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An Extremely Un-Get-Atable Place

An Extremely Un-Get-Atable Place

by Craig Easton

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Pre-order. Expected December 2025.

‘It’s an extremely un-get-atable place, but it’s a nice house and I think I can make it quite comfortable with a little trouble.’—George Orwell

An Extremely Un-get-atable Place is a lyrical reimagining of the time that writer George Orwell lived at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura in Scotland. It was here that Orwell wrote his landmark book Nineteen Eighty-Four—a dire warning of the dangers of totalitarianism and political despotism. Photographer Craig Easton was invited to stay at Barnhill—largely unchanged since Orwell’s time—where he made a series of landscape and still life images. In Easton’s new book, these photographs are presented alongside extracts from Orwell’s letters and diaries written on the island. 

More about this book

George Orwell lived on Jura between 1946 and 1949 accompanied by his housekeeper and son, Richard, who has written the book’s afterword. Orwell sought the solitude of the island whilst battling tuberculosis and writing his final work. Barnhill is extremely difficult to reach, an eight-mile walk from the nearest public road.

Easton was drawn to Jura by the prospect of finding the peace, creative freedom and, most importantly, the hope that Orwell had found there during a period of global turmoil. Rediscovering his love of the craft and beauty of the medium, Easton made a series of photographs around the house and the landscape of north Jura with his large-format 10 x 8 field camera. The resultant images celebrate the small details in life and the joy of looking deeply at a special place. This joy is summed up in the opening paragraphs of the book taken from Orwell’s essay ‘Some thoughts on the Common Toad’.

The interior photographs of household items conjure up images of the simplicity of Orwell’s life—the stove and teapot, a shaving mirror, the worn carpet he trod, a coal shovel and tools hung in a shed. Collectively they create an atmospheric vision of Orwell’s time on the island and the mood, desire and hope he experienced. Upon returning from the island, Easton printed the negatives as hand-made silver gelatin prints and toned them in strong tea in homage to Orwell’s famous obsession.

‘Craig’s finely crafted photographs capture the tenor of the times with their windswept portrayal of the lonely but beautiful landscape that is Jura. In many ways, they encapsulate my father’s life between the many visits of friends and relatives that came to Barnhill. A lot of the time, as he battled to finish his book while enveloped in cigarette smoke, he would see from his bedroom window the great herds of red deer that roamed freely on Jura, perhaps conjuring up the desire and hope that he too could escape the disease that was slowly eating into his lungs. Ah well, ‘let’s have another rollup!’ —Richard Blair

Published December 2025
Text by Richard Blair
270 x 330 mm
100pp, 58 images
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-80598-014-8

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From the author

  • Craig Easton is a multi award-winning photographer whose work is deeply rooted in the documentary tradition. His work is held in private and public collections including that of FC Barcelona, St. Andrews University Special Collections, Hull Maritime Museum and Salford University Art Collection. Easton’s work has been the subject of three previous monographs: Fisherwomen (Ten O’Clock Books, 2021), Bank Top (GOST Books, 2022)
    Thatcher’s Children (GOST Books, 2023). In 2021, he won Photographer of the Year at the SONY World Photography Awards for his series Bank Top, and the following year was recognised with an Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society. In 2023, he was awarded the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture and at The Orwell Awards, a special prize for Thatcher’s Children in recognition of his long-term commitment to ‘Exposing Britain’s Social Evils’.

  • ‘Barnhill was Orwell’s escape. His place of hope, a place of peace and calm where he could build a future. Where he would free himself from recent memories of war and carve out time to reflect on his concerns about the resultant fracturing of the world into competing political spheres of influence…. In a similarly fractious time in world affairs, I too escaped.’

    - Craig Easton