Sunday 28 October 2012

Blair and Barnhill

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


28 October

Many will know that George Orwell = Eric Blair. Perhaps fewer know that, partly out of fear of personal retribution from Stalin following publishing Animal Farm, Orwell went to live for several long stretches at Barnhill (the estate shown), in the white property in the photograph.

Barnhill is located close to the more northerly tip of the wild and remote Isle of Jura, one of The Western Isles.

In the end, probably because he had tuberculosis before he went back there for the last time, he had to be taken off the island, and he died in London, but he had been working on the novel that, by the expedient of reversing the final digits, became Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is not the first time that I have taken shots of Barnhill from as close as, unless one is renting the property, one can get from the private road, but I will have to look out those earlier images...



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