I have just been to the Hebrides, because trudging across tussocks in the rain is my ancestrally transmitted idea of fun. The weather was fine, actually, and the midges hadn’t reached peak summer blood lust, which meant we could indulge in that universal holiday activity: fantasising about living in the destination.
On one walk, we stumbled across the perfect beachfront cottage, utterly isolated, accessible only on foot or by quad bike. Was it the perfect end-times home, we wondered; was there enough growing land, a fresh water source, high ground for spotting marauding – possibly mutant – attackers?
A Highland spot was recently called the “perfect zombie apocalypse” retreat. Brae Cottage in Dornoch (offers over £130,000) has 0.8 hectares (2 acres) and the all-important panoramic views. OK, it’s “unfit for occupation”, but, come the end times, our criteria for habitable will probably relax a little. Alternatively, £500,000 or so could secure you your own 36-hectare island. There is only a cabin on Mullagrach and you need to climb a ladder to get ashore, but what price safety when you can have all the cormorants you can eat (debatably, according to WMW Fowler’s recipe)? If you are really flush, Sanda Island in Mull of Kintyre (£2.5m) has 183 hectares, including a “fertile section of pasture”, 55 sheep and accommodation for you and 25 carefully chosen designated survivors.
I don’t know about these hideaways because I am seriously searching, but because they keep hitting the headlines – suggesting an increasing interest in having a remote bolthole if the worst happens. We sometimes visit pockets of rural France for sale (hush, everyone needs a hobby) and estate agents there have started trotting out the phrase “vivre en autarcie”: to be self-sufficient. Post-pandemic, there has been a lot of talk about the pull of self-sufficiency and off-grid living; there are certainly plenty of people online showing it is possible, explaining why it appeals or warning that we should be considering it. “I am personally preparing for massive, long-term breakdown of critical supply chains,” I read on one homesteading site.
So, has anticipatory apocalypse-prepping become more mainstream or do we just fancy a few tomato plants? Perhaps people always talked about total societal breakdown as a real possibility that influenced their choices. There was the acute nuclear anxiety of the late 1950s and the 1980s, but I expect everyone thinks their era is the one teetering closest to the brink.
Even so, it feels as if there is a lot of it about. “If she survives the water wars,” a friend said recently of someone; it’s a half-joke I hear often, in various forms. The pandemic, its supply chain shocks and the baldly stated near-certainty of another, the Putin-Kim pact, genuinely terrifying climate records being smashed yearly and real food-security concerns make the future feel iffy at best. The UN has been warning of the possible “collapse of everything” since 2021.
Billionaires are trying to buy their way out of it. New Zealand is apparently lousy with Silicon Valley types buying tracts of fertile land and access to pure water; Mark Zuckerberg’s 567-hectare Hawaii ranch complex has an underground bunker and a herd of cattle. Try the Highlands, you cowards: midges, the one creature I would put hard cash on surviving any variety of apocalypse, laugh at your money. (Actually, please don’t.)
Those of us who have not budgeted for a bunker in 3,000 hectares of virgin forest will plod on. When I yearn for an apocalypse bolthole, I remember my catastrophic gardening record: if we were trying to be self-sufficient this year, we would be eating the woodlice and slugs that have eaten the rest. Plus, as much as I would like peace of mind, I also really like cafes and have no survival skills; I would eat the wrong mushroom and expire long before the water warriors arrived.
“We will all go together when we go / What a comforting fact that is to know,” Tom Lehrer sang in 1959, in that first acute phase of nuclear anxiety. Now, conceivably, a handful of billionaires in off-grid compounds may not. But would you want to survive with them? That may be a fate worse than death.