‘The greatest risk is not of money, but misjudgement’ T.S Elliot

For those of us of a certain age who live and work on Scotland's western edge, Mark Knopfler's Going Home from the peerless Local Hero movie features brightly in the soundtrack of our lives. For us, going home is an adventure - long, winding roads, ferries that occasionally work, single-track roads and another ferry.

I live with my family on Iona's west coast, above the machair. The next stop west is probably Newfoundland, but a few degrees of adjustment on the outboard and we can be on Tiree for lunch or retrace the route Columba took when he landed on Iona bringing Christianity to our islands. What we see from our farm is infinite - a long, beautiful and sometimes wild horizon that is part of us, and the community.

And like the fictional village of Ferness in Local Hero, the besuited industrialists have arrived.

This iconic film resonates with us more than forty years after its release. An international energy company identifies a remote Scottish coastline as the ideal site for an oil refinery. On paper, viewed from a boardroom in a different country, the proposal appears perfectly rational. Yet as Mac Macintyre and Felix Happer come to know the place, they realise its value cannot be captured in technical drawings or profit and loss accounts. Place trumps profit, no matter how glossy the sustainability report.

In our story, Burt Lancaster's role is played by Ignacio Sánchez........

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