John Ridgway Save the Albatross Voyage

Born in Ireland and raised in the south of England, I met John, a young parachute officer, at a roulette party. We married when I was 20 and we moved up to make our life at Ardmore, where we have been for 38 years now.

I am mother to two daughters Rebecca, born in 1967, and Elizabeth Berg Huaman, a Quechua Indian, whose late father saved John’s life on the Amazon in 1970; Isso, as she is called, was born in the Peruvian Andes in 1979 and was adopted by us in 1986. Today, in addition to the John Ridgway School of Adventure on Ardmore, we are proud to have Rebecca and her husband Will running there own Cape Adventure International, across the loch at Skerricha.

For the first eighteen years we were without electricity and only our own fickle water supply, it was all paraffin lamps and peat fires and damp. After working at the Arts Council in the middle of London, life out here, three miles from the road and 100 miles from the nearest town has developed resourcefulness and low hairdressing bills. I have had to cope with everything from medical matters and cooking for large numbers to taking groups up mountains and spotting the rare primula scotica.

We live beside the most northerly wood on the west coast of Britain, it’s just 15 miles south of Cape Wrath. This wild place is home to the otter, seal, badger, red and roe deer, pine martin, kestrel, buzzard, heron and many others. Each spring, Greylag geese fly in, to make their nests on a small island in the loch and swim their young ashore to grow quickly in the long daylight hours of the short northern summer, on the green pasture of the croft. Access is mostly by boat.

Back to The Crew on English Rose V1

Back to the Contents page