From a far-flung corner of the British Empire comes this sweet tale of an old priest who is remarkably self-sufficient:

‘I’m an old man of 85.

I live on fish and potatoes – we grow the loveliest potatoes in the world. I grow all my own crops; we grow them on raised beds of seaweed called lazy beds.”

The speaker is the Very Reverend Canon Angus John MacQueen, the place is the Outer Hebridean island of Barra where he has been a parish priest since 1952.

This elongated chain of islands, also known as the Western Isles, runs in a gentle north-east to south-west direction off the west coast of Scotland. Follow the chain south from Lewis and Harris to North Uist, Benbecula, South Uist, and you will come to Barra, right at the southern tip and surrounded by tiny islets with evocative Norse names: Eriskay, Pabbay, Mingulay.

Canon MacQueen was born and brought up on neighbouring South Uist at Balgarva. He attended Blair’s College in Aberdeen, studied theology in Ware in Hertfordshire and following his ordination in 1951 become parish priest at Dunoon on the Cowal peninsula before returning to the Western Isles.

Up until the 1880s, he explains, there was only one church, in the centre of the island. The population grew thanks to the herring industry (there are now around 1,500 souls “but that doubles in the summer time”). We had a herring-curing station and throughout the 19th century we exported salted herring to Russia and all that area, he explains. Today, there are five churches and two priests – Canon MacQueen’s two parishes are at Eoligarry and North Bay.

He lives in a 200-year-old house in North Bay with his three well-fed cats. “It’s a lovely old farm house/shooting lodge type of place with lots of accommodation. I’m within three yards of the ocean. I have views from every window of the sea.”

Does he have other priests visiting? He laughs.

“Yes, oh yes! You can’t keep them away _- friends from my theology days, even cardinals. When I was in one of the other parishes here on the islands, I had Cardinal Hume. He asked: ‘What do I have to do?’ I said: ‘You have to look after the sheep.’ He was an angler and on my croft in South Uist I had one of the finest trout lochs on the whole island, so he had the sheep to look after on the croft and he could fish the rest of the day. It’s very attractive, especially for city clergy – they need that kind of ridiculous relaxing that we can offer which is just simply get up when you want, talk to anybody and everybody you meet and if their door is open, go in and visit them.”

Canon MacQueen rises daily at five. “I’ve always been an early riser because I was born a crofter,” he says, “and we had things to do. The young people on the croft had to clean the byre, bring water from the well, and feed the animals.

“We had six cows and three horses, the horses did all the work because there were no motor cars or anything. We made our own butter, we made our own cheeses and we grew all our own crops.”

He still grows his own crops – carrots, onions, early potatoes, main crop.

Read on for the rest.

And a cheerful tip of my “Currents” baseball cap to Rod Dreher.