The fascinating history of Scotland's most debauched island
“It was more a full-blooded football match than a wedding to be honest. The last guests staggered home after a fortnight,” cracks Chainsaw Dave as he welcomes me ashore. Pointing back across the aquarium-clear waters of Loch Scresort to the ferry he says, “that’s rum heading the other way from one of Scotland’s newest distilleries”. It’s an apposite arrival on a wild and wildly beautiful island notorious for nefarious parties. And home to easily the most outlandish castle in Scotland.
Rum seems an unlikely setting for debauchery: stoic and elemental, forged by some of the planet’s oldest rocks, Lewisian gneiss and Torridonian sandstone, its mountainous heart soaring around an eroded volcano. Just because Danny MacAskill hasn’t yet hefted his bike to tackle them doesn’t make Rum’s brooding Cuillin Mountains a poor relation to Skye’s namesake just across the dolphin- and whale-kissed waters.
The most famous residents were the outrageous Bulloughs – we’ll come to their Edwardian excess soon – but man and Rum go back a long way. Back before the 400 residents were replaced by sheep in the 1820s. Back long before the Vikings made such an impression that Norse place names survive eight centuries later. Back not just to Neolithic times, but Mesolithic – Rum has some of Scotland’s earliest known traces of man.
Following a failed attempt to corral Rum into a giant deer park, John Bullough – a Lancashire industrialist – bought the island in 1888 with his own grand designs. Rum saw him off too. John died in 1891, but his son George made his mark like no one before. Nor since. The eldest son was already shrouded in scandal with rumours his welcome to the family for his stepmother had been an adulterous one. George was a man who sailed around the world on his private steamship, Rhouma, and added a Sir to his name thanks to the knighthood King Edward VII bestowed for diverting Rhouma to South Africa to serve during the Boer Wars. Again there are suggestions it was more to do with salacious Royal intrigue.
What would this globetrotting adventurer want with an island just a touch over eight miles north to south, less than eight miles wide? The answer was simple – everything. Bullough ravaged Rum into a private playground that galloped off with his £300,000 a year inheritance as fast as the thoroughbreds he raced at Ascot.
Rum became known as the ‘Forbidden Island’. Not content with Rum stone, he commissioned red sandstone from Arran, along with 250,000 tonnes of fertile Ayrshire soil. Over 300 men worked on Kinloch Castle for three years. The result? A flattened wedding cake of a mock baronial pile, a riot of windows and crenellated roof, that could scarcely jar more with its rugged Hebridean setting. Distasteful, but spectacular nonetheless – and we’ve not even been inside yet.
Ostentatious would be riotously understating the interior. We’re talking an orchestrion that summoned guests to dinner in a main hall awash with the heads of stags shot by Bullough and his pals on Rum’s hills, a massive bronze Japanese monkey-eating eagle and head-on tiger rugs looking as surprised as the day they were shot. Air-conditioning expelled cigar smoke, windows were an embryonic form of double glazing, heat emanated from marble-topped radiators.
Kinloch was one of Scotland’s first places to get electricity – a legion of glowing lamps lit the billiards room. Guests played croquet, tennis and golf, or strolled grounds tended by over a dozen gardeners – who were later packed off by Bullough to the trenches. A Japanese garden offered brief respite before a brace of heated pools, one stocked with turtles, the other? Alligators.
Many of the extravagant oddball exhibits linger; frozen in time. Startling photos depict George’s travels; a nude portrait of George’s wife, Monica, hangs outside her bedroom. The epicentre of the parties (some alleged orgies) that were the talk of the Hebrides was the ballroom, its ceiling lit by a galaxy of electric stars. Windows were small and high to deter voyeurs. Even the orchestra played behind a curtain that was never lifted. No servants entered – food, port and Madeira wine arriving via a serving screen and dumb waiter.
Some talk of Gaiety Girls from Glasgow; others of Bullough’s declared love of opium, and his bisexuality. Bullough is said to have insisted his male builders wear kilts despite the midges – increasing their tobacco rations to cajole them. Bullough never discussed his sexuality, wise as homosexuality was illegal. What we do know is that husband and wife slept in different parts of Kinloch.
The debauched days of Kinloch came to a shuddering halt as the Edwardian Era was scythed down by the industrial warfare of the First World War. Peering in the windows today it’s not hard to conjure up those wild days. Not when you can still make out the grandiose rooms and Bullough’s bizarre international bric-a-brac. As I wander around a building nature is doing her best to reclaim, I’m stuck in a time warp trying to sear the image of taxidermy sea eagles out of my head. I hear a motor engine, half expecting it to be Sir George coming to investigate. He is the only person ever to have had a road accident on Rum, on the roads he ordered.
You won’t crash your car on Rum – you’re not allowed to bring it. Dave Beaton is as he lives in a community that stoically survives in the shadow of Kinloch Castle. He has multiple roles of course: odd-jobs man, goods transporter (from ferry to the only shop), and wood sculptor – hence the chainsaw moniker. He talks fondly of his wedding in Kinloch when it was a hotel: “We brought a proper party back to the old dame”.
Then part of Kinloch Castle became surely the UK’s grandest youth hostel. Now nominally on sale for £1, you’d need at least an estimated £20 million to restore it. And persuade Nature Scotland that it should be yours. The community is being consulted. “Today it’s just sitting there growing old disgracefully, the big debate here is what to do with it,” Beaton says, supping a shot of Askival rum from the distillery that has just started production on Rum. Bullough would have been horrified: he changed the island’s name to Rhum to divert boozy associations.
When Lady Bullough finally sold Rum in 1957 it became a National Nature Reserve, attention turning to preservation of flora and fauna, rather than man. The red deer population exploded, sea eagles were successfully reintroduced, and Highland cows, goats and ponies ran wild. One of the world’s largest colonies of Manx shearwaters shrouds Rum in summer.
Things may finally be looking up for man on Rum too. In summer 2020 a competition seeking inhabitants for a quartet of new homes attracted over 3,000 notes of interest. The families are now bedding in. Rum has seen initiatives before, but everyone I speak to agrees with the shopkeeper who bluntly tells me: “New blood is welcome; we need it for Rum to survive”.
I hike to Harris, where John and George Bullough lie entombed. Once over 30 buildings bustled with men, women and children in Rum’s main settlement before they were shipped off to Canada. It’s dead to man now. A friend of Sir George’s apparently quipped his father’s mausoleum resembled a public toilet – Bullough had it dynamited. Then built the wildly incongruous temple I find, its 18 columns neither Ionian or Corinthian, just plain ridiculous; a Greek meteor bashed down in the Hebrides.
Sir George Bullough banned visitors from Rum. Today he’d probably be horrified to find the population growing from 22 in 2001 to almost 50. And they’ve reverted to the original name: George would now officially be the ‘Baronet of Rum’ – a fitting title for the man who fashioned the excesses in every way of Kinloch Castle. A moment of Hebridean sun warms my face as something startles the deer on the shoreline. Maybe it is Sir George Bullough turning in his grave. Or perhaps just allowing himself a wry smile.
The details: Alastair Scott’s ‘Eccentric Wealth: The Bulloughs of Rum’ digs deep, working to debunk some of the Bullough’s scandals, while unearthing others. See isleofrum.com for more information, plus Telegraph Travel's complete guide to the best hotels in Scotland.
