Who said paradise had to be comfy? It's infested with rats, has no toilet or electricity and the roof keeps blowing off, but for one man his tiny private island is sheer heaven Mentioning the words "Scottish islands" rather casually at a drinks party in London tends to summon up the wrong image, writes Adam Nicolson. You can see the illusions forming in people's minds: a salmon river probably, sweeping beaches of pure white coral sand with a hint of Ring Of Bright Water actress Virginia McKenna just over the horizon; a handsome, stone-built house - with drawing rooms, maybe, breakfasts emerging from distant kitchens - that magical ability to look out at appalling weather through perfectly maintained glass. I imagine this fantasy must exist somewhere, but sadly not on the islands which, since 1937, my family has been able to call their own. My paradise: Adam Nicolson relaxes with his family on The Shiants islands that he owns in the Hebrides Barren landscape: Rebecca Nicolson gazes down on Home Island from the peak of Rough Island The Shiants are far out to sea between Skye and the Outer Hebrides, as exposed to the weather as the deck of any trawler. Compton Mackenzie, the novelist who wrote Whisky Galore, later made into the classic Ealing comedy, owned them in the Twenties and Thirties. He described them as "three specks of black pepper in that uncomfortable stretch of sea called the Minch." There is nothing much to them: 500 acres of rough grazing, no quay or harbour, no good anchorage, no trees, nothing resembling a river, no sand on any of the steep cobbly beaches - almost nowhere, in fact, where it is possible to feel comfy. No one lives there full time, no ferries go there, and you have to hire a boat to deliver and collect you. Once you are there, the three islands make a tight little archipelago, fitting within a circle two and a half miles across. The only building still with a roof on is what I like to call "the house" and which others in my family, to my distress, often call "the shed." Out on the ocean waves: Adam takes a boat ride with three of his children during a trip to the islands Embracing nature: Adam and his sister Rebecca braving the icy waters at Home Island It is a two-roomed bothy, built originally for shepherds in the 1870s. It looks sweet, with two big windows staring out to sea and a chunky central door on which someone years ago put up a carved board, not quite straight, saying "Shiant Isles." Luxury accommodation it is not. The roof blows off from time to time. One year I arrived in the spring to find an entire shingle beach lining the back wall inside. The sea, during a wild storm at a very high tide, had smashed the door in, and played havoc for a few hours, turning all the chairs and tables upside down. The house looked like an abandoned aquarium, complete with dead crabs and mounds of rotting seaweed on the floor. The two small rooms are lined out in very nice tongue-and-groove boarding. There is a bottle-gas cooker, no electricity, so no fridge, just some cupboards. There is no running water, so no sink. There is a table on which you can put a bowl filled with water from the spring. And there is a nice fireplace at each end, so you can get a proper blaze going. After an hour or two of those fires lit, with some cleaning of the surfaces, flowers in jugs of water from the stream outside, something warming cooking on the stove, the paraffin lamps alight and a glass or two of malt whisky inside you, it is possible to banish some of the severity you invariably feel on arrival. Keeping it in the family: Adam's father bought the Shiants in 1937 as an act of pure romance when he was 20, for £1,400 ¿ money his grandmother had left him Honest assessment: By Adam's own admission, there is nothing much to the islands: Around 500 acres of rough grazing, no quay or harbour, no good anchorage, no trees and nothing resembling a river It is not a cosy place. The sea is far too cold to swim in most of the time. There is no toilet or bath, which is fine, except for the sensibilities of others when you return to civilisation. We go to the loo in what is discreetly called "the inter-tidal zone," where the swish to and fro of Atlantic tides sweeps away anything you are prepared to offer them. This lack of cosiness is not eased by the rats. Shipwrecks brought the black rats ashore, and the Shiants are now their greatest British stronghold. Their numbers fluctuate wildly each year, maybe 3,500 during the winter when there is nothing much for them to eat, perhaps ten times that by the end of their fast-breeding summer. Inevitably they are drawn to all the delicious food we bring with us. To guard against them, the door of the house cannot be left open after dark and no food can stay out of the cupboards. You hear them skittering over the tin roof at night looking for ways in. One year, a rat gave birth to a litter of about 18 babies which we found bright eyed and cheeping in the basket of peat blocks by the fire. The babies all went in the sea. Humble heritage: The Nicolson family enjoy the outdoors by the two-roomed bothy, built originally for shepherds in the 1870s At one with nature: Clouds swirl above Rough Island as Adam sorts ropes after a camping trip And I have woken there in the past to find a rat staring at me, about 18 inches away, wondering, I think, what I was doing in his house. He and his ancestors had been there since the 18th century; I had just arrived for a holiday. I shooed him away in my most proprietorial manner but he went on looking at me curiously like an anthropologist confronted with a strange new lifeform. Eventually, he wandered away to a hole in the panelling next to the fire. The most disastrous of all my family's expeditions to the Shiants was in 1946. My father, Nigel, a young London publisher, was not the most practical of men. He had bought the Shiants in 1937 as an act of pure romance when he was 20, for £1,400 - money his grandmother had left him. On visits there he suffered all manner of catastrophes: the collapsible canoe that did indeed collapse when he was trying to paddle it one stormy day between the islands; he arrived once for a month and forgot to bring any matches with him. Another time he took a dog for companionship, forgot to pack any dog food, shared his own food with the dog, ran out of it and decided he had to kill a sheep to survive. Man makes fire: Adam says the lack of cosiness is not eased by the rats, wich were brought ashore by shipwrecks Family heirloom: Adam was given the islands by his father when he was 21 and he has now passed them on to his eldest son, Tom He did manage to catch the sheep but couldn't bring himself to cut its throat. The only answer was a rope round its neck, the other end around a rock and, for the poor sheep, a good shove off a cliff. Dog and man then happily ate their way through hanged sheep for the rest of the month. That was bad, but the 1946 expedition plumbed new depths. My father had met two exceptionally smart young women at a London party. Both Lady Elizabeth Lambart and Margaret Elphinstone were going to be bridesmaids at the wedding of Princess Elizabeth, as the Queen was then known, the following year. Margaret was the bride's first cousin. Nigel - you have to wonder why - thought they might like to spend a night exposed to the delights of the Shiants. He arrived a week before them to tidy up. The weather was appalling. "I found the house in quite a good state," he wrote in his diary. There are a lot of holes, some made by the rats and some by the weather. You can see right through the ceiling and roof in the other room and the door is off its hinges. The stove has rusted to bits and has been thrown outside. He scrubbed and painted, but despite plugging the holes as best he could, he still couldn't keep out the rats. Happy: Adam says his family loves a place of such hostility and discomfort because it is 'a world full of marvels' He had also forgotten to bring a tin opener and had to open cans of soup with an axe, which wrecked both axe and soup. Then the fresh meat, bacon and eggs started to go off. He was left with potatoes, oatmeal and bread to feed the girls. His rat poisoning campaign was working but a terrible anxiety gripped him: what if the rats died in the house? These ladies would never have been exposed to such smells. They arrived. Nigel was in a state of heightened anxiety. But the sun shone and in the daylight he showed them the sights. For supper, they dined on oatmeal, bread and potatoes. At midnight, they went to bed, the two girls in one room of the house, Nigel in the other. At half-past three, he woke to hear them screeching. A rat had got inside the chest of drawers he had installed for their change of clothes in the morning. It was running up and down the nearly empty drawers like a tap-dancer in paradise. Nigel asked through the door - this was the Forties and he was shy - if he could do anything to help. "No, no!" they shrieked. If you let it out, it'll run all over us. They spent the rest of the night shaking under the blankets, Nigel staring at the ceiling next door. The calamity was not yet over. The wind had got up in the night and the tides were high. Nigel, in his anxiety, had forgotten to tie the dinghy to the mooring ring on the beach and it had been swept away and smashed on the island cliffs. Stunning surroundings: This clamorous and dazzling concentration of bird life is set in an epic landscape that includes 500-foot-tall columnar cliffs with deep pink sea caves at their feet When the fishing boat arrived to pick the girls up, there was no way of reaching it from the shore. Nigel entered the freezing waters of the Minch and returned with a rope. Elizabeth and Margaret stood waiting in their floral prints. Nigel tied them to the rope, one by one, and they swam out towards the herring drifter, speechless with cold, while their skirts spread like doilies around them. Or so my father told me. Neither, he had heard, ever came to the Hebrides again. I can't blame my father for getting it so wrong. We have had our share of disasters there too: boats swept away in a high wind; capsizing on the far side of one island which meant a long, cold and dangerous swim home; people slipping on rocks, broken limbs, coastguard helicopters. Why, you might wonder, should a family love a place of such difficulty, hostility and discomfort? The answer is that these islands are a world full of marvels. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds come to breed there every year, puffins and razorbills and guillemots making their nests in the giant screes and the big grassy slopes that run down to the sea. This clamorous and dazzling concentration of bird life is set in an epic landscape that includes 500-foot-tall columnar cliffs with deep pink sea caves at their feet, whales and dolphins abounding in the sea around them, the whole of the Outer Hebrides and the mountains of the west coast of Scotland arranged like a frieze around their horizons. Taking it all in: Adam looks out to sea as he relaxes with his dog Colonel And it is fertile country. Those seas are full of giant pollock, scallops, lobsters and big edible brown crabs. Every year we lower our creels (lobster traps) into the favourite, secret spots and haul these delicious monsters from the deep, as gripping a pleasure for me now as it was when I first did it 45 years ago with my father. My five children have been going there since they were conscious of life - the youngest spent a couple of weeks on the islands when she was three months old, when they were tiny my three sons happily played for hours in the rockpools. Between us, we have a common set of references to this astonishingly powerful, shared world. That is what I treasure most: that I can talk to them all about the suck and draw of a big sea on the storm beach; the tender and delicate process of gathering water from the well, which feels like something people did in the Stone Age; that sheltered feeling around the fire after a day out in the howling exposure of the islands; the mysterious creaks and whistles coming from the bird colonies on warm, still, moonlit summer nights when the sea lies around the islands like a pool of oil. All that sense of connectedness I shared with my father who gave me the islands when I was 21, 35 years ago - just as I have now given them to my eldest son, Tom. That connectedness stretches beyond the family to the hundreds of people who have stayed and worked there. We have a website now for them where anyone who fancies it - who can face it - can book to stay there for a week for free. Those who do usually end up entranced, their lives permanently enlarged by the experience of a tiny fragment of the world where reality is encountered so starkly. That is one reason we have never made it more elaborate: this is island life, which exposes you to the deepest possible experience of being alive.