Since leaving art school in 1979 I’ve wanted to build a house and over many years have visited many sites, real and virtual but either they weren’t right or I didn’t have the wherewithal.

Circumstances change and during the summer of 2018 Tash and I were looking at a handful of sites on-line and asked two trusted and interested friends to have a look at one or maybe two, if they had time, on their way to and from Islay. They came back enthusing, it was perfect. “You just have to see it”. The situation, the neighbours, the track to the slipway… Neighbours? Slipway? They’d visited the wrong site…

Two weeks later, five hundred miles north we were there, on our way to a sea kayaking trip.

We visited the intended site first; unmistakably it was wrong. Dark was gathering so we drove past the recommended plot and camped by the shore, owls hooting. In the morning we inspected the plot, or what we assumed was the plot. It wasn’t marked out and it sloped the wrong way (not suited to a passive house) but there was a view of the sea loch and the lumpy terrain was being colonised by the neighbouring native broad-leafed woodland. Something stirred.

Definitely maybe.

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