I left city life to move to an island with fewer than 50 people. Two years and a baby later, I have no plans to leave.

In the warmer months, the hillside is green, lush with free-flowing grass and dotted with bruising heather bushes. Red deer graze lazily, and the herons nest in the tall trees.

There's a waterfall that slices through the middle of the hills, delivering both the island's water supply and electricity source in one fluid downpour. Out here on the Isle of Rum, water is never in short supply.

This island sits in Scotland's Inner Hebrides, a cluster of islands to the country's west. Fewer than 50 people currently live here, and I'm one of them.

I didn't grow up on Rum, and before I moved here two years ago, I never would have predicted that this would be my life. Now, though, I don't plan to leave.

When I was younger, I yearned for a life in the city, a job in broadcast journalism, and an apartment with a partner and a cat.

As of 2024, all of those dreams had come true. I'd been living and working in Glasgow, cutting my teeth on televised reports and producing my own evening news programs. Every day, I went home to my husband and my fluffy black cat, Midna.

But one day, when I was sent out on a work assignment to film on a tiny island out west, I returned home with a Rum-shaped hole in my heart.

In the months that followed, the island stayed there in the back of my brain. When I saw a newspaper story advertising an opportunity for a couple to run the island's hostel, my "what-ifs" grew much louder.

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My husband hadn't touched Rum soil before, but it didn't take much to get him on board: He'd seen my photos and was similarly enamored.

On a random Tuesday afternoon, we learned that the job was ours. In just a few short weeks, our flat was packed up, our cat in her carrier, and we boarded the ferry, not entirely sure what awaited us on the other side.

Life on Rum forced us to change, and quickly. We were used to the convenience and ease of living in a major city with a population of about 650,000, but out here, life was completely different.