Rùm
|
View towards the Rùm Cullin from Harris Mausoleum. |
Rùm (a
Scottish Gaelic name which is often
anglicised to
Rum) is one of the
Small Isles, in
Lochaber,
Highland,
Scotland. For several decades the name was spelt
Rhum, which was coined in the
1900s by the former owner, Sir
George Bullough, because he did not relish the idea of having the title
Laird of Rum. It is inhabited by about 30 people.
Rùm was historically the possession of the
MacLeans of
Coll. The island was
cleared of its human population for
sheep farming in
1826. The population at this time was 450. 300 were cleared and had passage paid to
Canada that year, with another 100-plus the following year. The sheep venture was a failure and the island then passed in the
1840s to the
Marquess of Salisbury, who converted it to a
sporting estate. Although retaining many of the sheep he reintroduced the
red deer which had become
extinct on the island in the
18th century.
The island had a number of short-term tenants until George Bullough's father
John Bullough (a self-made millionaire cotton machinery manufacturer from
Accrington,
Lancashire,
England) acquired the island in the late
1870s and continued the island's use as a sporting estate. By the time of Sir George Bullough, who built the castle in
1900, there were about 100 people employed on the estate. This included 14 under gardeners in the extensive grounds which included a nine-hole
golf course,
tennis and
squash courts,
greenhouses,
turtle ponds,
aviary etc.
The
granite island was bought by the
Nature Conservancy Council (now
Scottish Natural Heritage) in
1957 to be a
National Nature Reserve. It contains the
Edwardian Kinloch Castle dwelled in by the Bulloughs, made of
red sandstone from
Annan,
Dumfries and Galloway.
Rùm is now an important study site for research in
ecology. Its red deer population has been the subject of research for many years, recently under the leadership of
Tim Clutton-Brock. This work has been important in the development of
sociobiology and
behavioral ecology, particularly in relation to the understanding of
aggression through
game theory, i.e. the theory of the
evolutionarily stable strategy as developed by
John Maynard Smith.
The island came to widespread attention with the 1999 publication of the book
A Rum Affair by
Karl Sabbagh, a British writer and television producer. The book told of a long-running scientific controversy over the alleged discovery of certain plants on Rùm by botanist
John Heslop Harrison - discoveries that are now considered to be fraudulent. Heslop Harrison is widely believed to have placed many of these plants on the island himself to provide evidence for his theory about the geological development of the
Hebrides islands.
The main range of hills on Rùm are known as the
Cuillin. They are usually referred to as the
Rùm Cuillin, in order to distinguish them from the
Cuillin of
Skye. They are rocky peaks, similar in many ways to their better-known namesakes. Two of the Cuillin are classified as
Corbetts:
Askival and
Ainshval.
In the summer of 2002 a
reality TV show titled "Escape from Experiment Island" was filmed on the Island. This short-lived show (6 episodes) was produced by the
BBC in conjunction with the
Discovery Channel. The show was to piggyback on the success of Junkyard Wars by having the teams build vehicles to escape from the island.
* Karl Sabbagh,
A Rum Affair, London: Allen Lane, 1999
* John A. Love,
Rum: a landscape without figures, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001
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Photos*
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