When Englishman Matt Armstrong-Ford left Eastbourne for the Isle of Bute with his partner Emily before lockdown, they did so with the intention of saying goodbye to a grandmother, but ended up realizing they had no intention of going back.
Matt Armstong-Ford
Matt, who owns an African safari travel business, moved with his partner to Kilchattan Bay, a tiny community on the Isle of Bute after Emily’s grandmother passed.
He said: “We came up to visit her before she died. She died the day before lockdown so we effectively ended up being ‘stuck’ in Scotland.
“We decided that this place has everything we are looking for to build a life and a home. We’re now in the process of buying the house she lived in. Given that we both travel a lot for work. It is a perfect place to come back to and enjoy the quietness and calm of island life.”
Bute’s population sits below 6,500 residents currently and the tiny village of Kilchattan Bay is home to just a handful of households.
Matt said that living in this remote island village poses a number of positive differences to the normal city life on the mainland that he has been used to.
“The pace of life is a lot slower on the Island. There’s no traffic, except the odd cow or sheep on the road.”
He said: “The pace of life is a lot slower on the Island. There’s no traffic, except the odd cow or sheep on the road. No noise pollution. Overall, just a general sense of calm and community that doesn't seem to exist in most towns and cities on the mainland.
After living in Tanzania & Zambia for three years running safari lodges and guiding guests on safari expeditions, Matt moved back home to England to start his own African safari travel business.
He runs his company, Armstrong Safaris, solely and takes clients on breath-taking tours of Africa’s more remote areas.
Boathouse on Kilchattan Bay
Nick Haseloff
He said: “We plan to split our time between Africa and the island. Six months here and six months there.”
He said that Emily is an artist and ‘the pace of life and quietness on the island gives her the opportunity to paint without distraction.”
Matt and his partner are lucky in that their careers allow them to work from a remote location.
Researchers from the James Hutton institute attribute lack of job opportunities on the Scottish Islands as one of the main factors of population decline in these communities.
Researcher Jonathan Hopkins said: “There’s a real problem with affordable housing too. There isn’t a lot of job availability in these communities, but even if there were, those new workers would have a lot of difficulty finding a place to live.”
The research conducted by the James Hutton institute projects that Bute may be one of the communities worst impacted by the problem of population decline.
They expect the island to lose up to 30% of its population represented in the 2011 census numbers.
Hopkins stressed that anecdotal evidence of resurgence such as Matt’s story paint a contrasting picture however.
Hopkins said: “It’s easy to discount these stories as simply being ‘anecdotal,’ but the truth is that they relay information in a different manner to the negative quantitative outlook that the population modelling shows.
“These people’s stories are just as important and give us information that we can’t get from just looking at the numbers.”