Buying a property is often a battle between head and heart: do you go for a sensible, practical place to live, or a dramatic and beautiful property that sets your heart aflutter every time you come home?
For our money — and most likely yours, too, if you're reading this story — the pull of the romantic will always win. And property doesn't get any more romantic than the utterly gorgeous Shuna Island, which is currently for sale via Sotheby's International Realty and Knight Frank for £5.5m.
Deserted white sand beaches and calm water make Loch Shuna popular for watersports.
Woodland, rough grazing and endless little bays dot Shuna.
Three miles long and a mile and a half wide, Shuna is part of a group called the Slate Islands in the Inner Hebrides, a collection which also includes Seil, Easdale, Luing and Torsa. Confusingly, there's also another Shuna Island away off to the north beyond Oban; online maps will point you to the other one first, but the Shuna that's for sale is the one at Loch Shuna. And that's a very good thing too, because this is the sort of Scottish island that has everything you could dream of.
There are glorious sandy beaches fringed by rocky coves that look like ideal for18th century smugglers hauling their booty ashore. There is wild open land beneath huge skies where golden eagles soar, and rippling waves where you'll see the porpoises dart and leap. There are ancient burial sites, a shipwreck, a notorious whirlpool — Corryvreckan — in the seas not far away. And, of course, there is a castle.
The castle was a labour of love was built just before the First World War, but has fallen into disrepair.
We say 'of course', but actually the castle is, relatively speaking, a new addition to Shuna. It was build 115 years ago by an adventurer called George Alexander MacLean Buckley, a New Zealander by birth who'd made a fortune in Australia, went on expeditions with Ernest Shackleton and saw the island as an ancestral home in the making. There are turrets, crenellations and battlements — this is the sort of fantasy castle you'd find in Ivanhoe,. It's clear that Buckley was an incurable romantic, so of course he loved it here.
Sunset on Shuna.
The castle apparently fell into disrepair in the 1980s and is in need of serious work — something which, subject to permissions, makes for an opportunity to turn the island into a unique tourist destination. There is already tourism here in any case, with a string of houses with names like 'The Garden House', 'Oakwood Cottage' and 'The Forge'.
In total there are 27 bedrooms-worth of accommodation able to sleep 52 people, of which Shuna Farmhouse has in recent years been the main residence of the island's owners, Viscountess Selby and her son Edward Gully, whose family have owned the place for eight decades.
A boat ride from the Shuna Island jetty back to the mainland takes only a few minutes.
Most of the island — over 600 acres — is made up of rough-grazing that sustains a large flock of 230 or so sheep, but there's also a good 300 acres of woodland and foreshore. It is, in other words, both island fantasy and going concern — and that's probably the best news of all about Shuna. Yes, it's dramatic and romantic and beautiful — but there's enough potential to suggest that this could be a place to buy with head as well as heart.
Shuna Island is for sale via Sotheby's International Realty and Knight Frank at £5.5 million.
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