Focus: The dream of escape

As the dwindling community on Iona appeals for a young family to move there, what is the lure of island life?

THIS small ad ran on the property pages of the Oban Times last week: "House to let on Iona with B&B potential. Other work available. Only families with young children need apply." It was a quiet plea for help from a community that is staring extinction in the face.

The tiny Scottish island is still in mourning for the four young men who drowned in the boating tragedy of Sunday, 13 December. Ally Dougal, David Kirkpatrick, Logie MacFadyen and Robert Hay were the only young men living on the island. Their deaths not only brought anguish for their families, but cast doubt on the community's future. In the mid-19th century, 500 people had their homes on Iona. Today, the figure is 102. Forty per cent are aged over 60.

The ad, however, has provided a much-needed ray of hope. Applications are pouring in. "There's been a lot of interest in the matter," says Iona's community councillor Evelyn MacPhail. "We need young families badly. Our primary school is threatened with closure. If that goes it would be like losing the heart of the island. The loss of the four boys has made things more difficult. But we're a very mutually supportive community." It is, no doubt, the promise of a stake in such a community that has inspired the strong response to the ad.

ISLANDS such as Iona may form little strongholds of the kind of social intimacy now rare in urban areas, but they are also centres of poverty and unemployment. For every inhabitant who feels offshore living is a retreat from a hectic world there are others who see their lot as one of confinement. Marlon Brando might have chosen to live on his private island hideaway, but Alcatraz inmates, Napoleon Bonaparte and innumerable leprosy sufferers endured a similar isolation that was far less splendid. Island living, however, continues to exert a powerful attraction over those in search of a slice of Utopia.

A short ferry ride across the Sound of Iona is the much larger Isle of Mull. Here, thanks to a burgeoning tourist trade, there is a regular influx of newcomers, and a population steady at around 1,200. Two weeks ago Stephen and Melba Ashworth and their six-year-old daughter Sarah arrived to begin a new life. They shut up their convenience store in Devon and took over the management of the Glenforsa Hotel, near the village of Salen. "I've lived in towns most of my life," says Stephen, originally from Preston. "But the sense of community is stronger here. We're not here just to run a business. We want to make a contribution." As well as receiving a warm welcome from their neighbours, the Ashworths have already seen the more melancholy side of island life: last week, they hosted a wake for a man who drowned in the Sound.

Derek McAdam was a financial journalist on the Sunday Express when he and his wife Kathy decided to move to Mull 23 years ago. "I came here because I was fed up with commuting. I travelled from Haywards Heath to London Bridge every day for 20 years, and I certainly wanted a change from that." The McAdams, who also make their living from the tourist trade, are now firmly integrated into the community, and have three young grandchildren living on the island.

However, it takes a certain kind of personality to make the adjustment from mainland to island life. "When you live here you just have to accept things as they are," says Evelyn MacPhail. "You have to be very self-sufficient, because if you're not you'll have a terrible time. And you have to be accepted by the community." Newcomers who arrive to work in the hotel business can use the sociability of their job to accelerate the process of acceptance. For others, who come to occupy properties in more remote areas, existence can be extremely lonely.

Islands are paradoxical territories. Their separateness allows them to embody our aspirations toward Edenic contentment (Fantasy Island, Bounty ads, Desert Island Discs), and our anxieties about the atavistic or cruel lifestyles that such isolation might encourage (The Island of Dr Moreau; The Camp on Blood Island). Nobody can pester you with trivia in such a remote place, but nor can anybody hear you scream. That's why film-makers and writers have seen them as homes for eccentrics and monsters such as King Kong, Polyphemus the Cyclops and Captain Nemo.

They also lend themselves to other metaphorical uses. In Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe employs the story of his hero's progress from shipwreck victim to comfortable, self-sufficient landowner to offer an allegory of western economic development. (Just as the island-bound British nation had done, Crusoe begins as a farmer, fights wars against invaders, and - with the help of Friday - establishes a class system.) Lord of the Flies and The Admirable Crichton demonstrate how island populations can develop their own social structures which may be complete inversions of the situation at home. In Golding's novel, a gang of marooned children revert to savage tribalism. In Barrie's comedy, the upper-class castaways find themselves ruled by their butler when circumstances force a realignment of power along meritocratic lines. And when the Famous Five went to Kirrin Island, they fetched up on the shores of an adult-free world where they could engage in all sorts of adventuring without anyone calling them in for tea.

THE BBC plans to recruit 30 volunteers to live on a solitary Scottish island for a year as part of an ambitious experiment. Lion Television, a company set up by Jeremy Mills (responsible for Airport and Hotel), have been commissioned to produce Castaway, a docusoap which will follow the lives of the selected inhabitants, and chart the rise (or fall) of their community. Public appeals for volunteers will be made in a fortnight's time, but applications are already coming in.

The price-tag for the island of pounds 1m, suggested by the Sun, is probably way over the top. If you have a fantasy about retreating to a private island, buying one may not be as expensive as you thought. Real estate companies such as Vladi Private Islands in Hamburg may be able to sort you out for less than pounds 3,000. Last year, Clawinch Island, off the coast of Co Longford, sold for pounds 175,000 - an unremarkable price for a suburban semi in the south of England. At the luxury end of the market, Pacific Island Investments offers celebrity homes entirely surrounded by water. Current deals include a 460-acre former plantation in the South Pacific ($660,000), and a 5,434-acre atoll in French Polynesia, with its own interior lagoon ($12.2m).

For the Isle of Mull's most recent arrivals, however, retreat and seclusion are not part of the plan. "It's not isolated here," says Stephen Ashworth. "It's difficult to say if we'll stay here for ever, but we certainly want to put down deep roots. I'm not interested in isolation. I'm interested in integration."