to raise 1m, and on top of that there's the money that has to go into the house. I'm still at the investment stage. I want this to be the loveliest B&B experience people can have, if what they're looking for is a homely, nurturing, gentle level of luxury in an outstandingly beautiful setting."

Does he encounter much anti-Americanism here? He flashes a look of incredulity. "In England Americans are very much discriminated against, at least where I lived. That doesn't happen here. In England once I tried to order firewood from a guy, around the time America was bombing Libya, and he said, 'I don't sell to f***ing Americans.' Welcome to Hampshire."

But it is a small island. "If you sneeze down here, someone at the North End says bless you. Everyone knows each other's business. But the willingness to help one another is tremendous. There's a real sense of community, and it is nice living in a place where people wave at you in the car as they go past."

His partner, Emma Rennie, later tells me the most powerful form of social ostracism islanders practice is not waving at someone when they go past, followed by the silent treatment when you meet in the village shop. And ostracism is a topic Dennis and Rennie know something about.

Rennie, 38, is Gigha-born and raised, and runs a dairy farm with her brothers. She's quick to laugh and instantly welcoming. When Dennis arrived she was married and hours away from delivering her second son. "We both remember the instant we laid eyes on each other: it was four years ago on 11 July, about 11 o'clock," Dennis says. "It was my second visit. I'd arrived on my birthday, two days earlier in the evening, and Emma gave birth around 9pm that night.

"Two days later, I was at the post office being shown around, and the owner pointed Emma out. I was astonished – I knew she'd just given birth. I'd never heard of that. I can still picture her standing there, beginning to turn around to look at me because someone else was pointing me out to her. It's like a photo in my mind, that instant."

So far, so romantic. But their relationship, three years strong, caused rifts in the small community. "That first winter I often found myself gravitating toward her farm. It took me a while to realise that it was because I felt at home there and the reason why was Emma. I didn't realise just how attractive she was until one ceilidh. Normally she's in a boiler suit, smelling of cows; that night she arrived in tight leather jeans and a close-fitting top, with make-up on and her hair done: an absolute babe!"

Rennie's marriage ended and her husband moved to the mainland. But the islanders were divided. One likened Dennis to Satan. Another told a B&B guest that they wanted to take him out in a boat, put a heavy stone around his neck and drop him overboard. With the passage of time, and the clear evidence that this relationship is serious – there's a lot of kissing, touching and good-natured banter – the animosity has died down. "They didn't graffiti the house, but I did take the car in for servicing in Glasgow and we wound up staying an extra day because the brake cable needed replacing. The guy said, 'It's rather odd; if I didn't know better, it's as if somebody had sliced it with a knife . . .'"

It strikes me that Rennie, the local, shouldered a greater share of the risk. Dennis agrees. "Friends of ours were fine with it. But she has seven brothers and two sisters and it sort of divided opinion. Some were absolutely fine because they'd seen how her marriage was, and some didn't like it. It got pretty nasty, but that's subsided."

I can't imagine Rennie, with her muscular frame and no-nonsense attitude, crumbling under the pressure – the woman is indefatigable. She evinces the kind of excitement most of us reserve for chocolate or sex when talking about the twice-a-day milking routine, but on top of that she has two lively boys, cooks breakfast for their guests – and cleans the house.

"It's not unusual for people here to have five or six jobs," Dennis tells me. "The character in Local Hero was based on the old postmaster, Seamus McSporran, who was in the Guinness Book of Records for having the most simultaneous valid job titles in the world. You have to turn your hand to many things in order to make it work. I've got the B&B, the flower essences, and in season I'm skippering a boat with the sea tours. It is weird owning the big house on the small island, compared to buying a similar-sized house anywhere else. Psychologically, that's the laird, the enemy or something close to it," he says.

"I feel I'm still treated a little bit differently through the projection of those psychological habits. I had to help deconstruct people's fixed ways of relating to this house and its inhabitants."

Has it been more or less difficult than he imagined? "For the first year I didn't enjoy going to the pub, mainly because somebody or other would have drunk too much and for a few people, if they were drunk, then I was an easy target for whatever frustrations they were feeling."

On the plus side, he adds quickly, he met a remarkable woman and now shares his life with her and the boys, Sean and Bryce. "Then there's the sheer beauty of the island. There are times when you sit on the bluff looking out at the Paps of Jura and realise that the scene's pretty much unchanged for thousands of years. I've stood outside in midwinter just listening – on a calm night without a breath of wind, you can't hear anything. I listen to the silence. I always feel a small sense of misgiving when I'm leaving the island and always feel happy to be coming back over."

Bed & breakfast at Achamore House starts at 55 for an en suite double room in low season and 65 in the high season, based on two people sharing. For more information, tel: [phone], e-mail [e-mail], or visit www.achamorehouse.com For information about Don Dennis's flower essences, visit www.ifer.co.uk