Women Who Travel Podcast: Life on a Windswept Scottish Island

12.10.2023 - 14:57 / cntraveler.com / Lale Arikoglu

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When Tamsin Calidas left London to live on a croft in the Scottish Hebrides, she was idealistic and totally ignorant about farming. Years later and after facing and overcoming significant struggles, she feels in harmony with nature, wildlife, and the beauty of her island. Calidas sits down with host Lale Arikoglu to chat about working the rugged landscape and her new book, I Am an Island.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi. I'm Lale Arikoglu, back with another episode of Women Who Travel. We often chat on the show to intrepid explorers and at other times to women who start new lives far from home. Today's story combines exploration with a bold move from London to a tiny island in the Scottish Hebrides. Tamsin Calidas has lived in a remote cottage for over 19 years. She's experienced tragedy, injury, and isolation, but also the regeneration power of nature, all of which is charted in her recent book I Am an Island.

Tamsin Calidas: I Am an Island is... It's just using the island, honestly, as, as the place where I'm telling the story from, but it- it's really, um, a metaphor for all of us in life. It's the human experiences that we each meet and which test and, um, what do you turn to when that tide draws back and you're really left alone and, and, and really facing your own existence and, and what it's all about and why am I here and what am I being called to do, knowing that that tide will return, that everything in life is circular, but asking it in that moment of profound challenge, "Who and what am I going to fall back on when everything that I would normally rely on or depend on, even the most basic structures, have all been pulled away?"

[singing]

LA: The island is off the northwest coast of Scotland. It's 15 miles long, sparsely populated, and it only got electricity in the 1970s.

TC: There's a lovely map at the front of the book which shows the contours of the great panoramic of mountains that surrounds the island and which makes it quite so visually spectacular and with such a, um, diverse abundance of wildlife, so it is a small island that's set in the sea with mountains in view right the way around with far-reaching views to the outer islands, so we're up in the west, northwest, and the great glen is visible that's like a very ancient volcanic kind of fissure, and so the island itself is an anomaly in its own landscape. It's this incredible limestone little outspur in quite barren ground around, and that also makes for