Published 14th May 2025, 06:00 BST

In George Orwell’s search for isolation from a troubled world on a Scottish island and the pursuit of pleasure in simple things, photographer Craig Easton has followed.

Now, a new book that reimagines Orwell’s time at Barnhill on the Isle of Jura, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, his final novel and cautionary tale of totalitarianism, is now due.

Barnhill on the Isle of Jura, where author George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, photographed by Craig Easton | Craig Easton

Mr Easton travelled to Barnhill where Orwell completed the novel in his first-floor bedroom dense with black tobacco smoke and paraffin fumes. The writer went there in 1946, recently widowed and looking for freedom from post-war London, a place to recover from tuberculosis and ultimately, Easton believes, a place of hope.

Mr Easton said: “Orwell’s work across the board is so resonant with the times we are living in now, it kind of drew me to say ‘I need to go there now’.

“It is misconception really that people think of Orwell as this guy who was dying and angst ridden and went to this isolated place to write a dystopian book. That is just not the case, it doesn’t ring true to me at all.

“The reason he went there was he wanted to warn the world about what he saw coming, but he went there with a sense of hope . He went there with his young son to start a life, to grow a garden, all those things.

“For me, going to Barnhill was an opportunity to focus on the small things in life and focus on hope rather than the dystopian world we seem to live in.”

George Orwell arrived on Jura in 1946 following the death of his wife, Eileen, with his adopted son and sister. It was there he wrote his last novel, 1984. | CC

Orwell wrote of the “eight-miles of inconceivable road” that led to the farmhouse where he made a home with his young son, Richard, and sister Avril.

Mr Easton travelled with a cumbersome 1952 wooden plate camera and a tonne-like rucksack of equipment to the house that Orwell described as being "in an extremely un-get-atable place” - a description now borrowed for the title of Easton’s book following his journey there in a damp and cold spell in February and March.

With no company - apart from a meal with a neighbour around a mile away one night- and time and space unfolding in that unique island way, Mr Easton found he could fall into the process of “making pictures for the pure pleasure of making pictures”. The way light fell on a wall or a chip in a teapot became his concerns.

Photographer Craig Easton worked with a 1952 wooden plate camera to capture Barnhill and its surrounds. PIC: Craig Easton. | Craig Easton

Tea was used in the developing process by Mr Easton for some of the photos taken at Barnhill in tribute to Orwell’s love for the drink, which the writer described as “one of the mainstays of civiliaztions in this country” in an essay published in 1946.

Mr Easton, who was named Photographer of the Year at the Sony World Photography Awards in 2021, said a sense of presence of Orwell remained at Barnhill.

He said: “I am not a great believer in auras or things like that, but the sense of his life there was very clear to me. The house is pretty much unchanged from when he lived there in the 1940s.

“It is not an easy place to live. It was very very damp and cold in February. I was very ill when I came back. I think I had properly exhausted myself carrying all my equipment about.

“It didn’t seem like the kind of place you would go to choose to recover from TB, but Orwell saw it better than London and the smog of London.”

Barnhill has changed little since Orwell's time there with photographer finding a "clear sense" of the author's life in the farmhouse. PIC: Craig Easton. | Craig Easton

Orwell arrived at Barnhill the year after his wife, Eileen, died during surgery aged 39. The couple had spoken about relocating there, with Eilieen in touch with the owners, the Fletchers, who still own the house, about the property.

The couple’s adopted son , Richard, has written a foreword for Mr Easton’s book as patron of the Orwell Society. He has recalled the sound of the typewriter echoing through the house, their shared lunches at Barnhill and the afternoon the pair nearly drowned after their boat was sucked into the notorious Corryvreckan tidal whirlpool.

Mr Easton, in his own work at Barnhill, has reflected on one of Orwell’s essays, Some Thoughts on a Common Toad, written in 1946, which reflects on the power of nature’s joy in the face of political disenchantment.

Orwell wrote: “Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost?

“I think that by retaining one’s childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and – to return to my first instance – toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

Orwell’s stay at Barnhill was punctuated by periods of deteriorating health and he left Barnhill on Christmas Eve 1947 for Hairmyres Hospital, where he remained for seven months. He left the island again in January 1949 to get treatment at a sanatorium in England - with Nineteen Eighty-Four published that June - and never returned.

Easton described time at Barnhill as both “challenging and restorative” as he slowed down, worked and sank into Orwell’s mindset in the silence of the remote farmhouse.

The photographer added: “In periods of great turmoil in a political or global sense, some people can feel impotent. But none of us are impotent, we can all do something and sometimes doing something is refusing to go under.

“I need to feel that in order that I can then fight the fight again. It is not a giving up in any sense.

“In the same way that Orwell rejoices in the toads and the elms and the blackbirds, he was also writing Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

A kickstarter is now underway to support publication of Craig Easton’s An Extremely Un-get-atable Place: George Orwell on Jura. To donate, please visit www.craigeaston.com.

George Orwell's home 'of hope' on isolated Scottish island where he wrote 1984 revisited

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