Couple who lived on the Isle of Rum move back to the mainland

‘Our off-grid dream turned into a nightmare’: Essex family who moved to a caravan on the Isle of Rum for £100 a year reveal they’ve returned to the mainland after constant gales and six hours of daylight became unbearable

  • Ben Fogle travels to the Scottish Highlands to visit Adrian and Nicola Goddard
  • Couple moved from Essex to Isle of Rum in 2012 with teens Davies and Scarlett
  • But after four years of island life, they decided to move back to the mainland  
  • Adrian admitted the dream had become a nightmare and had to change  

A couple who left Essex to live a self-sufficient life on the Isle of Rum have revealed how the dream became a nightmare, forcing them to relocate to the mainland after only a couple of years. 

Adrian and Nicola Goddard appeared on Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild five years ago, and introduced the adventurer to their life on the isolated Scottish Island. 

The pair, who have two children, Davies, now 19, and Scarlett, now 17, used to have a comfortable life in Worthing, Essex, where Adrian worked as a sales executive and earned £45,000 a year. 

But in 2012, they left everything to live in a static caravan on the Isle of Rum, costing £100 a year for 8 acres, where they homeschooled their children, kept farm animals and grew their own vegetables, while being battered by the elements on a daily basis.

And the couple admitted in tonight’s episode of the Channel 5 show, airing at 9pm, which sees Ben catching up with them five years on, that the dream was no longer meeting their expectations. 

The family have now relocated to a comfortable yet secluded home in ‘the middle of nowhere in Scotland’, and have scaled back their self-sufficient philosophy significantly, with both Adrian and Nicola taking part-time jobs.

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Ben Fogle travels to the Scottish Highlands to visit Adrian and Nicola Goddard, a couple who left Essex in 2012 he met five years ago for New Lives in the Wild on Channel 5 

Ben is surprised to see the couple have backtracked, but Adrian and Nicola said they don’t regret their change of plan.  

‘It wasn’t an easy decision but it was no longer meeting our needs as much as we wanted it to,’ the mother-of-two said. 

‘I think it’s always the danger that you keep on the dream and instead of becoming a dream, it becomes a nightmare. And you can see it’s become a nightmare,’ Adrian said, adding that it was a family decision. 

‘We were getting older, the kids were getting older and the caravan was getting tired,’ he explained.  

When Ben first visited in 2015, the family lived in a cramped caravan. They now live in a comfortable four bedroom house, pictured

Nicola admitted life on the Isle of Rum was becoming unsustainable.

‘It’s really difficult, there’s six hours of daylight a day, any other day there’s a gale storm,’ she said. 

‘We felt like we were doing nothing nothing productive. We literally spent our days gathering firewood and keeping animals alive for the winter.’

The biggest detriment to their lifestyle were the harsh weather conditions, which soon took a toll on their lives.  

‘It is just a constant battle. The outside didn’t stay outside when you shut the door, it was coming inside with us, whether it was condensation on windows or walls rocking because of the wind. 

‘The worry becomes that you get to bound up in your life up here so that actually, staying here feels like staying here is the safest option and that going back to mainland is big and scary.

Ben finds that Adrian and Nicola and their children, Davies, left, 19 and Scarlett, right, 17, had moved from the Isle of Rum to the mainland due to bad weather 

‘The reality is, when you’re standing there in a hailing gale, you live in a caravan halfway up a muddy hill with no connection to the grid and that feels like the safe option, you may need to question some of your choices and motivations.’ 

Ben agreed that it takes unique character to power through repeated storms, combined with island isolation.  

‘They don’t consider it as a failure that they had to leave the island. They decided small island life wasn’t for them and they started all over again and it’s not the end of a book, it’s the start of a new chapter,’ he said. 

On Rum, the couple bred and looked after their own animals: they had pigs, geese and several birds, but they had to leave some behind in the move. 

‘The whole thing has been scaled down dramatically from 8 acres to an allotment,’ Adrian told Ben. 

The father-of-two admitted there were some elements of island life that he missed, especially the animals. 

Adrian and Nicola admitted living in the wilderness was harder than they had ever thought and relocated their family, pictured, to the mainland 

‘It was a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. We just didn’t have the resources we needed to do it,’ he told Ben. 

‘We put 110 percent into it and you know this, Ben, you came to help us for a while. It’s just such hard work so we just sort of thought we’re gonna kill ourselves doing that.

‘We never went there to build a house, we just went there to live a dream,’ he added. 

Adrian left his high paying job to adopt a self-sufficient lifestyle on Rum, but now that the family are back on the mainland, he’s taken a part-time job with the NHS to pay the bills.  

He explained the couple were not back to working full-time because they didn’t want to work themselves ‘to death,’ and still wanted to spend quality time as a family.  

The couple went from a four bedroom house in Worthing to a cramped caravan they had to drag cross country to settle on the Isle of Rum, back in 2012. 

The £7,000 caravan was not enough to sustain the repeated assaults from the weather, and the couple planned to build their own mud house on a hill, with Nicola estimating the building cost under £10,000.

The two children are now grown up, and Davies, left, has a girlfriend in America and wants to go to university

At the time, their efforts felt worth it, and it allowed them to befriend the local community. 

Nicola, who was the driving force behind the move, said she couldn’t imagine herself go back to her old Essex life after living for three years in the Scottish wilderness.  

Davies and Scarlett, who were 14 and 12 at the time of Ben’s first visit, where home-schooled and didn’t want to go to university. Instead, they wanted to take over the animals from their parents and travel the world. 

Davies admitted he missed his friends but added he talked to them online when the family could get an internet connection. 

Five years on, the teens were all grown up, and Davies explained he wanted to go to university to study psychology, a choice that didn’t delight mother Nicola, who said she hoped people wouldn’t say ‘he turned out alright in spite of being home-schooled.’

Davies also revealed he had a girlfriend who lives in America, who had come to visit a few times, and that he wanted to go to see her.  

The family are now staying in a modern four bedroom house with central heating, internet and a TV, but Nicola still holds nature dear, and invited Ben to have a dip in the chilly Scottish waters nearby.  

Reflecting on her choice to leaving Rum, the mother-of-two said she didn’t regret anything.  

‘I think that everything that we did has led up to who we are today,’ she told Ben, adding she’d rather regret the things she did than the things she didn’t do. 

Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild airs tonight at 9pm on Channel 5.  

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