Standing in a forest clearing by a loch, deep in the Highlands, is a simple log cabin.
Hand-crafted from local timber, with a neat roof of corrugated iron, it might have been built to provide shelter for hikers caught by the sudden storms that batter this wilderness.
Yet its perimeter fence and sturdy front gate suggest its occupant is rather more permanent than a passing walker.
Rocks have been repurposed as flagstones to create paths and a patio. Someone has planted a vegetable and flower garden.
Logs have been split and stacked carefully in a purpose-built store. A chimney stack cheerfully belches out wood smoke from the small stove.
It is the kind of place hard-pressed city-dwellers daydream about escaping to: yet the cabin is so far ‘off-grid’ that the nearest road is a two-hour yomp across the bog and moorland of Lochaber.The closest shops are a lengthy trek beyond that.
It is home to Ken Smith, who has lived on the banks of Loch Treig in splendid isolation for almost 40 years, shunning convention for a life regulated only by the passing seasons. Inevitably, it has earned him a nickname - The Hermit of Treig.
Smith’s solitary lifestyle is now the subject of an intriguing documentary, made by Aruna Productions. It was filmed over two years by Scottish director Lizzie MacKenzie and produced by Naomi Spiro.
Ken Smith, 74, has lived on the banks of Loch Treig in splendid isolation for almost 40 years, shunning convention for a life regulated only by the passing seasons. Inevitably, it has earned him a nickname - The Hermit of Treig
Now, after almost four decades in the wild, age is taking its toll. Smith is facing his greatest challenge - whether his failing body will allow him to remain in his beloved cabin for the rest of his days
It reveals that his decision to live in almost total seclusion was born - initially at least - of a need to process some of the profound grief and trauma he experienced as a young man.
Now, after almost four decades in the wild, age is taking its toll. Smith is facing his greatest challenge - whether his failing body will allow him to remain in his beloved cabin for the rest of his days.
Health problems have sparked two well-publicised emergency evacuations in the past two years, but on a good day Smith, 74, seems indefatigable.
He can still climb the steep hillsides above Loch Treig. which is known, rather aptly, as the ‘lonely loch’.
Looking down, he says: ‘There’s no road here but [people] used to live here before they built the dam. All their ruins are down there. The score now is one and that’s me.’
He takes a strange pride in his isolation: ‘It’s a nice life. Everybody wishes they could do it, but nobody ever does.’
Smith survives on foraged berries, the harvest from his vegetable patch, and the fish he catches in the loch. ‘I think if you love the land, it sort of loves you back,’ he says of his modest bounty. ‘It loves you back in all the things it produces for you.’
Gimlet-eyed beneath a snowy furrow of wiry brows, Smith seems alive with curiosity for the natural world he inhabits, but no more than half-interested in the world beyond.
An inveterate chronicler, he records nearly everything he sees with his ancient Zenit camera, from a spider’s web to a spectacular sunrise — developing the photos on his trips to Fort William. What he doesn’t capture through his lens, he sets down on paper.
He started his first diary when he was 15 and writes frequent letters, thinking nothing of making a 54-mile round trip to Fort William to pop one in his nearest postbox.
In a cardboard ‘box of memories’ he stores precious images, letters and documents. One is a record of visitors. Most days, no one comes.
When the last caller leaves, he has no idea when he will next see a living soul. ‘It could be the next day, it could be a fortnight,’ he says.
Either way, Smith seems untroubled. It is not that he wishes to be away from people, so much as away from society.
There was one single, harrowing experience which drove Smith towards the road less travelled.
Ken’s cabin is on the 57,000-acre Corrour Estate, which is managed by a trust on behalf of its owner, Lisbet Rausing, daughter of Hans Rausing - one of the world’s wealthiest men until he died in 2019
Having left school in his native Derbyshire at the age of 15, he worked as a general labourer, both on farms and on a building site for a new fire station.
One night in October 1974 — when he was 26 years old — his world was turned upside down. He was attacked after a night out by a gang of thugs, who left him with life-threatening injuries.
‘There was about eight of them and they come charging at me and kicked me head in and shoved me through a baker’s window,’ he recalls matter-of-factly.
A brain haemorrhage left him in a coma for 23 days and he still bears five deep scars on his head where surgeons operated to relieve the pressure.
‘Certainly gives you a different view of life, I can tell you,’ he says.
‘They said I would never recover. They said I would never speak again. They said I would never walk again, but I did. And that’s when I decided I would never live on anyone’s terms but my own.’
He lives on the remote Loch Treig in Lochaber in the Scottish Highlands and the log cabin, which he built himself, is a two-hour walk from the nearest road
Instead of returning to his nine-to-five life, Smith started travelling and became fascinated by the idea of the wilderness.
He walked through the Yukon, the Canadian territory that borders Alaska, wondering how long he’d last if he just walked off the highway and ‘went into nowhere’.
‘If you go somewhere that isn’t planned, that becomes an adventure,’ he says. ‘That’s how it began.’
He spent two years following his feet and covered 22,000 miles before he reached the Pacific Ocean. It was time to head home to the UK.
He wrote to his parents to ask if they would pick him up from Heathrow airport. It was only after he landed that he discovered the awful truth: ‘They’d died. No home to go back to,’ he says. ‘That hit me real bad that did.’
Adrift on a sea of untapped grief, Smith pushed away the numbness by taking to his heels again, this time walking the length of Britain.
He was at Rannoch Moor when he suddenly thought of his parents and started to cry uncontrollably.
‘I cried all the way while walking,’ he says. ‘I thought, “Where’s the most isolated place in Britain?” So I went round and followed every bay and every ben [mountain] where there wasn’t a house built.
‘Hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothingness, looked across the loch, saw this woodland. That’s the place.’
It was somewhere he could finally grieve: ‘Yeah, cried everything out and went back to normal.’
An inveterate chronicler, he records nearly everything he sees with his ancient Zenit camera, from a spider’s web to a spectacular sunrise — developing the photos on his trips to Fort William. What he doesn’t capture through his lens, he sets down on paper
He accepts he puts himself at risk by remaining in the wild. Unsteady on his feet and suffering from double vision, he struggles to thread a hook on a fishing line. And the stroke has clouded his memory
He set about building a log cabin, having first experimented on the design by using small sticks.
Ken’s cabin is on the 57,000-acre Corrour Estate, which is managed by a trust on behalf of its owner, Lisbet Rausing, daughter of Hans Rausing — one of the world’s wealthiest men until he died in 2019.
Over the decades, a haven has emerged, suited to his modest needs. He collects his own firewood, some of which he uses to heat up water in an old bath to wash himself and his clothes outdoors.
He draws the sap from the birch trees to make hooch and has invented a compostable waste system he calls ‘the bottomless pit’.
Since settling here in 1984, in his mid-30s, his main link to the outside world has been a succession of radios that receive a local station.
He keeps a small library of books — picked up from charity shops — which he reads using a head torch, especially in the dead of winter, when it can be dark most of the time.
He doesn’t have a phone and doesn’t want one. He has no use for it, nor social media. In a sense, he lives in a time capsule, a relic of a bygone age.
But doesn’t he miss human company? Has he never been in love? He pauses briefly before admitting: ‘Yeah, there was really only one girl that I liked. All I wanted to do was see the world.’
He recalls how she even asked him to marry her: ‘And that’s when I told her I was going abroad, but if she still thought the same when I came back then I probably would have married her. I never went back,’ he adds.
It would take a special wife to endure Smith’s way of life, one imagines.
Once a month, he gets up at 4am to hike for three hours along the railway track to his nearest station at Corrour, then makes an hour’s journey to Fort William to fill his 70-litre rucksack with provisions and medical supplies for the following few weeks.
Ken Smith forages for berries near the banks of Loch Treig in the Scottish Highlands, where he has lived in a cabin for almost 40 years
But while his resourcefulness appears to know no bounds, the same cannot be said for his health. In February 2019, the perils of Smith’s isolated existence were brought home when he suffered a stroke while outside in the snow
But while his resourcefulness appears to know no bounds, the same cannot be said for his health. In February 2019, the perils of Smith’s isolated existence were brought home when he suffered a stroke while outside in the snow.
He used a GPS personal locator beacon — his one concession to modern life — which he had been given days before, to trigger an SOS. The emergency alert sparked a major response, which hit the national headlines.
The SOS signal was automatically sent to a response centre in Houston, Texas, which notified the UK coastguard, who alerted Lochaber Mountain Rescue. Smith was airlifted to hospital in Fort William, where he spent seven weeks.
The following winter, he had to be medically evacuated a second time after a log pile fell on him, leaving him with head and leg injuries.
While recovering from the stroke, doctors urged Smith to return to civilisation, so that carers could keep an eye on him. He just wanted to get back to his cabin.
Asked if he wouldn’t be more comfortable in town, he replies: ‘No. What would I do? Sit in a pub drinking beer?’
He accepts he puts himself at risk by remaining in the wild. Unsteady on his feet and suffering from double vision, he struggles to thread a hook on a fishing line. And the stroke has clouded his memory: ‘That’s the nuisance of it. I live in a cloud world,’ he says.
His health means he has had to accept more help than he would like.
The head stalker at the local estate, who looks after the forest where Ken lives, brings him food every couple of weeks, which he pays for from his state pension.
‘People these days have been very good to me,’ he says.
He is determined to stay put and is philosophical about his prospects: ‘Something will happen to me that will take me away one day as it does for everybody else. But I’m hoping I’ll get to 102.’
He is already been planning his funeral, though, and has stockpiled around 70 gallons of his birch wine for the occasion: ‘When I die, instead of everybody moaning and sad, I want everybody to be merry. Getting p***** up on my wine.’
Who will he invite? ‘Anybody can come that I know. And they know me, so they’ll come.’
The Hermit Of Treig is available now on the BBC iPlayer.
