Mail Online

Why Kirsty’s happy to share her desert island idyll with wallabies (but not preening celebs from her husband’

By Emma Cowing

IT SOUNDS idyllic. Almost, you might say, like a desert island. In fact Inchconnachan, nestling in the middle of Loch Lomond, is something of an island paradise. Water laps gently at its secluded bays and untouched beaches, while a pair of sea eagles soar above its towering conifers and oaks.

And it is, by far, the most remote outpost of one of the world’s most glamorous private members clubs.

For Inchconnachan has been bought by former Desert Island Discs presenter Kirsty Young and her husband Nick Jones, who runs Soho House, a global empire of upmarket club venues. They bought Inchconnachan for £1.6million – a significant advance on the £500,000 it was originally listed for last year – and have already submitted plans to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park.

They state: ‘Nick and Kirsty are tremendously excited to have this unique opportunity to not only conserve the island, but to enhance the natural habitat and restore it to its natural state. [Their] goal is to create a world-class place for everybody to enjoy its unique natural beauty.’

The couple certainly have an impressive history when it comes to ‘world class’ places for ‘everybody’ to enjoy, although some wags may posit that there is little natural about the hordes of celebs and wannabes who troop daily into Jones’s chain of high end

‘The enforced absence has altered my perspective’

private members clubs. Dubbed Mr Razzle Dazzle because of his ability to put the fizz into any party, Jones is a king of the international party scene.

From one club on Greek Street in London’s Soho which he opened in 1995, Soho House has evolved into a company with a global brand and clubs on almost every continent.

In the past year alone and despite the Covid-19 pandemic he has opened venues in Paris, Rome, Tel Aviv and Austin, Texas, and there have also been rumoured expansion plans within the UK, with talk of venues in Manchester and Glasgow opening soon.

Last year the firm, now worth around £1.5billion, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

It all goes some way to explaining why Young once remarked: ‘Boy, did I luck out when I met Nick.’

Now 53, Young has kept a low profile since stepping down from Desert Island Discs in 2019 after 12 years in the role.

Indeed these days the only time you’re likely to hear Young’s distinctive low tones on the radio is when an old episode of the show is being aired.

Young’s decision to leave the show she once said she thought she would present ‘until I’m 85’, was not an easy one. In 2018 she took a leave of absence after revealing she suffered from fibromyalgia, a long-term condition that causes widespread pain and fatigue and is often thought to be triggered by stress. In 2019, Young announced she was hanging up her headphones for good.

‘Having been forced to take some months away from my favourite job because of health problems, I’m happy to say I am now well on the way to feeling much better,’ she said in a statement at the time.

‘But that enforced absence from the show has altered my perspective on what I should do next – and so I’ve decided it’s time to pursue new challenges.’

The first of these marked a swift change in direction for the woman most Scots recognise as their favourite low-spoken newsreader: she became a director of Sussex Royal, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s UK foundation.

Intriguingly the Joneses are said to be close to the couple, and the royal rebels not only had their first date at Jones’s Soho House in London, but went to Soho Farmhouse, the firm’s rural outpost in

Oxfordshire, for one of their first weekends together.

When the two married in May 2018 Young presented the live coverage on BBC One, while Jones and their eldest daughter Freya were wedding guests. Young’s role was not to last long, however, as Sussex Royal was folded when the couple moved to the US and left the Royal Family. Enter, then,

Inchconnachan. As a project, it’s about as far removed from royal charities and the chic, rarefied atmosphere of private members clubs as you can get.

Because there is one hitch about the beautiful Scottish isle the couple have purchased: it comes with a colony of wallabies.

It is not, perhaps, the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks of Scottish island ownership. But when it comes to the wallabies of Inchconnachan, who have roamed free on its 103 acres since they were introduced in the 1940s by former owner Fiona Bryde Colquhoun, a champion power

‘I’m happy to say I am now well on the way to feeling much better’

boater and breeder of exotic animals, things are far from clear cut.

Indeed, experts do not even know how many wallabies there are on the island, as it has been uninhabited for so long that ‘land management has lapsed’.

Not that any of this troubles the Joneses. They have already applied for ‘natural regeneration of the site and wet woodland/habitat diversity’, and set out their plans. Grey squirrel numbers will be reduced by traps and pine martens will be encouraged to set up home on the island. Rhododendrons will be hacked back to encourage tree and shrub generation and a new boathouse and shelter will be built for wardens’ accommodation. The couple also plan to replace the current, dilapidated lodge on the island with a two-storey timber lodge with three bedrooms which can be used for short-term holiday lets, not to mention Jones family jaunts. And it should be said that this is not Young’s first venture into animal husbandry. During an appearance on the panel show Would I Lie To You she revealed that she owned chickens named after her favourite female newsreaders: Selina Scott, Viv Lumsden, Anna Ford, Jan Leeming and Mary Marquis. But how on earth did a colony of wallabies – native to Australia – end up on an island in the middle of Loch Lomond in the first place? Bryde Colquhoun, who upon marriage became Lady Arran and died in 2013 aged 95, was apparently something of a character. She raced power boats her whole life and in 1980 at 67 years old became the first woman to travel faster than 100mph on water, earning her the nickname ‘the fastest granny on water’. A member of the Colquhoun family, who still own some of the land both in and on Loch Lomond, she grew up on the loch’s shores, and also loved animals. At her home in Hertfordshire she kept llamas and alpacas and brought the wallabies to Inchconnachan after the Second World War, where they have adapted happily to the climate. They have even been known to hop across the frozen loch in winter to nearby woodland. Not all locals are fans, however. They are seen as a threat to the capercaillie population in the area, and there have been signs in the past of illegal culling.

Young, by the sounds of it, will have her hands full as she and Jones seek to adapt the island into a place that keeps the wildlife experts happy, and also provides a cosy retreat fit for a family that is used to the finer things in life.

It’s all a long way from East Kilbride, where Young was brought up in a council house and her biological father, a policeman, walked out on her and her mother when she was just three weeks old.

‘[My mother and I] didn’t really talk about it properly until I was in my mid to late teens, but at that age you are only focused on yourself,’ she once said.

‘To her credit, my mother wore her divorce lightly. It is not a painful subject for her.’

Her mother remarried when Young was still a child, and she has no relationship with her biological father. But although she says she has ‘never been in psychoanalysis’, the loss hit her in a different way when she became a mother herself, caring for her three-week-old baby.

‘It seemed a very significant moment, because that was the age I was when my parents split up. I was sitting in the bath wondering how I would feel if my marriage was imploding, when I had this tiny baby in the cot.

‘I felt immensely vulnerable. I thought, “Good God”. The emotional force of it hit me like a ton of bricks.’

Nicknamed ‘Old Man River’ at Stirling High School for her deep voice (she was even thrown out of the school choir), Young was restless as a teenager, leaving school at 17 having abandoned her Highers in order to take a job as an au pair in Switzerland, convinced that life ‘was happening elsewhere’. Still in her teens she joined BBC Radio Scotland as a runner before, at 20, taking a job as a continuity announcer. Her deep, honeyed tones were swiftly spotted and three years later she moved to STV to present Scotland Today.

In 1997 she was poached by Channel 5 News where she became, memorably, the first British newsreader to perch on a desk.

She has always maintained that being different – young, female, Scottish – worked for rather than against her in the tough London media world.

‘Thirty-five years ago, there wouldn’t have been Scottish news

‘To her credit, my mother wore her divorce lightly’

‘People find it harder to place you in class terms’

readers. And you certainly wouldn’t have had a young, female Scottish newsreader,’ she said.

‘So I think probably I would be kidding myself if I thought my being Scottish and my being a woman hasn’t helped me, if I’m being honest.’

It wasn’t always easy, however. She recalled one incident not long after she moved to London.

‘I went to a dinner party and mentioned that I went to state school; you could almost hear people checking their wallets to see if I’d nicked them.

‘But the huge advantage of being Scottish, of this accent, is people find it harder to place you in class terms.’

Still, there have been bumps along the way. After a high-profile move to ITV News she was tipped to be Trevor McDonald’s heir apparent, but was rumoured to have been sidelined by management. Instead, after a return to Channel 5, she eventually went back to the BBC, where her career started, landing a presenting role on Crimewatch and then Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, viewed as one of the most prestigious jobs in broadcasting.

She met Jones when she ran into him during a stay at one of his hotels, Babbington House in Somerset.

According to a friend: ‘He sat down at her lunch table, and she said by the time she stood up three hours later, she knew that this was the man she was going to marry.’

They did, in 1999, and now have two children (21-year-old Freya is making her name in the art world as a painter, and Madonna and Claudia Winkleman are said to be fans) as well as homes in Somerset, the Algarve and Los Angeles.

For Young, then, this latest project not only fulfils her own desert island ambitions , but marks a sort of homecoming.

In an interview last year Jones joked that he had been under pressure to open a Glasgow branch of Soho House ‘from a certain quarter for some time’.

‘Glasgow is where it properly happens,’ he said.

Glasgow and now, presumably, the island of Inchconnachan.

Ukraine On The Brink

en-gb

2022-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-29T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://mailonline.pressreader.com/article/281994675881916

dmg media (UK)