I live on an island that most maps don’t label. A recent village pub quiz taught me that the isle of Rum is the 16th largest inhabited island in Scotland by area, and yet many people I speak to haven’t visited - or haven’t even heard of it. On Rum, our largest mountain, Askival, stretches to 812 metres. That’s just a few metres shy of the height needed to gain Munro status. I’ve often wondered if we could stack a few boulders atop each other to elevate us to that level. If we were just a few metres taller, the difference in footfall to the island would be tremendous. Munro baggers would come from miles to tick us off their list and take their ‘I did it’ snapshot at the peak.

But the longer I’ve had to think about it, the time I’ve spent in villages and towns that appear on every ‘Things you must see in Scotland in one week’ list, the more I’ve come to realise that, really, I won’t be stacking rocks any time soon.

Because the people that visit Rum tend to stay a while. They’re not racing against daylight for their onward journey, or speeding through the landscape to add another image to their Instagram carousel. They come for the wildlife, the........

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