Ken Smith has lived off the land in a cabin in the Scottish Highlands for nearly 40 years. For months at a time, his only human contact would be a hardy fell walker. So what happened when Robert Crampton went for a sleepover?
What some of us — all right, some men; all right, me — occasionally fantasise about, Ken Smith actually went ahead and did. In the spring of 1986, aged 38, he started building a cabin in this wood alongside Loch Treig, 25km east of Fort William in the Scottish Highlands. Smith has lived here ever since, albeit mostly in a second cabin after the first burnt down.
He has no mains electricity, gas or water. There is no mobile phone reception. The nearest settlement, a café at Corrour railway station, is a 10km walk. There is snow on the ground four or five months of the year. One winter, a 40 gallon drum of water froze solid outside Smith’s door. In those dark months, he can go weeks without seeing a soul. Even in this largely empty countryside, where isolation is the norm, Treig is known as “the lonely loch”.
Just those bare facts alone cured me of any lingering envy of his lifestyle, even before I’d stepped off the train at Corrour on Rannoch Moor, a location so bleak they used it to film the scene in Trainspotting where the lads decide on a day out in the country. The midges and humidity finished the job. Maybe I’d fancy Smith’s anchorite life for a week in spring or autumn, if good weather could be guaranteed. After that, I’d be talking to myself and counting the days.
The dense, tangled wood around Smith’s place — boggy, pathless, slippery, alive with insects, every step a potential twisted ankle— reminded me of spending a night on a Belizean island 12 years ago. I enjoyed the visit to Smith’s more, however, because I had a cracking curry for dinner, human company and a solid roof over my head. Also, there aren’t any crocodiles in Scotland. But I couldn’t hack it by myself. I once went to France and lived alone for ten days, supposedly to write a book. I ended up inhaling thrillers and playing a lot of darts to while away the boredom.
Smith has now written a memoir of his life, half of it spent among these pines. It’s been a tough existence. And also, he insists, a happy and rewarding one. It is also, as I discovered when I went north to meet him on a spectacular Saturday earlier this month, an existence that will soon come to an end.
Smith’s health, following colorectal cancer, at least two strokes, a fall and a head injury sustained by a falling log pile, is poor. Meniscus trouble means he walks painfully and slowly, refusing to take anti-inflammatories. And this is a man who not long ago thought nothing of a 28km round-trip hike to stock up on food, the return leg completed under a heavy pack. His hearing isn’t great. Neither is his eyesight. At 50kg, he is thin verging on underweight. His memory isn’t what it was. After a hard life, he looks an old 75.
With the sun shining and pals regularly stopping and delivering food, Smith can just about manage. But I don’t think he is robust enough to endure another winter in this fastness. Over my 24 hours in his company, I had the strong impression I was witnessing the end of something. Local social services are aware of his frailty. After a hospital stay in 2020, they decided, on balance, that he was just about well enough to stay put, prioritising emotional over physical health. The same call followed another stay in Belford Hospital, Fort William, last November. I’m not sure the authorities would say the same now. Aside from anything, he owns a chainsaw, a chip pan and a rifle (possibly — he won’t say if he’s still got his).
His home — three cabins almost enclosing a rough square of garden — has a melancholy, claustrophobic feel, exacerbated by the lack of any view of the utterly spectacular loch just 45 metres away (and 10m below us). To live here and turn your back on that beauty feels sad.
His book is called The Way of the Hermit. That word conjures images of a holy man, a prophet, in a cave in the wilderness, alone not for weeks, but decades. Smith is in the wilderness all right, or as close as you can get in these islands. But he isn’t either messianic or misanthropic. His patch of land boasts two guest cabins, in which he hosts regular visitors. “We’ve had a few good parties out here,” he chuckles.
The night I stayed over, Smith’s co-author, the broadcaster and naturalist Will Millard, was also there, along with his wife, Emma. Millard hasn’t seen his subject since last summer, and is shocked, both at his physical decline and the disarray in which he finds the once shipshape home. “He hasn’t planted any veg, the soft fruit trees have disappeared and there doesn’t seem to be much firewood split,” Millard tells me. We later discover that his various fuel dumps of logs dotted around the woods are either bare or threadbare. He hasn’t done his regular evacuation of the cesspit below the primitive outdoor loo. Not good.
Smith also seemed to be running down his food and booze supplies. He used to have a larder packed with tins and a score of demijohns at various stages of fermentation. Not any more. Another worrying development, Millard tells me, is that he seems to have ceased keeping the meticulous handwritten records — of wildlife, of stores, of weather conditions — that he had previously maintained since childhood. A skilful angler, he hasn’t been able to fish for a year or more. Nor does he seem to pursue his talent for photography any longer. He still reads voraciously, mind you. Many surfaces are covered with stacks of True Crime and How It Works magazines. He also reads the many fan letters he receives, brought over every few weeks by John, an ultramarathon runner in Fort William.
Besides the three of us, another guest, Peter, 63, over from his home in Fife, is staying too. “I first met Ken in the bothy at Staoineag many years ago,” Peter — a keen fell walker — recalls. “He was a wild man, with this huge beard and long hair. He said, ‘You’re the first people I’ve met in three months.’ " Peter and his companions, exhausted from their trek to the remote bothy, fell asleep. “When we woke up, he’d cut his hair and trimmed his beard. ‘Because I’ve got visitors,’ he said.”
These old-school good manners go to show that, despite appearances, Smith isn’t any sort of counterculture radical. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but he didn’t swear, not once. He has no interest in politics. His lifestyle isn’t any sort of statement. He doesn’t even profess any environmental agenda, beyond being off-grid, loving wildlife and the great outdoors, not owning much stuff and refusing to engage with “civilisation” as most of us know it. He makes occasional reference to “the rat race” but isn’t polemical or proselytising, either in his book or in person. Nor is he cantankerous or curmudgeonly. Rather, he’s a gentle soul. An introvert, certainly, a loner, but quite a long way from a grumpy old man.
And yet, he’s no longer as genial as his friends and the helpful staff at Corrour station — where a new portrait of the local celebrity graces the wall — recall that he once was. When a stray hiker appears seeking directions on Saturday afternoon, Smith curtly tells him, “This is private land.” Since a documentary about him aired on BBC Scotland in 2021, he also gets a stream of well-wishers dropping by. “I don’t like it,” he says. “They bring their dogs and I don’t like them. I’m a gardener.”
Millard tells me that throughout the many visits he made researching the book, Smith was always a solicitous host, hospitable yet fiercely self-sufficient. Whereas now, Millard reveals on Sunday morning, “I’ve just made him a cup of tea for the first time ever.” He also submits, reluctantly, to his friends’ insistence that they split some logs to replenish his supplies. Even in this sultry 25C heat, he gets through a lot of fuel, the burner in the main cabin stoked to sauna-style levels, the door kept shut because otherwise he feels the chill.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Born in Derbyshire to a working-class family, he’s still got a nicely dry northern sense of humour. He tells me, for instance, that he’s got a smart suit in one of his cupboards. How come you’ve got a suit, I ask. “For when I need to wear one,” he replies, unanswerably. He threatens to get his ukulele down off its peg by his bunk and play it “badly”. In those moments, his clear blue eyes twinkling, cosy in our armchairs by the stove as the midges wreak havoc outside, Smith is great company.
Millard had suggested that should I want to bring a gift, Lucozade, Jaffa Cakes and, top of the list, cans of beer, nothing fancy, would be appropriate. They go down well. A few no-frills ales into the evening, he sings a couple of old music-hall ditties.
Having left school at 15 in the early Sixties, by the time he hit 31 he had grown desperate to avoid spending the rest of his youth labouring on building sites. Smith’s mum, to whom he was close, died suddenly in 1979. He wanted out. He saved hard and set off with a friend, Roy, for the Yukon. There, in the vast emptiness of northern Canada, he caught not the wandering but the wilderness, bug. Which is rarer. We all know people who keep moving around the world even into old age. Not so many of us are familiar with those who settle in the middle of nowhere and stay for almost 40 years.
And yet, if his Canadian adventures confirmed Smith’s desire for solitude, his need to lose himself, to insulate himself from the risks that attend frequent close human interaction, was triggered by a horrible episode that befell him a few years before boarding the plane heading west. In October 1974, still living, working and socialising in his native Derbyshire, this sensitive 26-year-old was the victim of a vicious unprovoked attack by a gang of thugs in the street. He decided then, as he tells Lizzie MacKenzie, the local film-maker who shot the documentary about him, “that this is a wicked world”. I think it’s possible that Smith’s reclusiveness was and is a response to that attack, an extended symptom of untreated PTSD.
The assault was way worse than a late-night punch-up. The boots and fists put Smith in a coma for three and a half weeks. He was signed off work for a further nine months while he recovered. But recover he did, physically at any rate. “The doctors said I would never speak again or walk again or write again,” he recalls. “But I did.” Emotionally, however, the impact endured. “I decided I would never live on anyone’s terms but my own,” he says. It is hard not to conclude that part of the motivation for the way he has lived his life was, paradoxically, a desire to minimise risk.
That has not always been possible. The backwoods life is no Garden of Eden. Living semi-rough attracts its share of the violent, the deranged, the addicted. “One bloke was a right pest,” he tells me. “He moved into the railway hut up the hill and he used to come here with a knife.” From what I can gather, this man, who has now decamped elsewhere, took a fancy to Smith’s cabin. “He said he wanted to be able to stop anywhere he liked. I said, ‘What, even Buckingham Palace?’ He said, ‘Yeah, even Buckingham Palace.’ He was blimmin’ crazy. Not a very nice man.”
On Sunday morning over mugs of tea I ask him if he has any regrets. “Not. A. Little. One,” he replies, enunciating carefully and looking me right in the eye to send the message. How about romance? Kids? Would he not have enjoyed a family? “There was one girl I really liked, but then I went to Canada and never really went home again. I never wanted children; they anchor you for life. I wanted to be free of all them commitments. A lot of people do. They tell me in the letters they write.”
Like most of us, he would like to leave this world sat in his favourite armchair, gazing into his fire. But he talks as if he has become reconciled to that being an unlikely scenario. “I’ll go ill again,” he says. “My body will let me down eventually. I’ll go into a home.” What will he miss? “Probably nothing.” Nature? “Not really. It won’t make any difference to me.” Millard tells me later that Smith has never spoken in such terms before. In the documentary two years ago he says, “I’ll stop here till my final days.”
In the meantime, he is much loved locally. The former landowner gave him permission to build back in 1986 and the current trustees of the estate (chief among them Lisbet Rausing, the Tetra Pak heiress, environmentalist and philanthropist) look out for his welfare, supplying him with an emergency locator device he can use to call for help.
Wherever he spends his final years, in death he will return to his treasured wilderness, to a burial spot he has had consecrated on the shores of the loch near his cabin. There, the solitude he sought in life should be guaranteed.
The Way of the Hermit by Ken Smith with Will Millard is published by Macmillan.
Written by: Robert Crampton
© The Times of London
