The walk starts from a parking space at the remains of a quarry just beyond Lealt next to a slope of rock debris. “End of road – please leave all vehicles here” reads the information board. Richard Rees quoted a letter from his friend: “It’s quite an easy journey really, except that you have to walk the last eight miles.” Yet another Etonian – though three years older which would have prevented meaningful contact – Rees edited The Adelphi magazine. He had encouraged the struggling Orwell and published his pieces. The sign (the drawings are wonderful) also promises short-eared owls which are by no means purely nocturnal so I’m hopeful.

The spot where the track declines must have changed since the Forties or perhaps Orwell is detailing the distance after a car ride to his landlords at Ardlussa? The track has not ended and continues at the same width and state of disrepair but there is now a succession of padlocked chains with ditches on either side. Only people with legitimate business at Barnhill or travelling to the settlement of Kinuachdrachd can go any further in a vehicle.

Much suspense now and I can feel a history of reading Orwell stir inside me. Stamina is not a problem; any moderately fit person will do this without discomfort. But it’s a trek and you will feel, as the writer said of himself after shifting two tons of earth in his garden one afternoon, that you “have earned your tea”. My ankles are feeble and I’m afraid of turning them on the stones which sometimes behave like scree. Effort is concentration rather than cardio-vascular. You could do this walk wearing trainers in summer though hiking boots help. I wonder what footwear Orwell used here – there had been trouble finding size 12 boots while he was fighting in Spain. The British Army may have shod him for a stint as a war correspondent early in 1945 during which he reported from bombed-out cities on the continent for The Observer and The Manchester Guardian.

Jackie in the shop at Craighouse (the same site that Orwell used) has sold me a booklet, an OS map, and some tame postcards. They are bland library shots; there is no sign of the crude innuendo-stuffed McGill postcards about which Orwell wrote a piece for Horizon. Having a few here might please him. He didn’t like them much and was sniffy in his essay but they had caught his interest since boyhood. There is 4G across much of Jura but the OS map consistently gets us out of trouble in coming days.

In Orwell’s time, the boat from the mainland came to Craighouse. Jackie tells me that the author would ride down from Barnhill to the settlement on his motorbike. The bike, a 499cc Rudge-Whitworth Multigear, would have been at least 25 years old when he acquired it, and with wire wheels must have been a dog to handle. At 6ft 3in, he could only have ridden it with knees near the handlebars as if on one of the Seventies kids’ bikes a Raleigh Chopper. Islanders reported that the engine frequently let him down, and he would sit in his oilskins tinkering. He usually had a scythe tied to his back so that he could slash at tussocks in the middle of the rutted track. There have been modest improvements since his day; the route is two paths of pebbles with boot-high rushes in the middle and lady’s bedstraw on the edges. Punctures must have been unavoidable. In September 1946 (so still summer) he describes the track as “a morass”.

Over the three years there was an assortment of transport including a strong-willed Highland pony called Bob, a bicycle, and a tank-like Austin car. A ten-horse-power Ford truck he had bought from Spanish Civil War comrade Georges Kopp seized up just after the ferry crossing. It lay abandoned on the Craighouse quay, and in an era when recycling and landfill were unheard of, could still be seen – if without anything removable – as late as 1976. Money injected into the farm by Rees was spent on another lorry that proved dilapidated from the beginning according to Orwell’s sister, Avril. I fancy that interest in lorries would have been all about wheel clearance over this wretched road rather than size, especially with fuel being rationed in the post-war years. Rees managed to contribute to life on Jura without distracting his friend from the task of writing and was a frequent visitor. He is surely the inspiration for the magazine editor Ravelston in Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The other regular visitor was the trench coat-wearing, broadsheet-hawking, stuttering, blinking Anglo-Canadian writer Paul Potts. A Walt Whitman-like figure, he was a prose poet on the fringes of Soho and the neo-Romantics. Much of his best work was inspired by Blake. One of those people who seem primed for hurt, his whole life turned on an unrequited love. Devolving into a drunk, he was eventually banned from central London pubs. But he was clubbable at Barnhill and Orwell was devoted to him. The friendship even survived an incident in which, having been asked to find firewood, Potts cut down the only nut-bearing tree on the farm. With the possible exception of a nurse, Potts would be the last person to see Orwell alive at University College Hospital in January 1950. He had come with a votive offering of a box of tea (probably the favoured Typhoo) but seeing that his friend was sleeping he simply left it at the door.

For a while the terrain becomes bland, like an undistinguished links golf course. This is hardly the repeating theme of the “Golden Country” sought by Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four or by Orwell at his childhood home of Shiplake in Oxfordshire. What it most certainly is not is “the finest scenery in Europe”, a description by Potts. The road has been carved out of peatbog which explains the absence of grazing animals or arable farming. Only in areas where the soil has more minerals is there any chance of agriculture. Orwell did okay with the land and once reported that his strawberries were “superlatively good”. But it was not success across the board: “The things that always seem to fail here are anything from the onion family.”

The diary tells us that Orwell’s one cow became bogged and had to be hand-fed gruel while she regained strength to stand. Later, I will see muscular quizzical-looking cows right down on the sand at coves towards Craighouse, but they are not the Highland breed with horns and shaggy coat. Deer join them there as if this were Blackpool beach. The deer are curious and unselfconscious. Seen in profile, the hinds have a cartoon quality. By contrast, the cattle preen themselves a little. Orwell observed farming practice closely and was intrigued to watch corn (oats) being sown “broadcast” i.e. randomly rather than in rows. But agriculture is limited. Fishing is the main industry here followed perhaps by tourism. There will be marketing and sales people at the distillery, but my understanding is that whisky production is labour-unintensive.

A succession of birch woods and aquamarine bays to the right raises my mood. Sea thrift, the colour of parma violet sweets, is growing on rocks down to the waterline. After a kink in the path, the ground falls away revealing an expanse of irises and bluebells. It’s as if someone has pulled back a curtain. Laid out below is a whitewashed farmhouse with dormer windows against an upland of bracken and a spinney of pines. The four-mile channel that is the Sound of Jura sits to the east. Panning around, I note the mainland looming up in ridges across Knapdale. Seen from this height, the colours are preternatural and have a Hornby or Dinky Toy quality.

A stretch of grass in front of the building (a rye-grass field in Orwell’s day) has just been mown in circular patterns with the cuttings left to bed in. The wind is in the west and the grass is being blown seaward. Orwell’s entry for 27 August 1946 tells us that he can see the Skervuile Lighthouse reflected in front of the meadow. I can’t make it out today even with powerful field glasses but the slick solar-powered Ruadh Sgeir lighthouse is visible. Orwell would have known a cast iron predecessor. During his tenancy there would have been foxgloves and primroses at the porch, a vegetable garden and two fields for arable crops.

Orwell wrote primarily in the top-left of the four bedrooms which gave him a view of woodland and the bay. In the final summer when there were many visitors (and needing all the fresh air he could get) he slept on the grass in a tent. During the bitterest months there were spells in London, but he never shirked the harsh conditions here. It was always an escape where he could concentrate. Fug created by his shag tobacco roll-ups and fumes from a paraffin-stove must have warded off would-be interrupters in the household as he thumped away on a portable Remington. Nineteen Eighty-Four may have been sketched out quite well, certainly in his head, before he got here. The huge effort, one that had an effect on his health, was the graft of typing. Frustrated at not being able to persuade a stenographer-typist to visit the island, he bashed out a fair copy of the novel himself at 4,000 words a day. And with two carbon papers between the rollers, he really would have been pounding the machine. Often, he was propped up in bed and coughing blood. Annotations could be made with one of the new-fangled Biro pens (only just available in Britain) sent by Symons.

A video cameraman is staking out an upper field of machair flowers and thistles. Something about him (and not just the gargantuan tripod) says two things. The work being done now is exploratory but whoever he is, this technician is first-rate. At the front of the house there is another camera on a clothes horse-type device which the technician is tripping remotely or perhaps it is tripping itself on movement when a large animal passes?

Wens and I have encroached ten yards or so onto private property and should not have done so. There must be a stream of enthusiasts of all stripes and standards of behaviour here every day, and we have no invitation. I’ve prepared thoroughly for this trip, but my general Orwell knowledge is modest. It’s on us now. Saying I’m from Eastbourne is not a trump card; Orwell hated his prep school there. The owner, Fiona Fletcher, is mistaken in thinking that we have driven, and she points to a mystery 4×4. We are on the receiving end of a lot of hand-wagging until she realizes from our backpacks and demeanour that the car is not ours. Fiona climbs down, warms to us and is charming.

I empathize with Fiona when she admits to deflation after realizing that the diaries are so quotidien – often details of kerosene consumption, a running laying total from his Rhode Island Reds, lobsters caught, letters to seed merchants, and the epic battle with slugs which had followed him from the stores cottage in Wallington. However prosaic (although there are snatches of humour and lyricism) the diary-writing is perhaps significant in that Winston’s first act of rebellion against Big Brother is … starting a diary.

The scoping-out video work in the field above is on behalf of Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck who only this June had his documentary about Ernest Cole, a South African photographer who exposed apartheid, premiere at Cannes. It will be released in France this December. Peck is now creating a documentary about Orwell. Fiona’s view is: “When people of this calibre approach you, you don’t refuse them.”

Looking east from the bay I think of some moments of high comedy here. In December 1947, a Christmas goose escaped and was spotted swimming near the head of the island. It was followed in the rubber dinghy, shot and eaten none the less. The diary does not report whether the gooseflesh was compromised by seawater and Orwell would not have known about this directly. He had left for a tuberculosis clinic near Glasgow on Christmas Eve.

With the objective achieved, we can take in more things on the way back to Craighouse. It might be a phenomenon only in Sussex, but I’ve been brought up to expect gorse to smell of coconut. Not so here though it may not be in full flower. Occasional scarecrows throughout the island appear to have been designed by the same person. They all have their right arm held aloft as if appealing for offside. From behind a substantial outhouse, we hear gravelly whistled phrases of birdsong. Wens holds up his iPhone using an App to identify this, and the answer comes back. It’s a stonechat. The clue is in the name I suppose.

I wonder what Orwell, who could have written an Audubon-style book about species in Europe, would have thought of such a low-brow approach. Chaffinches were his bugbear, destroying his parsnips. He built devices to ward them off, but the birds tumbled to these within 48 hours. The observations about birds (as with the more serious writing) are full of notes and questions. “Cuckoos all over the place. Query whether they really change their note in June or merely become more irritating as they cease to be a novelty.” Later in this year [1947] he describes watching an eagle being forced to the ground by crows.