Yours for £500k! A Scots isle where you can get marooned for days

There is something splendid about standing on top of the rugged, lichened, 89-acre kingdom of Mullagrach; tasting the salt on my lips from the sea spray, watching the cormorants swirl, listening to the skylarks sing and knowing there’s nothing but water between me and the North Pole.

Oh, how very wonderful it must be to be rich. Because this glorious spot — a teeny island, all cliffs and coves, crags and shags and flowering sedums, and perched right on the northernmost tip of the Summer Isles — is up for sale. And it could be mine, or yours, for half a million pounds.

Plus a bit extra for a sturdy boat to make the 35-minute crossing from the Old Dorney Harbour on the mainland. And another £395,000, if I fancied snapping up Mullagrach House back on the mainland, to have somewhere comfy and cosy to wait, and wait, and maybe wait a bit longer, for the sea to be calm enough to cross to my very own island.

Because, as always, there’s a teeny-weeny catch — this gorgeous Highlands and Islands utopia is not brilliantly accessible.

In fact, at the moment, the only way to get on to it is to climb a rickety-looking series of very vertical, rusty ladders, from a bobbing boat. Until, that is, the wind gets up and the swell reaches a metre high — which happens alarmingly often, thanks to the vigorous northerlies here — and then it’s too dangerous.

Which means that, as well as being very rich and somewhat agile, any potential purchaser will need to be extremely patient, too — even just to view the island.

Phiddy Robertson, of Galbraith estate agency, who has sold a few islands in her time and is handling the sale, puts it like this: ‘On this island, nature is in charge. So if nature decides that the wind is too wild or the swell is too great, then you can’t land. Which is a very humbling and grounding experience and makes it so special.’

She’s not joking. We waited nearly three weeks while our lovely boatman Steve Husband, 63, checked his trusty weather-forecasting app — Windy.app — on his phone, updating us every few days. ‘Too windy… too much swell… not for the foreseeable… maybe next week — I’ll find you some dolphins…’

But finally on Wednesday, after a three-hour drive from Inverness admiring the lochs and wild lupins, we were scudding across the water in Steve’s orange boat in the bright sunshine towards the island.

We had strict instructions from the vendor, Chris Bown, that this was to be a day trip only. Because, well, there’s always a risk with Mullagrach that, even when you finally get there, the wind will change and leave you stranded.

One previous owner became marooned here with his son for the best part of a week.

The swell was too high, winds too fierce and the pair were left cowering in the only man-made cover on the island, an unpleasant plastic shelter, until they were finally rescued by the coastguard.

‘They were stuck for days,’ says Steve. ‘You wouldn’t have wanted to be in that thing for a minute. It had no windows and it stank.’

Not surprisingly, within hours of them staggering back onto dry land, the island was up for sale. ‘They weren’t ever going back,’ says Steve.

Chris, who bought it back in 2006, tells me his longest stay was four days. ‘A bit longer than I’d planned,’ he says, though he had at least built a cabin by then — more of which later. ‘You just have to go with it, but it’s a very special place.’

And as we haul ourselves up a rusty ladder (constructed by Steve) and climb out onto the grass, it feels almost shockingly pristine and perfect. As if the volume has been cranked up on our senses.

The smells of heather and bracken. The turf, so green and springy and soft it feels like a fairy mattress.

The taste of salt and fish and honeysuckle in the air. The swoosh of the waves on the rocks below. The wind. The loud caw, caw, caw of the cormorants and the sweet, sweet song of the skylark.

‘Sometimes the birds are so bloody loud you can’t hear yourself think,’ says Steve.

At the last count, there were at least 22 kinds of bird — including great skuas, kittiwakes, shags, ­fulmars and geese — as well as two resident otters and more than 95 species of plant or flower, from juniper to orchids, flowering moss to campion.

And on a good day, with a sharp eye, you can spot seals, porpoises, dolphins and minke whales.

‘It’s a great spot for watching the Northern Lights and, if you look really hard, you might see the North Pole…’ smiles Steve.

Not forgetting, of course, Chris’s cosy ‘high-quality, low environmental impact’ cabin, which was made in Switzerland out of super-strong cross-laminated timber.

It was erected on the island — mainly by Steve, by the sound of it — in 2016 and has everything you could possibly need: log burner, solar-powered fridge, hob, compost loo, two bunks with a stack of carefully curated reading material, and a very welcoming cupboard full of wine, beer, gin and emergency food.

The only thing it doesn’t have is Wi-Fi — and while Chris says it would be possible to have it, he clearly can’t think of anything worse.

For him, buying the island was always about respecting its unspoilt wildness by doing as little to it as possible.

Of course, if you really wanted to, you could make a few changes.

Development would be strictly limited, but if you had money coming out of your ears, you could clear the boulders in the teeny bay and put in a landing jetty.

Or just forget about boats altogether and slap a helipad on the bouncy moss and chopper in and out from Inverness Airport.

Though both Steve and Phiddy sound horrified at the thought. ‘That would be completely missing the point,’ they say.

‘This is not about fast living or ­convenience. It challenges you and brings you back in touch with something more honest,’ adds Phiddy. ‘Just enjoy it.’

On a bright, sunny summer’s day, it’s hard to imagine anywhere more perfect. But, according to Steve, that’s the trap.

Yes, the summers are long and light — around midsummer you can sit outside and still read a book at 11 o’clock at night — and fantastically energising, if prone to midges. But they’re also unreliable.

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