Greenstreets on Easdale

First of all there’s the approach. This starts with the main A816 road from Lochgilphead to Oban. Riddled with potholes and bad repairs as it is, this must be the worst and most dangerously engineered road anywhere in Scotland.

There’s hardly a corner that’s not cambered the wrong way – most are chicanes, lurching from one 90 degree curve to the next, each throwing you outwards, many with edges directly overhanging steep drops. Every passenger thinks they’re in the hands of the worst driver. Cars come off the road Breathalysers are  not required. It’s the road that’s drunk.

Getting there

Seething with the risk and discomfort of this familiar nightmare, the landscape slowly soothes and distracts with its variety and magnificence: the wide freedoms of the ancient Kilmartin Glen, the lumpy hillscape, the great sea lochs of Melfort and Craignish, the little villages of Kilmelford and Kilninver and then – the B-road off to the west.

Dropping down slowly, sometimes on single track, a world of its own draws you in and away. The ski-jump of the glorious stone ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ at Clachan Seil delivers you to Seil, the first of the slate islands. As you drive on westwards there are glimpses of Balvicar Bay to the east, before…  you nearly come off the road for a very different reason than the corners of the A816.

It’s the view. A last hill to crest and a swinging right turn and there is cliffscape, seascape and a mad archipelago below you. The almost vertical slate cliifs lean out and over the little whitewashed, former quarrying township of Ellenabeich, on the edge of the mainland. A wall of cliff sweeps away in the north west – but that’s actually on the Isle of Mull across the Firth of Lorn.

Out in the Firth to the west, Garbh Eilean, the largest of the Garvellach islands, lies surreally, like a ship going down at the stern. Inshore of her is the green crag of Luing across the Cuan Sound. Between them are islets and lighthouses marking the entrance to the Sound of Luing and a collection of the fiercest of water features unknown to fashionable landscape gardeners.

Check out the Dorus Mhor, the Grey Dogs and the Corryvreckan and you’ll get the point.

Opposite Ellenabeich is Easdale island, almost joined to it but a world apart. Impossibly small to be inhabited, with a great angular lump of rock in the middle and, clustered on the small curving plain below it to the south west, a tightly packed collection of cottages – the community.

This is why we’re here. Easdale was a winner in the Scottish Gas Greenstreets competition, encouraging communities to develop communal energy efficient schemes. It’s having its second community consultation today (Sunday 31st January) to discuss insulation and energy generation.

With its stock of the 200 year old traditional cottages that used to house the quarriers – 2′ thick slate walls, small interior spaces and concrete floors – Easdale, now a conservation area has – is about to have – a complex relationship with insulation.

Dropping down the hill into Ellenabeich, a tourist coach crushes into a passing place, a second not far behind. Hang on. This is January. Locals say that there are coaches every day here, except for Christmas Day and Hogmanay. Residents like to see them come, not just for economic reasons but because they bring variety, a sense of being connected.

Driving past the banks of slate spoil around the quarry ponds, the geometric block of self-sheltered white cottages that is Ellenabeich, there on the harbourside is Jack Welch from Scottish Gas, waiting for the same ferry for the same purpose – the meeting on the island.

He presses the buzzer in the ferry cabin to let the skipper, on Easdale, know that he has custom for the trip.

Eilean Eisdeal

Far below (there’s a significant tidal drop), round the harbour wall comes a stout, open, clinker-built boat, nosing in to the slipway. Locals say that visitors, seeing the fishing boat moored between the harbour and the island, assume that it’s the ferry and when the real thing appears, some refuse to get in. That’s the urban clash.

The crossing takes a couple of minutes. The skipper makes a fast, knowledgeable approach, swinging hard against the tide to come alongside the steps. As we climb ashore, on the far side of one world, Andy Murray on the far side of a bigger one, has just lost the final of the Australian Grand Slam to Roger Federer.

Colin, from Dunkeld, missing the Tay but passionately enthusiastic about Easdale, comes out of the ferry cabin with a shake of the head, to give us the bad news.

Then there’s the Village Hall. Easdale has won awards for the design of its hall and it’s not hard to see why. The heart of it is the old hall, built by the quarriers – a square, slate walled structure with a roof of four perfect triangles rising to an apex and with tiered horizontal bands of glass in the slate to let stripes of natural light into the windowless space below.

Added to it is a flat-roofed extension of timber and glass. And no. The building doesn’t look modern, even though this description cannot help making it seem so. The new area is largely reception and conversation. Its openness to view draws you in and lets you own the place as much as anyone. It doesn’t hide and it doesn’t exclude.

It’s a mad blend of tradition and fantasy, croft meets Hansel and Gretel, black house meets Indian teepee, fortress meets party. It shouldn’t work but it does. It has an integrity as well as an individuality that is hard to believe without seeing it.

To work

Inside are 34 islanders and their guests, chatting and having coffee.

You can’t take your eyes off the space itself: the black geometry of the walls, the planked floor, the heavily timbered roof and, in the centre, a massive round wooden pillar rising to support the apex of the roof high above.

This is the mast of a boat wrecked in 1870 on the reefs off the island. The quarriers salvaged its mast – and here is it, 140 years on, still working for its keep. The big structural roof timbers came from the same source – part of the cargo from the wreck, now cleaned and with only 3 needing repair.

This space hosts an astonishing arts programme – mostly music – created by the island’s arts organiser, Steve Brown. They’ve recently had Karine Polwart, John Renbourn and Robin Williamson. They’re about to have Lau and Shooglenifty. Envy or what?

There’s no accommodation for visitors in Easdale – yet. A development project includes a bunkhouse. But island life is about team work, a community working together for the common good. There’s an Easdale answer to the occasional need to house community guests. Islanders working away from the island offer the use of their cottages.

Steve Brown has found some bands, given the opportunity to chill out here in a cottage to themselves,  choosing to stay an extra night and doing a free gig in the pub. This is Easdale’s cherished Puffer Bar and bistro, run on an eighteen hour day by the enterprising Keren Cafferty.

As we settle down for the start of the meeting, past gigs reverberate around us along with other events, like the community pantomimes. Step forward Donald Melville in a dress. (There’s a photograph somewhere…)

The session

Mike Mackenzie, a builder from Easdale and Waseem Hussein from Argyll Architecture are doing a joint presentation on energy efficiency, focusing on insulation and energy generation.

Mike, an inquisitive and restless thinker, a fund of insight and information, is now a politician, He will be the SNP candidate for the Argyll & Bute seat at Westminster at the coming General Election. There can be few greater contrasts to contemplate than between this cheek-by-jowl island community in its breathtaking setting and the anonymous human log jams on the streets of London.

Waseem is one of only 29 architects in Scotland who are qualified under Part 6 of the Energy Regulations, to certify new homes. The two men work well together and, early in the session, we learn that circumstances threw them into preparing the island’s final presentation to Scottish Gas Greenstreets – at a week’s notice. They won.

Easdale’s endemic problems with its traditional buildings present themselves during the event. The Powerpoint projector regularly fails. Why? Because damp in the 2′ deep slate walls interferes with the electrical circuitry.

Hit in mid flow, Mike Mackenzie shows the way to deal with this sort of challenge and demonstrates that the screen really is the prop it’s meant to be and not the lead player. Above all things, this demonstrates the necessity of knowing what you’re talking about. He carries on seamlessly.

• Fuel poverty and heating

We learn about fuel poverty. If you spend more than 10% of your annual income on heating your home, this is fuel poverty. Elaine McChesney talks of when she lived in No 11. Everyone nods. Islanders know every house and its history as if it was their own. It sort of is. Elaine spent £25 per week on fuel costs. This is fuel poverty. This is deciding whether to eat or be warm.

Everyone shivers involuntarily when they describe how cold it was in these uninsulated – virtually uninsulatable – cottages in the protracted freeze from mid December well into January.

A discussion on how people heat their homes produces a spectrum from electric storage heaters (the least efficient), to coal fires, to wood burners, to what Lynn Mackenzie describes as ‘burning everything’.

Iain MacDougal, curator of the dive-in-and-emerge-a-week-later Easdale Museum, asks about temperature targets in heating homes.

Waseem answers first by talking about our ‘comfort zone’ in interior heating. He says that most homes are heated to 24 degrees and that if the temperature falls to 18 degrees people feel cold. He then says that if we’re outdoors in 18 degrees, we run around in shorts and T-shirts.

All eyes slide towards Donald Melville, sitting in a pair of shorts, smiling serenely, smugly even.

The very mention of homes heated to 24 degrees provokes May McGillivray. She asks why we heat homes to 24 degrees when the planet’s in the state it’s in. She says: ‘I don’t insulate my home (because she can’t). I insulate myself. I wear layers of jumpers. Why should anyone living in Scotland expect to sit in their houses in T-shirts, heating the room to 24 degrees. Buy a jumper’.

Everybody laughs and from then on the comments from the floor get more feisty. May has set the tone.

• SAP ratings and the Easdale conundrum

We learn about SAP (energy efficiency) ratings: that 86 points is the basic standard today’s buildings must achieve; that a traditional Easdale cottage rates 30; and that every single form of insulation that could be added would, at best, achieve no more than that minimum standard of 86. Some of the energy efficient measures would be impossible anyway; and some, like photovoltaic panels,  would be likely to be obstructed by Historic Scotland on the grounds of Easdale’s conservation area status.

• Energy generation and conservation status

If the traditional Easdale cottages are unlikely to be brought within sweatshirt range of the minimum SAP rating standard, is there another approach to reducing fuel bills? What if the island had a 15KW wind turbine, earning from its power and offsetting it? The thinking here is that if you can’t use energy efficiently, can you create more of it?

There’s mention of the role of offshore wind turbines, fast becoming the preferred location but still with unresolved issues of salt water corrosion to be confronted.

The hero who’s been lashed to the temperamental Powerpont projector, raises his head briefly to throw in the observation that wind turbines can be removed later, leaving no negative environmental impact.

It’s obvious, in attitude as well as words, that Mike Mackenzie is pushing no agenda on this. It will be a community decision whether or not to have a turbine.

The focus turns back to heating homes renewably and raises the issue of micro-generation: small roof-mounted domestic wind turbines, Here too Historic Scotland and the Council’s planners would be likely to refuse permission on the grounds of Easdale’s conservation status.

Pamela Carr’s voice cuts sharply across this. ‘What are we conserving exactly?’, she asks.’Are we conserving traditional villages no one will live in? Or are we conserving communities?’

The positive response to that encourages her to start a campaign on the spot, suggesting that this issue should be escalated upwards (it should) to the Scottish Government and Historic Scotland. She suggests that the latter be invited to come to Easdale to consider its position at first hand and discuss the matter with the residents.

Lynn takes the pass and comes in fast on the wing. She challenges overwrought romance about the past. She leads people’s sight back 200 years to when Easdale was a working slate quarry with 500 people living on the island. She conjures the dirt, the dust, the blackness, the lack of green, the lack of gardens, the damp, the smells. ‘We wouldn’t have liked it at all’.

• Insulation

Mike and Waseem turn to a supeb model they’ve made – of a skeletal timber-frame house, in demountable sections, using timbers of the correct size in positions and functions which they would serve in a full scale building. They show the different forms of insulation and roofing. We see where they fit and how they are installed. We feel for ourselves how tactile and sweet smelling sheep’s wool is, compared with the irritant invasiveness of fibreglass wool.

But be warned. Don’t serially rob local sheep. Their natural coat is full of bugs and bacteria that will stink in fairly short order. Buy the proprietary material. It’s sterlilsed. It’s about four times as expensive as fibreglass wool but it’s very much less harmful to the eyes and the skin and the lungs. Voirrey Grier has used it in her loft and has felt the benefit of it. (Although she said that the biggest improvement was insulating and draftproofing her porch.)

• Winding up

Jack Welch talks through the details of the funding Easdale has been granted to improve its energy efficiency. 50% of it is to go to homes and 50% to communal projects.

He goes on to describe the other three winning projects he is also supporting: Newmill, near Keith in Moray; Ingram in Northumberland; and Casterton in Cumbria.

You think what a great job he has – infiltrating such a spectrum of highly individual communities and mapping the country as he drives. Almost as much fun as being a journalist in a place like Argyll.

Mike Mackenzie raises a last issue and floats a last kite.

• The issue is upskilling – there are few plumbers in Argyll with knowledge and experience in installing and maintaining renewable energy resources like ground-source heat-pumps. There is opportunity here.
• And the kite? What about promoting Easdale as a ready-made focus for studies and research on energy efficiency in traditional buildings? Way to go. It offers the perfect control conditions.

A last curve ball – or skimming stone

People wander over to the side to sign up to offer their homes for energy measurement.

But Easdale isn’t finished with us yet.

A small boy who’s come with his mother passes the time with a false moustache, finding some innovative locations for it on his face, turning to eyeball those behind him in a blend of mischief and a call for applause – renewable energy personified.

Then there’s a reporter from the Oban Times who’s not actually a reporter from the Oban Times – and visibly pales when the real deal, award wining Oban Times journalist Louise Lee, whom he hadn’t known was present, advances upon him with the gleam of battle in her eye.

Only on Easdale…