Meet the family reluctantly giving up their idyllic life in the
country’s remotest home.The festive season is here, and for Mick and
Joyce Simpson it brings mixed blessings.On the plus side, they don’t
have to worry about having too few mince-pies for surprise visitors —
for there has only once been an unexpected knock on their door in the
past 30 years, and that was a lost hiker.Then again, they had better
remember to buy brandy butter for the Christmas pudding, because they
can’t exactly nip out to the corner shop.Just to reach the nearest
grocery store they must clamber into their waders and oilskins, walk
down to the edge of the choppy loch below the house, row out to their
fishing boat, sail four miles across the water to their waiting car, and
then drive for some 40 miles along a parlous single-track road: a
round-trip that takes at least four hours.Then, at the end of this
marathon, they have to haul grocery-filled carrier bags up a pebble
beach, through a field strewn with old shrimping pots and buoys, and
over a meandering stream. By now, you will have gathered, the Simpsons
live some way off the beaten track. So far off it, in fact, that their
120-year-old, stone-built cottage on the northernmost tip of the
Knoydart Peninsula — a heather-clad outcrop in the Scottish Highlands
known by some as ‘Britain’s last wilderness’ — is believed to be the
most remote postal address on our mainland.For more than three decades, the couple have survived and flourished in this far-flung outpost, raising two fine — though very different — daughters there, and living a Swiss Family Robinson existence filled with heart-warming (and occasionally sorrowful) memories.Joyce, aged 60, describes it as ‘an amazing place, with incredible peace and privacy’, and says she would gladly ‘stay for ever’. Her husband feels similarly attached.At 62, however, Mick is finding it increasingly difficult to chop logs for the fire, and catch the fish and grow the vegetables on which they subsist.He also suffers a health condition that requires him to be within driving distance of the hospital.Reluctantly, therefore, the couple have taken the momentous decision to move to what, for them, is a bustling community — the hamlet of Arnisdale, four miles across Loch Hourn, which has no shop but boasts a church and a tea-room (open in summer only) and has a population of 20.They are selling the isolated, two-bedroom cottage — named Cuillin after the magnificent hills which it faces — plus three acres of land, and have advertised it on the internet for £200,000.
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