Orwell's phrase from a 1946 letter still applies. To reach Jura from Glasgow takes most of a day. The standard route is a two-hour drive to Kennacraig on the Kintyre peninsula, a two-hour Caledonian MacBrayne car ferry to Port Askaig on Islay, then a five-minute crossing on the small vehicle ferry MV Eilean Dhiura across the Sound of Islay to Feolin on the Jura side. From Feolin to Craighouse is another seven miles on the single road. There is no airport on Jura. Islay Airport is the nearest landing strip, eight miles away as a gull would fly and an hour by combined ferry and road. From March to October a passenger ferry runs from Tayvallich on the Argyll mainland, but it is small and weather-dependent. The result of all this is that fewer than 200 people live on Jura, despite the island being thirty miles long. The locals call themselves Diurachs in Gaelic. There are around 5,000 red deer.

The distillery was founded in 1810 by Archibald Campbell, the Laird of Jura. It struggled. It fell into disrepair. It was restored in 1884, fell into disuse around 1900, and was dismantled. For sixty years there was no distillery on Jura - the local economy was sheep and dairy and a small fishery and what tenants could squeeze out of the heather. The current distillery dates to 1960, when Charles Mackinlay & Co rebuilt it on the original site as part of an effort by the Jura estate to revive the island economy. The aim was straightforward: jobs, year-round employment, a reason for young people to stay. The two stills installed in 1960 are unusually tall - around 28 feet, the tallest on Islay or Jura - which produces a lighter, less peat-forward spirit than the heavily smoked drams of Islay's south coast just twelve miles away. The distillery passed through Scottish & Newcastle (1960-85), Invergordon Distillers (1985-95), Whyte & Mackay (1995-2014), and is now owned by Emperador Distillers of Manila, a subsidiary of the Philippines-based Alliance Global. The local brand ambassadors - Willie Tait, who started at the distillery in 1975, and Willie Cochrane, who started in 1976 - between them have nearly a hundred years of institutional memory of the place.

Jura's house style is unusual for an Inner Hebridean island distillery: lightly peated by default, with a non-peated mainstream expression, balanced by occasional heavily peated releases like Jura Superstition. The shift away from heavy peating happened deliberately under Scottish & Newcastle in the 1970s, when the company believed that a smoother, more accessible single malt would sell better against the rising Speyside competition. The strategy worked commercially. It also gave Jura its current identity: a whisky that is recognisably Hebridean but does not punch you in the mouth with smoke. The current range comprises 26 expressions across the Signature, Travel Exclusive, and Rare & Limited series. Among the discontinued products is a release called Two-One-Two, named for the 212 people who lived on Jura when the bottling was made. The 10-year-old Origin and the 16-year-old Diurachs' Own have both won International Wine & Spirits Competition golds. Jura Superstition picked up a Double Gold at San Francisco in 2009. The distillery is one of the largest employers on the island. When it closes for two weeks of maintenance each summer, the island feels different.

Twenty-six miles north of the distillery, the road runs out at Barnhill. George Orwell - Eric Blair, dying of tuberculosis at 45 - lived here on and off between 1946 and his death in January 1950. He wrote 1984 in an upstairs bedroom that looked over Loch nam Breac and the Atlantic. The book that arguably did more than any other to shape twentieth-century political thought was finished at the kitchen table of a Hebridean farmhouse owned by a friend's family, with no electricity, no running water, and the nearest neighbour a mile away. Orwell's son Richard, then about three, ran around Barnhill while Orwell wrote upstairs. The Paps of Jura - three quartzite peaks that dominate the island's skyline - were visible from the back of the house in clear weather. Orwell took his nephews fishing in the Gulf of Corryvreckan, the notorious whirlpool between Jura and Scarba, in 1947 and they almost drowned when the engine of their small boat conked out and the tide swept them toward the maelstrom. They were rescued by a passing lobster boat. The Diurachs still tell the story. The distillery still pours the dram. The single road still runs out at Barnhill, where the typewriter has long been gone but the view has not changed.