Jura's unreal wildness

I'm writing this, as often, to work out what I think about something. It's our last day on the Isle of Jura and the others have gone for a walk leaving me with the log burner, a pot of coffee and a table with a stunning view over the Sound of Jura to Kintyre.

It's beautiful. That's what everyone keeps saying. Sweeping hillsides, the Paps rearing up in the background, sea eagles swooping over our heads, huge skies, incredible.

And yet I'm finding Jura hard to love. Is it me, or is it Jura?

Here's a nice piece of timing. As I wrote the line above, my son sent me a link to Tracey Ullman's sketch, 'You Woke?'. Tracey is leading group therapy for young people so woke that they can no longer have fun. Ouch.

But here's a thing. Jura is owned almost entirely by a very small group of people for whom it is a playground. One has created a private golf course, looked after by 25 staff, but played on by no one. Most of the rest of the island consists of a handful of private estates managed for deer stalking. While we have the right to roam, thanks to Scotland's access legislation, in fact if you pick a line across a hill there's every chance you'll come up against an impenetrable deer fence. The estates call the shots when it comes to where we can go. This is a very strange form of wilderness.

The deer eat everything: Jura's hills are bare of trees and shrubs because no shoot or sapling can survive such a concentration of deer: there's a 14-pointer stag in the garden, for goodness sake, and thousands across the island as a whole. We've met them everywhere we've been.

In the small folds of land around farms and houses, outside the deer estates, Jura is stunning, with ancient woodlands hanging with lichens and ferns. These parcels of land show just what Jura has lost, but could regain if the deer-stalkers did not determine the ecology of the land.

And yet, in the Jura Hotel, I asked where people work who live on the island, and those estates employ many people. The population is growing: six babies were born this year. Visitors come to see its strange bleakness. We are here to find peace on an island with only about 200 residents and one road, and expanses of unpopulated country. And we've found that.

Do I need to get over myself? Maybe. I'll make another coffee and check the sea for whales, but this is a weird place.