DONALD EWAN DARROCH looks up at me from the haunch of venison he's in the process of quartering. “I'm a slow butcher,” he says, with a wry smile and, though I have no way of knowing if he is slow or not, I agree, mostly because it's such a pleasure to watch him work - as I have done all morning, ever since I left my car by the ferry and walked half a mile along the shore to his house, passing the big, wind-thrawn rowan tree on the beach by the sailors' graves and stopping now and then to pick a citrus-coloured shell from the white sand, the solitary, elm-green deer larder always in view as I negotiated a path through the rocks and the dark, brown trickles of water and peat spilling on to the sand from the slopes above.

I am on the Isle of Jura. I came here to write poems and stories, beneficiary of one of those invaluable retreats that contemporary writers, like the monks and mystics of old, can hardly do without. The process is called “buying time” - a happy notion, and an appealing reversal of that old saw: time is money. For most writers - well, for me, at least - money is neither here nor there, once the bills are paid and the family are clothed and fed, but time is everything. Time is thought and image and a space where the rhythm of style can happen. On Jura, where the people work carefully and surely at whatever they do, allowing it to happen properly, I have a month to walk around and sit up late, to feel my way into the handful of notions with which I came and, when the rhythm and the feel and the sound are all right, to set them down as well as I can.

This is an enormous luxury. Here, I can sit all night over a paragraph and not worry about the morning. Here, I can walk all day, crossing the fairy-haunted hills, with the place-names ringing in my head - Cróm Dhoire, Beinn Shiantaidh, Leac Fhola - and waiting for the image that will capture the local and specific now, of which, according to Emily Dickinson, forever is composed. Yet, during my spell here, I have begun to feel that mere time is not enough. What I want is to re-engineer my inner clock, to live my life according to a different rhythm than the one to which I am accustomed.

That different time is everywhere on Jura. In the walled garden of Jura House, where one of the gardeners wraps a slice of elm wood in a sack and fastens it to the sluice for a month, so the water will flow through and season the wood. In the way people here think about the dead, not letting them slip forgotten into the past, but talking about them, always, as if they were still present. People here characterise the mainland as a buzz of noise and impatience, a place they visit reluctantly, and from which they are glad to return - and by the end of my stay, I am also uncertain about going back because, whatever it is a writer needs of rhythm and quiet and moments so vivid they seem like moments from a dream, it is more than plentiful on this small island. Before I left, one of my neighbours told me that Jura was a fairy place, and I laughed, thinking he was pulling my leg - but that was to misunderstand what he meant by the word fairy. Here, as on Prospero's isle, the air is full of voices, and it is surprising what one can hear in the small hours, or in the still of a long afternoon. Some of this is fairy lore, no doubt - but it would be as wrong to treat any of it as supernatural, as it would be to dismiss it as superstition. All those voices are real and, wherever they originate, all I can do is treat them as a form of dictation, setting my clock to their time and listening to the stories they tell about now and for ever.

The old days were better for mourning;
better for tongue-tacked girls in ruined plaid
climbing a hillside to gather the rainwashed bones
of what they had lost that winter to the cold;
and men in the prime of their lives, with dwindled sight,
gathering rowans to lay on an empty grave
and thinking of the dead, away at sea,
who dream of nothing more than Leac Fhola

John Burnside spent a month on Jura as part of Scottish Book Trust's Jura Malt Whisky Writer Retreat.
For more details visit www.scottishbooktrust.com/jura
The retreat won the Cultural Branding Award at this year's Arts & Business Scotland Awards.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist