Ian Wace first saw the advertisement for the remote island of Tanera Mòr in 2013. “It basically said, ‘idiot required,’” the hedge fund manager recalls. But when he set foot on the island in north-west Scotland, overgrown with bracken, moss and brambles, with no proper roads, an abandoned herring station, and views out on to the immense ocean, “I just thought this was an extraordinary place”.
At around 800 acres and only a mile or so from the mainland, Tanera is the largest of the Summer Isles archipelago. Traditionally, local crofters used the islands for summer grazing of their livestock, giving the enclave its name. The word Tanera is derived from a Norse word meaning haven; indeed the island was used as a safe anchorage by the Vikings as far back as the 11th century. But its fortunes have ebbed and flowed since then, a microcosm of the plight of other rural communities in Scotland and beyond, suffering from urbanisation, population decline and limited job opportunities.
“It felt very dead,” says Wace of that first visit. “But I thought that was a transitory position caused by under-investment and deep hardship.” Four years or so passed and the island, still unsold, lingered in Wace’s mind. He returned once more. “It was blindingly clear to me that if it was [developed] on a commercial basis, there was a real chance that it would be ruined,” he says. “And I recognised that I would be able to bring together a group of people to do it, without recognising what it actually was.”
In 2017, Wace, then 54 and best known for running London-based Marshall Wace, one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, and for philanthropic work that includes helping to set up the Absolute Return for Kids education charity, bought Tanera for £1.7mn. Since then he has galvanised the local community and poured capital investment of around £100mn into a project that has evolved around three pillars of charitable purpose: rural and community regeneration; environmental restoration and protection; and targeted support for those in public service.
“People want to be seen, want to be heard, want to be cared for and want to care for others,” says Wace. “In a world that is basically extremely lonely, Tanera is a refuge from that loneliness.”
At a time when many societies are lamenting a decline in a sense of purpose and belonging, Tanera tentatively offers a new model. The island’s journey over the past eight years is a story of how a billionaire’s accidental adventure has become a blueprint for harnessing community to breathe new life into people, places and ecosystems.
Wace says he has no particular connection to Scotland beyond a feeling that, “as someone who likes to paint, the sense of space and remoteness always spoke to me”. And the endeavour has gradually unfolded in an iterative process with an open mind and no defined business plan.
It’s his MO. Wace didn’t go to university and became the youngest-ever director at London-based investment bank SG Warburg, aged 25. Together with Paul Marshall — who has in recent years emerged as one of the UK’s most influential right-leaning media barons — he went on to co-found Marshall Wace in 1997. It kicked off with $50mn in assets, some of which came from financier George Soros. The pair did not start with a grand plan, and their strategy has kept evolving; the London-based firm has subsequently grown to run over $71bn in assets.
“I think when you build a business, what you try to do is to build people who build a business,” says Wace. “You don’t build a business, it’s all about people.”
Tanera’s herring station — where Wace first came ashore — dates back to 1785. At that time it was the heyday of the herring industry and the adjacent bay would have been bustling with dozens of lugger boats, their long drift nets bursting with herring. The small fish — nicknamed silver darlings — were brought ashore to be cured before they were exported to the mainland, Europe and the British colonies.
At the peak of the fishing trade prosperity in the late 19th century, the island was home to 120 people. However, Tanera’s herring industry fell victim to overfishing and gradually disappeared, devastating both the island and the adjacent mainland community — the subsequent population decline was compounded by the Highland Clearances (the evictions of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands) and two world wars. By the time Wace came to do a recce, the herring station was derelict, and the island had a full-time population of just a handful of people.
“I have always had an interest in industrial history,” says Wace, whose demeanour is energetic, intense and tenacious. “And the herring station gave me the narrative to understand how to interpret [Tanera] and how to give the island back its history, while using its past as a way to give the island a future.”
Take Robin Irvine. As a teenager during the early 2000s, he spent two years living on Tanera in a small cottage next to the ruins of the herring station. Each day he commuted back and forth to school on the mainland: 20 minutes on the boat to the village of Achiltibuie, then a 50-minute bus ride along a single-track road to Ullapool.
Tanera “was a paradise for teenagers”, he recalls. “We were feral, we had ferrets and a buzzard. We ran around the island getting up to all sorts of mischief.”
Summer holiday rentals aside, the sum total of Tanera’s resident population was five: Irvine, his mother and brother; and the island’s then owners, conservation farmers Bill and Jean Wilder.
After school, Irvine completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge and then a PhD in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He had discounted returning “simply because the career opportunities weren’t here”, he says. That changed when he heard about the island’s new owner.
Today Irvine leads the regeneration and communities group at Summer Isles Enterprises, the organisation that is delivering the regeneration of Tanera and is itself owned by a charitable trust. He is one of 130 people working on the project, where the average age is early thirties; a new generation that has been drawn to the island’s restoration. “It’s a balance of people who’ve been born and brought up [locally] investing themselves in the project but also embracing new energy from elsewhere,” he says.
This includes the likes of Anthony Lewandowski, from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He met his wife Georgie, from Achiltibuie, in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2021; they came to Tanera a year ago to work.
Staff accommodation is provided on the island and the mainland. “This makes a huge difference for young people,” says Orfhlaith McDevitt, impact, innovation and delivery officer. It helps address two of the area’s socio-economic challenges: a lack of both year-round job opportunities and affordable housing. “It can be difficult up here when the area is so overly reliant on tourists,” she adds, with the ubiquity of holiday lets driving local rents to Edinburgh prices.
One of the first steps in Tanera’s regeneration was to construct five kilometres of roads across the island. Next was tackling the extensive renovations of the dozen or so derelict properties in the north of the island. “In the early days, we worked our way up from the shore, building a road and then restoring each ruin as we came to it,” says Robbie Punt, guest host. Wace, who is dyslexic, paints his designs in watercolours.
One of the first properties to be completed was the former café and post office, which has since become “The Mess” and is the epicentre of communal life on the island. Former crofters’ cottages that were knee-high ruins lost in the bracken were brought back to life using traditional carpentry and stonemasonry skills; heather that was cut during excavation for the island’s paths was repurposed as thatching for roofs. A breeze block loo became the Silver Darlings pub, where guests, using chisels, carve their name on the bar or the large oak table.
The guiding principles in the restoration were commitment to hand building and repurposing, using both local materials and those from further afield that might otherwise have been consigned to a skip. More than 60 per cent of the stone used was sourced from around the island. Reclaimed Ballachulish slate was repurposed for roofing and flooring, while wood from the Union Canal, which runs from Falkirk to Edinburgh, was turned into beams, flooring and furniture.
Meanwhile, a large slab of white marble that is now a dining table top in the smokery came from the men’s toilets at The Savoy hotel in London; the chrome basins in the bathrooms of an abandoned boat turned into a cinema are repurposed from wartime German U-boats.
It makes for a colourful, eccentric patchwork of history. At the top of the crossroads of the three main island pathways stands an Avro Lancaster hangar, originally built in 1924, whose previous home was the Woodford Aerodrome in Cheshire — Wace snapped it up on eBay. Inside, the wooden floorboards were salvaged from Winston Churchill’s Old War Office on Whitehall, after they were ripped out during the construction of the new Raffles hotel.
Traditional skills such as weaving and beekeeping have been revived; and an extensive planting effort — more than 100,000 trees, an array of wild flowers, and vegetables growing in raised beds and greenhouses — have transformed the barren landscape and provide a core source of food for the island community.
Like the 18th-century buildings of the herring station — which have been converted into a gathering place for the entire island — the hangar is now a large communal space for workshops and events.
This emphasis on creating communal spaces is important because from the start of the project, Tanera has provided targeted support for those in public service. To date it has hosted more than 1,000 guests as part of a philanthropic programme, more than half of those from the Taigh Mor Foundation, a mental health and wellbeing charity for those in the emergency services or military. They come for rest and relaxation and to be subsumed in island life: helping out in the garden or in the kitchens; mackerel fishing, picking seaweed or restoring one of the buildings.
“Sanctuary is needed for respite and it is also needed for reward,” says Wace. “I think that many people in public service don’t quite get that recognition that they deserve.”
“This week has given us everything we wanted and everything we didn’t realise we needed,” wrote one guest in the island’s visitors’ book. “It felt like a return to myself and life beyond burden,” wrote another.
The butterfly effect of Tanera is already being felt.
In July last year, Hurricane Beryl swept across the island of Canouan in the Grenadines; more than 90 per cent of homes were destroyed or damaged, resulting in a humanitarian crisis. Wace, who owns property there, sent $25mn to the relief effort. The Tanera project also sprung into action.
“Within a month Tanera had sent people and equipment to help mobilise the local community and support the island’s recovery,” says Adam Blaker, chief executive of the Summer Isles Enterprises. Closer to home, when a wildfire struck the mountain of Stac Pollaidh on the nearby mainland in April of this year, Tanera sent a crew of more than 30 people and equipment to assist in the firefighting effort.
Back on Tanera, the island is nearing the end of an eight-year period of major construction and entering its next chapter. The team has opened a new cookhouse, developed housing on the south side of the island and expanded its communal spaces.
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In 2024, Wace gifted just under 8,000 acres of crofted land on the mainland to the Coigach Community Development Company, meaning that the majority of the land in the Coigach peninsula is now held by charitable and community organisations.
At the same time, the Tanera project acquired 1,022 acres of land around Achnahaird Farm that was formerly part of Badentarbet Estate. It is restoring the old buildings, which sleep eight guests. This is one of several mainland projects for which a commercial dimension is being considered to support the island’s charitable objectives. It also includes the Summer Isles Hotel — once owned by Robin Irvine’s family — which will reopen in 2027 after a substantial refurbishment; and the Old Manse in Achiltibuie, formerly an early 20th-century church, which sleeps up to 12.
Navigating the dynamics between island and mainland, between philanthropic and commercial, will be a key challenge for the project in the months and years ahead.
The Tanera project confounds traditional mindsets of building, philanthropy and community. It has a level of financial backing, flexibility and long-term thinking that most rural or government-backed projects can only dream of, and the alchemy of this remote corner of north-west Scotland is hard to replicate.
But the hope is that Tanera can act as an inspiration for regeneration elsewhere, enabling the project to punch well above its weight and have an impact far beyond its shores.
“I’m a believer of catalytic interventions that can really scale and in doing so achieve something vastly more than you could otherwise,” says Wace. “The values of Tanera are clearly defined; its legacy is still to be written.”
tanera.org
Harriet Agnew is the FT’s asset management editor
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