It takes Fergus Granville 17 minutes to commute to work. His journey takes him through some of the most spectacular scenery in the world, past red deer, eagles and deserted beaches with seals lolling on the rocks. The added plus is that he owns most of it.
Welcome to North Uist, a 13 by 17-mile island in the Outer Hebrides, with a population of 1,700 hardy souls who catch and eat some of the best seafood you'll ever taste.
Fergus, 44, has lived on the island since he was a baby. His father, the fifth Earl Granville, decided to make a break from the ancestral ties of Staffordshire and built an extraordinary 14-bedroom roundhouse on the northwest shore of the island in 1960 where Fergus - now the sixth earl - his wife, Anne, and their three children, six dogs and assorted tame birds live.
The island has only a couple of small shops - so acquiring the next meal by rod, net or bullet is pretty much part of everyday life. Fergus likes nothing better than to dive off the rocks outside the house for lobster, crayfish and crabs. Anne keeps Hebridean sheep for delicious lamb, and they grow as many vegetables as they are able to under glass - the gale-force, salty winds put paid to all but the most hardy vegetation.
When his parents first arrived there, the island was only accessible at low tide by horse and cart, so building their house presented colossal problems, and 100 workmen took up residence in huts and set to work. Now there's a causeway linking it to Benbecula, the next island, but it's still frontiersville to a townie. When Fergus and Anne's eldest daughter, Rose, lost consciousness and became suddenly extremely ill, the remoteness of their situation did hit home and it was six nail-biting hours before she was airlifted to hospital in Glasgow.
However, the children - six-year-old Rose, George, five, and Violet, two - normally enjoy rude good health, and Anne - a trained nurse - can cope with most small emergencies. They spend the summer outdoors, living an idyllic childhood of beaches, picnics, camps and ponies. Fergus and his siblings (both of whom have returned to live with their families on the island) had very much the same life, interrupted in the summer by the Queen arriving on the royal yacht for the annual picnic with Fergus's parents. 'One year she got lost and I was sent to find her,' recalls Fergus. 'It took us 45 minutes to walk back and by the end I was a little tongue-tied.'
Dogs and children rule the house. A mighty barking heralds your approach, and the visitor is engulfed by a tidal wave of Labradors, Westies and an Irish Water Spaniel who then jockey for position beside and over you on the sofas. In the TV room the African grey parrot does a very credible imitation of Fergus whistling the dogs, and very occasionally they all fall for it.
The house is a comfortable stew of ancestral pictures and furniture, crested colonial oddments in ivory and silver from the fourth earl's life as a diplomat, and plastic toys - croquet balls rolling under the sofas, George's birthday aquarium containing a small crab perched on the window seat. And then there's Fergus's incredible collection of things he has found around the island: Viking bone pins, a Roman brooch shaped like a hare, flints and arrowheads and lots of coins washed ashore from wrecks.
The Outer Hebrides are steeped in history and ancient settlements, and fish is very much at the heart of North Uist's existence, so when the local smokehouse came on the market five years ago, Fergus decided to take it on. His aim was to produce the best smoked salmon and sea trout in the world, and he has put heart and soul into the project. And money. So far, the overhaul has cost more than £700,000, and badly needed funds for renovating the house have all been diverted into the business.
There is a reed-bed cleansing system that could support a small village, and state-of-the-art refrigeration and smoking facilities. Meanwhile, the house needs repainting, the roof patching up, new windows - the last quote was £100,000 - and a total overhaul of the empty indoor swimming pool.
Fergus takes his smokehouse responsibilities seriously. He joins the seven-strong workforce in white coat and wellies and fillets fish for eight hours a day. In the lead-up to Christmas - their busiest period when they dispatch more than 12,000 packages of fish - he gets to work at 4am to meet the postman and make sure they make the extra plane that has been laid on: apart from local customers the smokehouse is entirely mail-order, so a postal strike can spell disaster.
Scottish farmed salmon came in for a battering earlier this year when it was reported to contain dangerous levels of PBDE, PCBs dioxins, pesticides and mercury. There was concern that escaped fish were breeding with and polluting the dwindling wild stock and local people were increasingly fed up with broken-up sea cages being washed up onto the shores of west Scotland.
None of this helped the Hebridean Smokehouse, which is at pains to flag up its environmentally sound practices. The salmon and trout are reared from eggs stripped from local stocks (so any escape is not a cross-breeding problem). They are raised in huge tanks on the fish farm that Fergus's father started and then transferred to sea pens offshore with a 10-foot tidal drop, so all residue is regularly and naturally washed away. The pens contain only a third of the fish a huge commercial concern would cram in, so they don't get sea lice. They are never fed antibiotics, and their food has a low-oil content for good texture and flavour; samples are regularly sent off for bacterial testing. When it comes to meeting industry standards, 'our fish are more organic than organic,' insists Fergus.
The fish are transferred from sea to fresh water and tank to loch by helicopter; it's quite common to see one flying over the moors dangling a barrel full 0f fish. There are six pen sites all over the island for health and visual reasons. 'I wouldn't want to walk over a hill and see a whole load of fish pens in the loch below me,' says Fergus. 'I don't want to spoil the landscape.'
The gentle, 16-hour peat-smoking process produces smoked salmon and trout that is exceptionally delicious with a dense texture, and low oil content. The flavour is subsequently deepened by a spell in the cold room. Smoked-salmon paté and hot-smoked salmon are also produced. Charismatic manager Christopher West is a former chef who brings an extremely useful palate to the enterprise, and they plan to experiment with smoked scallops and possibly introduce a heather smoke.
'Labour is the most expensive part of the whole process,' says Fergus. 'We hand-slice and hand-pull the little bones. It takes ages.'
The product isn't cheap (£6.95, including p&p, for 125g compared to, say, 97p in Asda) but is so superlatively different from the greasy, rubbery, brightly coloured mass-produced norm, that I, for one, will never eat anything else. Prue Leith and Albert Roux are both huge fans, and are often to be found on the island fishing in the lochs. If you've been put off salmon by all the scares, this is the way to restore your faith in what is truly the king of fish.
· Hebridean Smokehouse, Clachan, North Uist, Scotland HS6 5HD; 01876 580209; sales@hebridean smokehouse.com; www.hebrideansmokehouse.com
