Rùm

View towards the Rùm Cullin from Harris Mausoleum.

Satelite view of Rùm (Landsat image viewed using NASA World Wind software)

Rùm (a Scottish Gaelic name which is often anglicised to Rum) is one of the Small Isles, in Lochaber, Highland, Scotland. For several decades the name was spelt Rhum, which was coined in the 1900s by the former owner, Sir George Bullough, because he did not relish the idea of having the title Laird of Rum. It is inhabited by about 30 people.

Rùm was historically the possession of the MacLeans of Coll. The island was cleared of its human population for sheep farming in 1826. The population at this time was 450. 300 were cleared and had passage paid to Canada that year, with another 100-plus the following year. The sheep venture was a failure and the island then passed in the 1840s to the Marquess of Salisbury, who converted it to a sporting estate. Although retaining many of the sheep he reintroduced the red deer which had become extinct on the island in the 18th century.

The island had a number of short-term tenants until George Bullough's father John Bullough (a self-made millionaire cotton machinery manufacturer from Accrington, Lancashire, England) acquired the island in the late 1870s and continued the island's use as a sporting estate. By the time of Sir George Bullough, who built the castle in 1900, there were about 100 people employed on the estate. This included 14 under gardeners in the extensive grounds which included a nine-hole golf course, tennis and squash courts, greenhouses, turtle ponds, aviary etc.

The granite island was bought by the Nature Conservancy Council (now Scottish Natural Heritage) in 1957 to be a National Nature Reserve. It contains the Edwardian Kinloch Castle dwelled in by the Bulloughs, made of red sandstone from Annan, Dumfries and Galloway.

Rùm is now an important study site for research in ecology. Its red deer population has been the subject of research for many years, recently under the leadership of Tim Clutton-Brock. This work has been important in the development of sociobiology and behavioral ecology, particularly in relation to the understanding of aggression through game theory, i.e. the theory of the evolutionarily stable strategy as developed by John Maynard Smith.

The island came to widespread attention with the 1999 publication of the book A Rum Affair by Karl Sabbagh, a British writer and television producer. The book told of a long-running scientific controversy over the alleged discovery of certain plants on Rùm by botanist John Heslop Harrison - discoveries that are now considered to be fraudulent. Heslop Harrison is widely believed to have placed many of these plants on the island himself to provide evidence for his theory about the geological development of the Hebrides islands.

The main range of hills on Rùm are known as the Cuillin. They are usually referred to as the Rùm Cuillin, in order to distinguish them from the Cuillin of Skye. They are rocky peaks, similar in many ways to their better-known namesakes. Two of the Cuillin are classified as Corbetts: Askival and Ainshval.

In the summer of 2002 a reality TV show titled "Escape from Experiment Island" was filmed on the Island. This short-lived show (6 episodes) was produced by the BBC in conjunction with the Discovery Channel. The show was to piggyback on the success of Junkyard Wars by having the teams build vehicles to escape from the island.

Further reading

• Karl Sabbagh, A Rum Affair, London: Allen Lane, 1999
• John A. Love, Rum: a landscape without figures, Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2001

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