- Steven brocklehurst
- BBC News Escocia
Credit, Uruna Productions
Ken Smith says knowing how to fish is a fundamental skill for independent living.
For nearly 40 years, Ken Smith avoided a conventional routine and lived without electricity or running water in a handcrafted log cabin on the shores of a remote lake in the Highlands, Scotland.
“It’s a great life. Everyone would love to do it, but it’s not,” Smith said.
Ken fishes and collects food, collects firewood and washes his clothes in an old outdoor bathroom. Not everyone would agree that this isolated and lonely lifestyle is ideal, let alone at 74.
His cabin is a two hour walk from the nearest road on the edge of Rannoch Moor, near Lake Loch Treig.
“It’s called the lonely lake,” he says. “There is no road to get there. Before the dam was built, there were other people here, ”he says.
Looking at the lake on its slope, Ken says, “All the ruins are over there. The census (of the inhabitants) is currently for one person, which in this case is me.”
Ken is from Derbyshire, England. He says he started working at the age of 15, helping to build posts for the fire department.
But his life changed when he was 26, when he was beaten up by a gang overnight. He suffered a brain hemorrhage and was unconscious for 23 days.
“They said I would never heal, that I would never speak again. They said I would never walk again, but I did. That’s when I decided I wouldn’t. would never live on anyone’s terms except mine, ”he said.
Nine years ago, Ken had his first contact with filmmaker Lizzie McKenzie. For two years, she has been filming him for the documentary The hermit of Treig (“The Hermit of Treig”, in literal translation) from BBC Scotland.
Credit, Uruna Productions
Ken Smith has lived far from the world in his cabin for four decades
In search of a new direction
Ken began to travel and became interested in the idea of living in nature after recovering from his medical condition.
In the Yukon, a Canadian territory bordering Alaska in the United States, he wondered what would happen if he just walked on the road and “went nowhere.”
So that’s what he did. He says he left aimlessly and walked about 35,000 kilometers before returning home.
While he was gone, his parents died, and he did not know until he returned.
“I didn’t feel anything then. It took a long time for it to affect me,” he says.
Afterwards, Ken left home again and traveled all over Britain. He was in Rannoch, in the Highlands of Scotland, when he suddenly thought of his parents and began to cry.
“I cried all the time while walking,” he says. “I thought to myself: where is the most isolated place in Britain?”, He reports in the documentary.
Credit, Ken smith
The main source of food is the lake.
“I went around and followed every bay and every peak where there was no house built. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothing. I looked across the lake and I saw this forest, ”he recalls.
At that moment he knew he had found the place he wanted to be.
Ken says that was when he stopped crying and ended his constant wandering.
He started to build a log cabin, but first he made different designs with sticks to assess the best shape for the construction.
an isolated life
Four decades later, the cabin has a wood-burning stove, but there is no electricity, gas, or running water, and certainly no cell phone signal.
Firewood must be cut in the forest and brought to the remote refuge. He grows vegetables and searches for fruit in the forest, but his main source of food is the lake.
Credit, Ken smith
Ken in his log cabin shortly after finishing construction in the mid-1980s
“If you want to learn to live an independent life, what you have to do is learn to fish,” he says.
Ten days after director Lizzie McKenzie left her cabin in February 2019, the dangers of Ken’s isolated existence became real when he suffered a stroke while out in the snow.
He used a GPS he had been given a few days earlier to activate a distress call that was automatically routed to a center in Houston, Texas.
From there, the British Coast Guard were notified and Ken was airlifted to a hospital in Fort William, Scotland, where he spent seven weeks recovering.
The team did everything they could to get him back to an independent life, and doctors tried to bring him back to civilization, where he would have an apartment and caregivers. However, Ken just wanted to go back to his cabin.
However, his vision and memory were affected after the stroke. As a result, he began to accept help like he had never received it before.
The local headhunter, who tends the forest where Ken lives, brings him food every two weeks, which he pays with his pension.
“People have been really good to me,” says Ken.
Credit, Uruna Productions
‘I will stay here until my last days come’
A year after his first rescue, Ken had to be airlifted again after being injured when a pile of logs fell on him.
Despite the difficulties, he says he doesn’t care about the future.
“We did not come to earth forever. I will stay here until my last days come, certainly. I have had many incidents, but I have survived them all,” he said.
“I will definitely have new health issues at some point. Something is going to happen to me that one day, just like everyone else. But I hope to be 102,” he says.
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