HONESTY SHOPS I West Ardnamurchan, Near Kilchoan, Scotland

Community grown veg on the edge of Europe

Whenever The Coracle visits an honesty shop, I’m often amazed by the loving care that’s gone into the items for sale and more so by the hard cash on view, often in an old margarine tub! Now many of us live more urban lives and don’t know all our neighbours, the way we trust our communities can be different from generations past. Maybe when a shop is remote enough to be near the most westerly point on the UK mainland, it’s a little easier to have faith in your community compared to strangers in town. That said, I think most folk enjoy the sense of honest exchange that is at the heart of an honesty shop.

The West Ardnamurchan Community Shop and Garden is remote even for Scotland which being on the edge of Europe, and having many nooks and crannies, specialises in remoteness. It’s a four and a half hour round trip to the nearest main town of Fort William, much of it down a torturous single track road AND it includes a ferry journey across a loch! It’s a beautiful journey mind, it doesn’t look like your average drive to Tesco. It was partly because of this remoteness that the community took a rugged bare landscape and created this little pocket of a beautiful food-producing garden. 10 years ago money was provided by the Climate Challenge Fund to reduce food miles on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula. This enabled the core structure of the garden to be built with extensive hedging providing shelter from the fierce winds blowing in off the Atlantic. A huge variety of produce is grown and if you’ve travelled around some of the remoter parts of Scotland, you’ll have noticed the paucity of fruit and veg in many of the (wonderful) smaller shops. It might seem hard to get excited about a courgette but it is possible in these parts.

What surprised me when I visited was that the day-to-day running of the garden was being done by a lovely young couple from a small city in Holland who, before this experience, knew nothing about horticulture. Ivo and Loet live, somewhat romantically, in the lighthouse at the end of the peninsula and often work on the garden seven days a week. Although members of the community all get involved and provide the overall maintenance impetus, having full-time workers between March and September keeps the garden and the shop tip top. Ivo and Loet’s wages are that same hard cash from the honesty box which gets carted off and banked at Fort William when they do their shopping trip every five weeks. Obviously, the first thing I wanted to know from them was whether anyone had ever stolen anything from the shop, to which the answer was thankfully……no.