Cold comfort

TO a confirmed central-belter like myself, travelling to Corrunich, the stone cottage writer and cordon bleu cook Ghillie Basan shares with her two young children, is akin to charting a course through the upper reaches of the Amazon.

I abandon my car, as instructed, at a tiny settlement called Chapeltown, in the foothills of the Cairngorms, and take a dirt track through eerie, deserted farm buildings, across open fields and along the edge of a dark pine forest, wading ankle deep through a marsh until, finally, the house, deep in the Braes of Glenlivet, looms into sight. As I draw near, I can smell the scent of middle eastern spices wafting in the wind, a sure sign that Ghillie is in her favourite spot, hovering over the stove.

This used to be a joint enterprise with her husband Jonathan: a madcap scheme to create cook books in a house with no mains electricity or freezer. Ghillie conjured up gourmet fare in their cramped kitchen while he took the photographs, armed with nothing more than a 35mm camera and a couple of hand mirrors to reflect the light through the windows. But this past November, eight years after they swapped their metropolitan lives in Edinburgh for a back-to-basics existence, Jonathan suddenly left. He drove the family’s Land Rover back down the track to Chapeltown to start a new life with another woman, leaving Ghillie devastated and completely cut off.

She blames the outbreak of foot and mouth disease, which effectively sealed off the Braes from the rest of the Highlands, and the fact that her book The Moon’s Our Nearest Neighbour, recounting their Highlands adventure, brought her more attention than it did him. "Things had been bad for a couple of months," says Ghillie. "We had money worries, but nothing we hadn’t faced before. I just thought we were hitting another low and that we would get through it.

"But he had reached a point where he was questioning his love for me, so he didn’t think it was worth getting over that hurdle - for him there was nothing left. The night Jonathan walked out was the saddest of my life. The hardest thing to accept is that he did not try to solve the problem first, because that renders me worthless."

Basan’s family - her parents in Braemar and her brother in Devon - rallied to help without passing judgement. But even they were surprised when, instead of packing up and heading back to the city, she decided to stay on for the winter. Throughout the snowbound months, when not even a four-wheel drive can tackle the terrain, Basan walked five miles a day, pulling her daughter Yasmin, now six, to school on a sledge, while two-year-old Zeki rode on her back. She gave herself a hernia, but she survived.

Today Ghillie has decided to stay for good. In a matter of weeks she converted Jonathan’s photographic studio into a self-contained cottage where she plans to hold cookery workshops and wilderness retreats, and her latest cook book The Moroccan Kitchen will be published by Anness in October.

THEY say Corrunich means an open, barren place. If so, it is aptly named. Set in open moorland 1,500 feet above sea level, some would call it Godforsaken. In Scottish terms, it’s about as close to a wilderness as you can come. For the Basans, the cottage’s remoteness was its main attraction. For Glasgow-born Ghillie it was the realisation of a dream that germinated when, as a child, she roamed free in a garden of frangipani and jacaranda in Kenya. For Jonathan, the cottage represented the chance of a lifetime, "like moving to a foreign country".

The last time I visited, 15 months ago, we - Ghillie, Jonathan, the children and their dogs Biglie and Aslan - dined al fresco under scorching sun while hares leaped in the fields and oyster-catchers swooped noisily around us. I listened entranced as the couple enthused about life away from the rat race. Theirs was a tale of a shared vision, of harsh winters and impossibly sweet springs, of broken generators and frostbitten fingers, of Chianti drunk under star-heavy skies. It was told with such passion and energy that it was difficult imagining a hurdle they could not overcome together.

At their first meeting, however, when they worked in Istanbul, neither Ghillie nor Jonathan liked each other much. Their unusual childhoods (Ghillie’s father was responsible for setting up a medical centre in Nairobi, while Jonathan, who is half-Turkish, grew up in an Ottoman mansion on the Bospherous), and mutual love of wide, open spaces, eventually brought them together.

After a spell in America, they moved to Edinburgh, but were soon criss-crossing the Highlands in search of the perfect home. The first time they saw the cottage it was derelict, without mains electricity or a phone. But there was fresh water running off the land and barns that could be converted into a photography studio. They immediately fell in love and set about making it liveable.

Dodgy generators and suspicious neighbours aside, the first year was everything they had hoped for. "We had money left over from the sale of our house in Edinburgh. We went for long walks in the hills. In the winter we watched the northern lights," Ghillie says. Sure they grappled with archaic machinery and trod their clothes in freezing bath water to wash them, but basically they were happy.

Things got harder when the children came along, bringing a need for greater financial security, accessible healthcare and a network of friends. The Basans hit upon the idea of collaborating on cookery books and successfully pitched the concept to English publishers who had no conception of the difficulties involved in making and then photographing middle eastern dishes such as Izgarada Boga Yumatarzi (grilled bull’s testicles with butter, garlic and dried chilli) in a place where red bell peppers are considered exotic.

Since the nearest shopping centre is several hours’ drive away in Elgin, keeping the cottage stocked became a military operation. "In winter we have to load our shopping into rucksacks and trudge up the track with bottles of whisky in our jackets," Jonathan said during my last visit. "At times, when it’s been a white-out, I have walked past Corrunich because I couldn’t see anything."

The only time they thought about giving it up was when Ghillie was pregnant with Yasmin in 1995-96. "It was a particularly harsh winter and we didn’t have double-glazing so the snow came in to our rooms. The heaters were making no impact on the -30C temperature, so we huddled under the duvet with the dogs. I couldn’t throw off the flu and I had morning sickness. We had no money and could see no way of making any and we questioned the wisdom of bringing a child into such a wilderness."

By the time Yasmin was at nursery, however, Ghillie and Jonathan’s life had taken on a familiar pattern: there were up times when food was plentiful and the weather good, followed by slumps when the money dried up and they had to devise income-generating ventures. They rode it like a rollercoaster, revelling in its twists and turns.

According to Ghillie, the cracks in their marriage only began to appear when foot and mouth swept the country in March 2001. Although Scottish cases were confined to the Borders, farmers were terrified their livelihoods would be destroyed. The Braes of Glenlivet were consumed by paranoia. Everyone kept a check on their neighbours’ movements, ready to point the finger if the disease should be found. Incomers came under particular scrutiny. As outsiders, they were seen as having no vested interest in ensuring foot and mouth did not come north. "It’s a place where they make their own rules, and there were threats," says Ghillie. "Norman [the nearest farmer and a close friend] told us he could only vouch for us if we accounted for our every movement. It was made clear we were to travel no further than Tomintoul. We had to disinfect our boots and the wheels of the Land Rover every time we left the house. And we had to change vehicles at the bottom of the track."

They decided it would be easier for Jonathan to do the school run every day, while Ghillie stayed at home and worked. This meant he was socialising more than usual, mixing with the mums, and he started to enjoy it. "I think it was a combination of that, and us being so much more isolated in the glen. It really was deathly quiet. We had no visitors or keepers coming in to see us."

At the same time, they realised that the idea of collaborating on cookery books was running out of steam. When Ghillie was asked to write The Modern Moroccan Kitchen, her publisher insisted upon using a London photographer. And Ghillie wanted Jonathan to find other work so that their wages would not be inter-dependent. "Even as late as last summer we had people to stay and he was still full of enthusiasm for our dream," she says. "Life had become a cycle of work/children/work/children, with Saturdays and Sundays indistinguishable from the rest of the week. But I was still cooking supper and we were still eating it together in the evenings.

"Then, in the months before he left, Jonathan seemed to become depressed. He kept saying he couldn’t cope, that he wanted out. I said he should go off and travel until he decided what he wanted. But in the end he didn’t do that: he just left."

In the aftermath, Ghillie blocked everything out and simply focused on the children. Zeki was up at 5am every morning demanding cocoa, and Yasmin needed to be taken to riding, dancing and school, so Ghillie didn’t have a chance to lie in bed moping. At night she had to work on her book.

Determined to ensure a measure of stability, she maintained a friendly relationship with Jonathan, who still lives within relatively easy access. The children visit him often. "I try to keep it as normal as possible," she says. "When I am with them we laugh about the things they have done with Jonathan. I want them to grow up loving us both."

Physically, life remained demanding. Although they had mains electricity not long before Jonathan left, there was still the question of getting the children through the snow. "One time I got stuck in a drift with Zeki on my back and Yasmin on the sleigh," she says. "I was up to my waist in a stream and I had to pull it down so I could lean on it and get it across the stream. I felt something pulling. Later, I was lifting heavy stones and I felt it going again. I was physically sick for a few weeks and had a huge swelling in my stomach. It was a hernia."

On the positive side, Ghillie discovered her once-aloof neighbours had become allies. The farmers used their tractors to clear her track or carry her shopping from the village. Someone gave her the use of a Land Rover so she would be able to get about more easily. Others turned up unannounced just to check if she was OK. Of course it didn’t hurt that she could pass for a blonde Nigella Lawson. In a place like Glenlivet, news of an attractive woman on her own spreads like wildfire, and Ghille admits she has not been short of offers, though she is not yet ready to accept them. "The hardest thing was not the isolation, because, to be honest, I don’t feel particularly isolated. The hardest thing was what is hardest for everyone in this situation. To understand how, after 14 years, he can just switch off. But I think it is almost old-fashioned nowadays to assume that the man that you marry is going to love you through thick and thin."

Nearly a year after Jonathan’s departure, Corrunich, with its walls plastered with children’s paintings and its shelves weighed down with wholesome food, looks the very model of a rural sanctuary and not like a broken home. Just shy of 40, Ghillie looks forward to a new beginning. Her website is up and running and her book is out soon. If all goes well, her cookery workshops and wilderness retreats will start later this month.

More domestic river sprite than domestic goddess, Ghillie seems completely at home here in the wilds, with her fresh-from-the-garden spinach, and her free range children around her. She’s upbeat and realistic. "If this works, great, but if it doesn’t then that will be time to move on," she says. "There’s no point in hanging on to something tied in to so many memories for the sake of hanging on to it."