A feeling of deep loneliness engulfs you when you step off the ferry onto Rum's rocky shore. This is a wilderness, an island in the Inner Hebrides that became defined by its sense of mystery. It is a place where the environment has been left to spread unbound, where the wind carries the rustle of leaves and bird cries, and voices are lost whispers. A sense of barren seclusion seeps from the soil.

The island is an outcrop of volcanic peaks that stretch 2,500ft above sea level. The largest of the so-called “small isles” of the Inner Hebrides, Rum has a history of banishing human beings. Almost 200 years ago, the then landowner, Maclean of Coll, shipped the entire population to Nova Scotia and replaced them with 8,000 black-faced sheep.

The cotton mill owner John Bullough bought the island in 1888 as a hunting retreat and ordered his gamekeepers to shoot at passing boats to deter visitors, earning Rum the nickname of the Forbidden Isle.

When it became a nature reserve in 1958, the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) declared: “Visiting and living would be strictly controlled so as to minimise every kind of human impact not essential to research and conservation.”

By keeping the human population to a minimum, planting more than 1m trees and managing the deer population at about 1,000, conservationists allowed nature to reclaim the grazing scrubland and so return Rum to its natural forested state. And so it became an obscurity, an island known for its few residents, a dark presence brooding off the west coast of Scotland.

Yet now there are plans to repopulate Rum, bring in more young people and even build some new crofts to bring the place alive. Thinking has changed among environmentalists. Gone are the days when the public had to be excluded from the nature reserves their taxes fund.

Rum, kept remote for so long, is opening up because more residents are needed to better serve the visitors that Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), successor to the NCC, wants to bring to the reserve.

Almost 10,000 people visit the island each year, mostly hill-walkers and bird-watchers keen to visit the designated European Sites of Special Scientific Interest and to search for the sea and golden eagle populations. SNH needs to create a stable community on Rum in order to attract expert staff who will stay. To do that, they need enough young families to keep the school open.

Rum is spartan and the village of Kinloch is a meagre scattering of 12 houses; it is hard to imagine anyone remaining for long. The 31 residents all occupy property owned by SNH, for whom most of them also work. But there is no sense of permanence. You leave your job, you lose your house.

Mike Russell, the Scottish National party environment minister, former film-maker and broadcaster, demanded change after he visited the island last autumn.

“I visited in September and I was worried by what I found,” says Russell. “There are some serious problems that need to be addressed with the electricity and water supplies. We owe the community there to take that very seriously.” He found the dilapidated state of property on the island particularly shocking because Rum is publicly owned, albeit through the SNH quango. “Continuing to pour money into Rum in the way it was done in the past has not made things better,” he said.

Russell set up the Rum Task Group to move the process of change along more quickly, appointing Lesley Riddoch, the broadcaster, as its chairwoman. At a meeting in Morar, near Mallaig, last December called the Rum Summit, proposals began to be drawn up to transfer ownership of the village of Kinloch from SNH to a community trust.

“We just want to have an ordinary community, a stable one,” says Sean Morris, who has worked in deer research on the island for 14 years. He is standing behind the wooden counter in the narrow hut that houses the island's only shop. Residents take turns to open it for several hours each evening, and it becomes a brief gathering place as daylight starts to fade. Ruddy-faced men in work clothes gather to drink and chew the fat together. It has been impossible to establish a proper shop, a tearoom or community hall extension while everything is owned by SNH.

“I've seen so many families and children come and go,” Morris sighs. “There are only four [children] here now, with another on the way.” He softly pats the belly of his girlfriend, Ali, who is six months' pregnant.

Most of the community's members support the plan. Conservationists are also in general agreement, seeing worth in revealing their work to the public as a way of informing them about environmental issues.

“There is a point where there would be too many people coming, but we're a long way from that,” says Richard Kilpatrick, the deputy reserve manager. “There's a lot of catching up to do in providing visitors with the experience they would expect on most national nature reserves.”

Life is hard on Rum, and during the midge season from May to July there are days when you can't step outside and the children wear body suits, hoods and masks at school, but people seek this form of life as an escape.

“I have more of a social life here than I did in Edinburgh,” grins “Chainsaw Dave” Beaton, who lives in a caravan, sculpts with a chainsaw and makes furniture with Sandy Fraser, a 12-year Rum resident. On Friday nights, locals often gather in the Kinloch Castle bar, bringing musical instruments and jamming. One resident, known as Norman, is a trained chef and occasionally cooks grand meals for the entire village.

There is, as with so many isolated communities, a hovering sense of eccentricity, a feeling enhanced by the presence of the castle, built by Bullough's son George as a holiday residence for shooting parties. He paid the construction workers an extra shilling a day to wear Rum tartan kilts and gave smokers an extra tuppence to smoke more often and keep the midges at bay.

The castle hosted lavish parties for society figures, including Edward VII, the eldest son of Queen Victoria, when he was prince of Wales, which brought it the nickname of the Royal Brothel. If the prince arrived without a female companion, one was provided for him, and the ballroom has many salacious stories to tell. Its windows are above head height, to stop people looking in, and drinks were served through a two-way hatch so that the butler could not see inside. The orchestra played behind a curtain, prompting tales of wild revelry.

Decades of harsh weather have weakened the building's structure and it needs £12m of renovation work. Although the current prince of Wales is keen on helping and has involved the Prince's Trust, Kinloch Castle's future is uncertain. SNH hopes to establish a charitable trust to take on its ownership. The castle attracts visitors, but new residents must also be found if the population is to grow to 70, which is considered the ideal figure.

People claiming to be descended from the original inhabitants occasionally leave messages on the community's website, and the Rum Trust hopes to have the resources to follow these up soon. Once businesses can be established, the regular tourist trade is also expected to draw in new islanders, as will the building of five crofts. Mostly, though, the islanders expect that their new neighbours will be people who are already regular visitors to the island.

“From press interest in the past, we get inundated with letters from people who would like to come and live here,” says Fliss Hough, an administration assistant for SNH and one of the trust's directors. “The island was featured once on a radio programme in Nova Scotia and there was a lot of interest from over there. People sometimes want to start over again here.”

There are deer, Highland cows, ponies, feral goats, birds and even a colony of rats on Rum. In a small clearing, people are also trying to become established on an island that once shunned them.

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