Ardnamurchan is听famous perhaps to some for its part in the Shipping Forecast, but beyond that a place that's escaped much notice. Which is why, it seems, the people who live there love it.
Richard Uridge begins his trip to Ardnamurchan with an overview of the one thing that has shaped the place more than anything else - the sea. David Ferguson takes him to the top of the lighthouse, built in the 1840s, which, on a clear day, offers a wide panorama from Mull to the south, along to the Treshnish Isles, then to Coll, and hidden behind it Tiree, round to Barra and South Uist, then over Canna, Rum, Muck and Eigg, to Skye, then to Mallaig and the Knoydart Hills.
Unlike many others, Malcolm Macmillan has never moved away from Ardnamurchan in search of work. He has a long family association with the lighthouse: his great grandfather worked there, as did Malcolm himself, starting the first of two stints there in 1947. It may sound romantic but was in fact a monotonous job, hours on end with nothing to do but keep an eye on an expanse of empty ocean, and he'd always prefer to have been out working with his sheep on the hills.听
Dochie Cameron fishes the sea off Ardnamurchan for salmon, in the traditional way, and is finding this year the worst in a long time. Even jellyfish, usually plentiful, are few and far between. Richard goes out into the Sound of Mull, on a typically changeable Ardnamurchan day, and finds that this is fishing for salmon the hard way.
It's the solitude and that ever-changing seascape, though, that brought Trevor Potts to Ardnamurchan. He's the only person to have recreated, unsupported, the marathon journey of Sir Ernest Shackleton to South Georgia from Elephant Island in 1916. In a replica of the twenty two foot boat used by Shackleton, Trevor made it across eight hundred miles of the world's most treacherous ocean.
Shackleton had then gone on to get help for his men by crossing South Georgia, unmapped at the time, and eventually, a year after the Endurance was crushed, he returned to Elephant Island to rescue the crew. All had survived their time in the Antarctic. Trevor himself returned to recreate that second part of Shackleton's mission in 2001. He now runs a study centre on Ardnamurchan.听
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