The good life: Living in the middle of nowhere without mains electricity and modern comforts for nearly 50 years, meet an extraordinary 80-year-old

Published on Wednesday 11 August 2010 16:48

Tom Forsyth is soon to celebrate his 80th birthday but he still strips off for a regular dip in the icy waters of a Highland sea loch. After almost 50 years of living without mains electricity or many modern conveniences, he remains physically hardy and at the forefront of new cultural movements.

• Tom Forsyth in and around his croft house at Scoraig. Pic: Ian Rutherford

Forsyth is one of the unsung heroes of Scottish land reform. He played a key role in the formation of the Isle of Eigg Trust and the community buyout in 1997. Eigg inspired the new Labour government to lay down legislation that paved the way for similar schemes.

He lives on the north-west Highland peninsula of Scoraig, one of the founding fathers of a thriving community. It comprises about 80 people who live in a range of quirky houses and enthusiastically embrace the physical and financial challenges associated with remote living.

To visit, you can drive through Dundonnell and take a short boat trip across Little Lochbroom, or make your way to the end of a long single track road, then walk four miles along a winding, cliff path to a soundtrack of screeching seabirds as brisk breezes inscribe cryptic shapes on the surface of the loch.

Mountains rather than buildings define scale here. Waterfalls provide a pit stop for a paddle or a drink. Then, after an hour or so, some small domestic windmills come into view. They stand sentry to the community, at a distance from the clutch of stone houses for which they are the main provider of power.

Forsyth greets visitors at the gate of his tiny croft house. It's a bothy really. Children often mistake him for a wizard and you can see why. He has a long white beard, soft white hair and a wiry frame. He speaks with a soft Scottish accent, has a gentle manner and is easily moved to tears of joy or empathy. What, one wonders, persuades anybody - especially a pensioner - to forgo modern comforts for a tougher, more physically demanding existence?

In Forsyth's case the answer lies - at least in part - in a youth during which a great deal of reading and soul-searching took place. He says, "I am keen proponent of the theories of Jung. He believed man is defined by an archaic self and is spiritually nurtured by feral existence and contact with nature."

In his home, old-fashioned furniture is crammed into a small living space. The staircase by the door is made from a wooden boat mast. It is studded with a spiral pattern of struts which serve as steps. A sink and a small gas cooker are slotted into one corner and there are books and papers on every surface.This house does not have a windmill. A single solar panel is the sole source of electricity. It runs an LED light and a radio. When there is a lack of wind, it is also used to charge batteries for appliances such as laptops belonging to other households. An array of candles suggests that they provide supplementary illumination. So are there times when Forsyth longs for a television or a washing machine?

He says: "No, I don't feel the need for TV. Radio keeps me happy and I get infinite pleasure from looking at simple things; details like the way slugs form an arbour on burdock leaves for mating. And hand-washing is just fine. I don't have a lot of laundry to keep up with."

There is no flushing toilet in this tiny house. A compost loo is in a shed and cold water is piped in from a spring. There used to be a cast-iron bath. It was sited in the garden and a carefully tended fire beneath heated the water.

Forsyth was born in Fife but his father's work as a coal mining manager took the family to the Black Country when he was two. It was a fairly conventional upbringing enriched by hours of immersion in the countryside.

Although always interested in the esoteric, and of a spiritual nature, he has never subscribed to conventional religion. In his twenties, after National Service in the Royal Navy and an apprenticeship in forestry and horticulture at the Botanic Garden in Edinburgh- he became youth secretary for the Iona Community. This entailed running outdoor camps and liaising with groups of youngsters - many on the wrong side of the law. Refusing to join the Church of Scotland, he had to move on.

By that time he had married Ray, his first wife. The couple moved to New Harmony in Indiana in the US to work in a creative community founded by wealthy benefactress, Jane Owen.

Again Forsyth found himself concerned with the travails of disaffected youth. Local teenagers were apparently living the American dream but remained fundamentally dissatisfied. To Forsyth, their plight was confirmation of the limits of materialism. He says: "Their situation was a prime example of a beautiful idea murdered by an ugly truth. These young people lived luxurious lives but they lacked challenge and were bored out of their minds."

It was found that diverting their frustrated energies into a building project, fostered confidence and wellbeing. It was a lesson Forsyth and his wife kept in mind when they returned to Scotland in 1963. They were looking out for a place where they could live self-sufficiently. And they wanted a place where others could come and live in a so-called unintentional community - one with no rule-book or underlying mission.

Their first visit to Scoraig was by seagoing kayak. They arrived with their children, Morag and Fergus and decided to stay and become tenant crofters. Another couple, Alan and sa Bush, had settled about a mile away with their children.Traditional crofters had deserted the place and the only other inhabitants were two bachelors who lived together.

The Scoraig lifestyle is founded on hard physical graft. Ruins had to be made habitable, land was fertilised with seaweed for food production and livestock purchased and tended. In a far-lung setting devoid of authority strictures, personal integrity determines limits of behaviour.

Love affairs and conflicts posed particular challenges and - as the dramas played out -the cast of characters grew. Bush and Forsyth gave away tracts of their rented croft land. This allowed those without capital to build homes and create an autonomous way of living. Ray and Tom had five children together before eventually deciding to split. Tom went on to marry twice more.

Many Scoraig offspring have become artists, artisans, builders, environmental campaigners and academics. One works as a scientist for NASA. But beyond book learning, those who grow up here can turn their hand to any practical task. They can tile a roof, build a wall, shear a sheep, bake a loaf, or wield a chain-saw.

Forsyth believes everyone can learn from his example of making do with less. He says: "We all know the western lifestyle is environmentally unsustainable. Besides that, though, people suffer stress from living by deadlines, when we could be living by livelines - that is, responding to our feelings rather than imposed pressures.

"I feel people are becoming out of touch with their true nature - or reality if you like. An over-emphasis on a quest for money and goods ultimately distracts from the life of the soul."

He goes to Ullapool and Inverness for shopping and responds to occasional requests to attend alternative cultural conferences, but Forsyth, for the most part, lives out the closing scenes of his life in a state of contemplation. His solitude is punctuated by visits by friends and regular contact with his daughter Ise, 12. Her mother, Jeanie, is Forsyth's third wife. They live separately but are still close friends.

He and Ray are also on good terms.

A cache of sweet treats supplements his otherwise abstemious, wholefood diet. Water for tea is heated on a wood-burning stove. Its fuel comes from a shelter belt of trees Forsyth planted more than 40 years ago. Food production has somewhat slipped from the agenda with the advancing of the years. But herbs, potatoes and courgettes thrive in his semi-wild garden. Nettles have been planted because they provide habitat for tortoiseshell butterflies and make a good pot of soup. Burdock is good for bees and its roots are sustaining food for humans.

A visit to Scoraig is always worth it. Even on a typical West Highland day when rain clouds are suspended from a moody sky and low light presents the landscape as if you are seeing it through half-shut eyes, time with Tom Forsyth makes simplicity appealing.He says: "I try to live by the maxim of the 19th century American philosopher David Henry Thoreau who said: 'You can judge a man's contentment in terms of what he can afford to do without'."