The hermit who has lived for 40 years in a forest isolated from the world

For nearly 40 years, Ken Smith has avoided conventional life and lived without electricity or running water in a handcrafted log cabin on the shores of a remote lake in the Scottish Highlands.

“It is a nice life. Everybody wants to be able to do it, but nobody does it, ”says Smith.

Not everyone would agree that Ken’s secluded and lonely lifestyle of fishing and gathering food, gathering firewood and doing his laundry in an old open-air bathroom is ideal. And even less at 74 years.

Your log cabin is a two hour walk from the nearest road on the edge of Rannoch Moor, by Loch Treig (Scotland).

“It is known as the lonely lake. There is no way to get here, but people used to live here before the dam was built, ”he says.

“All its ruins are there. The census [de habitantes] now it belongs to one and that is me, ”he says as he looks out over the lake from the hillside.

Filmmaker Lizzie McKenzie first came into contact with Smith nine years ago and for the past two years she has filmed him for the BBC documentary Scotland The Hermit of Treig (“The hermit of Treig”).

Ken, who is originally from Derbyshire, recounts there how he started working at the age of 15, building fire stations.

But his life changed at the age of 26 when he was beaten up by a gang of thugs after a night of partying.

He suffered a brain hemorrhage and lost consciousness for 23 days.

“They said I would never recover. They said he would never speak again. They said I would never walk again, but I did. That’s when I decided that I would never live on anyone’s terms other than my own, ”he says.

Looking for a new direction

Ken started traveling and became interested in the idea of ​​nature.

In the Yukon, the Canadian territory that borders Alaska, he wondered what would happen if he just walked off the road and “went nowhere.”

So that’s what he did. He claims he walked 35,000 kilometers before returning home.

While he was away, his parents died and he did not find out until he got home.

“I did not feel anything. It took a long time for it to hit me, ”he says.

Ken walked the length of Great Britain and was in Rannoch, in the Scottish Highlands, when he suddenly thought of his parents and began to cry.

“I cried all the way while walking,” he says.

“I thought where is the most isolated place in Britain?”, He adds in the documentary.

“I was going around and I followed every bay and every summit where there was no house built. Hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothing. I looked across the lake and I saw this forest, ”he recalls.

He knew he had found the place where he wanted to stay.

Ken says that was the moment he stopped crying and ended his constant wandering.

He set out to build a log cabin, having first experimented with designing with small sticks.

A life in isolation

Four decades later the cabin has a wood stove, but there is no electricity, gas or running water and definitely no cell phone signal.

Firewood must be cut in the forest and brought back to the remote refuge.

He grows vegetables and forages for berries, but his main source of food comes from the lake.

“If you want to learn to live an independent life, what you have to do is learn to fish”, share.

Ten days after film director Lizzie McKenzie left the cabin in February 2019, the dangers of Ken’s isolated existence became present when he suffered a stroke while outside in the snow.

He used a GPS that had been given to him days before, to activate an SOS that was automatically sent to a response center in Houston, Texas.

From there the coast guard in the UK was notified and Ken was airlifted to the hospital at Fort William, where he spent seven weeks recovering.

The staff went out of their way to make sure he was able to live independently again and the doctors tried to get him back to civilization, where he would have an apartment and caregivers. But Ken just wanted to go back to his cabin.

However, the “double vision” he suffered after his stroke and his memory loss mean that Ken has had to accept more help than he ever received.

The chief hunter in the area, who looks after the forest where Ken lives, brings him food every two weeks, which he pays for with his pension.

“People these days have been really good to me,” says Ken.

A year after his first rescue, Ken had to be airlifted again after being injured when a pile of logs collapsed on him.

But he says he is not worried about his future.

“We did not come to earth forever. I’ll stay here until my last days come, definitely. I have had many incidents, but it seems that I have survived them all, ”he says.

“Surely I will get sick again at some point. Something will happen to me that will take me one day like everyone else. But I hope to reach 102 years ”, he points out.