Forecast: Wind, Rain, Occasional Sun

A remote Scottish island shows the way

When I was a kid growing up in Scotland, my father used to sing me songs from the Hebrides. His favorite was "The Skye Boat Song," with its wistful call for the return of Bonnie Prince Charlie: "Carry the lad that's born to be king/Over the sea to Skye." The island names, too, had the power to fire a child's imagination. The most enticing of all were the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides: Rhum (with a silent h), Eigg (silent i), Canna, and Muck. From the time of earliest memory I was resolved to see these places, but it took Mike Goldwater's photographs of Eigg, with its new, all-renewable energy scheme, finally to get me there.

Let's be clear: we're not talking about the Hoover Dam here, or Cape Wind. Eigg's wind farm, solar panels, and three small hydro dams generate a maximum of almost 150 kilowatts, I was told by John Booth, who is, to speak metaphorically, the human dynamo driving the island's energy program. But that doesn't diminish its significance. Other small island communities, and not only in Scotland, are beginning to take notice of what Eigg has accomplished.

From the tiny harbor of Arisaig on Scotland's west coast, it took an hour to reach the island on a frail ferry named the Shearwater. The passengers were a mixed bunch: island residents returning home, a few early-season tourists, a pale young hiker with a prodigious set of dreadlocks, a gaggle of serious bird-watchers glassing the whitecaps for the slashing dive of a Manx Shearwater, the Atlantic seabird from which the vessel takes its name. The seas were heavy. Only one person lost her breakfast as the little boat pitched and heaved in the swell, but several others had a gray-green pallor by the time we landed.

A little welcoming committee from the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust was waiting to greet me at the pier head. A mix of Hebridean natives and incomers from the mainland, they're best described as "Characters," with a capital C. Maggie Fyffe, an Englishwoman of formidable energy, came to the island more than 30 years ago after making the trek along the old Hippie Trail to Afghanistan. Marie Carr, who runs the Kildonan guesthouse, a plain eighteenth-century building on a low promontory near the harbor, grew up at Laig Farm, overlooking a sheltered crescent of white sand on Eigg's northwest corner. John Booth had a variegated career in Oxfordshire, working successively as a biochemist, the owner of a company that refurbished cranes, and a consultant on industrial relations, before he bought an old farmhouse here in 2001.

From the pier Booth took me to see the island's wind farm, a row of four modest 50-foot turbines whirring away in the stiff southerly breeze blowing across the channel that separates Eigg from its smaller neighbor, Muck. He is a voluble man, self-taught in the intricacies of renewable energy and fluent in its jargon of installed capacity, rated output percentages, and variable insolation values.

All around us, ewes and their spring lambs nibbled at the grass. Beyond them were the tumbled dry-stone walls of a hamlet called Grulin, depopulated in the 1850s when the crofters who lived there were evicted by the island's landlord and set off for new lives in North America. Above us a sheer-sided stack of columnar pitchstone lava called An Sgurr, a kind of Hebridean Devils Tower, rose 1,300 feet into the clear June sky. At its summit were the remains of a fort from the pre-Christian era. Down below, where the Atlantic breakers crashed against the rocks, Booth pointed out a path leading to the Massacre Cave, where, with the single exception of an old woman, the entire population of the island, some 350 souls, was wiped out during the vicious clan wars of the 1500s. Eigg is a small place (12 square miles, current population 85, give or take), but there's a lot of history here.

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