The man who has lived as a hermit for 40 years


For almost 40 years Ken Smith has shunned conventional life and lived without electricity or running water in a hand-made log cabin on the banks of a remote loch in the Scottish Highlands.

"It's a nice life," says Ken. "Everybody wishes they could do it but nobody ever does."

Not everyone would agree that Ken's isolated, reclusive lifestyle of foraging and fishing as well as collecting firewood and washing his clothes in an old bath outdoors is the ideal. And even less so at the age of 74.

His log cabin is a two-hour walk from the nearest road on the edge of Rannoch Moor, by Loch Treig.

"It's known as the lonely loch," he says. "There's no road here but they used to live here before they built the dam."

Looking down on the loch from hillside, he says: "All their ruins are down there. The score now is one and that's me."

"It's a nice life," says Ken. "Everybody wishes they could do it but nobody ever does."

Not everyone would agree that Ken's isolated, reclusive lifestyle of foraging and fishing as well as collecting firewood and washing his clothes in an old bath outdoors is the ideal. And even less so at the age of 74.

His log cabin is a two-hour walk from the nearest road on the edge of Rannoch Moor, by Loch Treig.

"It's known as the lonely loch," he says. "There's no road here but they used to live here before they built the dam."

Looking down on the loch from hillside, he says: "All their ruins are down there. The score now is one and that's me."

"They said I would never recover. They said I would never speak again," he says.


"They said I would never walk again but I did.

"That's when I decided I would never live on anyone's terms but my own," he says.

Ken began to travel and became interested in the idea of the wilderness.

In the Yukon, the Canadian territory that borders Alaska, he wondered what would happen if he just walked off the highway and "went into nowhere".

So that's what he did, saying he finally walked about 22,000 miles before returning home.

While he was away his parents died and he didn't find out until he came home.

"It took a long while to hit me," he says. "I felt nothing."

Ken walked the length of Britain and was at Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands when he suddenly thought of his parents and started to cry.




"I cried all the way while walking," he says.

"I thought where is the most isolated place in Britain?" Ken tells the documentary.

"I went around and followed every bay and every Ben where there wasn't a house built.

"Hundreds and hundreds of miles of nothingness. I looked across the loch and saw this woodland."


He knew he had found the place he wanted to stay.

Ken says that was the point when he stopped crying and ended his constant wandering.

He set about building a log cabin, having first experimented on the design by using small sticks.

Four decades on, the cabin has a roaring log fire but no electricity, gas or running water - and definitely no mobile phone signal.

The firewood has to be chopped in the forest and carried back to the remote shelter.

He grows vegetables and forages for berries but his main source of food comes from the loch.

"If you want to learn how to live an independent life what you have to do is learn how to fish," he says.

Ten days after film director Lizzie left the cabin, in February 2019, the perils of Ken's isolated existence were brought home when he suffered a stroke while outside in the snow.



'Off-gridder' rescued from collapsed wood pile

He used a GPS personal locator beacon, which he had been given days before, to trigger an SOS, which was automatically sent to a response center in Houston, Texas.

It notified the coastguard in the UK and Ken was airlifted to hospital in Fort William where he spent seven weeks recovering.

Staff did what they could to make sure he could return to living independently and doctors tried to get him to move back to civilization where he would have a flat and careers. But Ken just wanted to get back to his cabin.

However, the "double vision" he suffered after his stroke and his memory loss mean Ken has had to accept more help than he'd had previously.

The head stalker of the estate, who looks after the forest where Ken lives, has been bringing him food every couple of weeks, which he pays for from his pension.

"People these days have been very good to me," Ken says.

A year after his first rescue, Ken had to be airlifted again after he was injured when a log pile collapsed on him.

But he says he is not worried about his future.

"We weren't put on earth forever," Ken says.

"I'll stop here until my final days come, definitely."

"I have had lots of incidents but I seem to have survived them all.

"I am bound to go ill again sometime. Something will happen to me that will take me away one day as it does for everybody else.

"But I'm hoping I'll get to 102."


Is The Hermit Of Tragi Still Alive?

Yes. Ken Smith, the hermit of Tragi, is alive and doing good. Ken Smith is a 74-year-old man who has spent the past 4 decades living in a log cabin nestled near Loch Tragi in Locater. Ken lives on the land with no electricity or running water. He eats fish for his supper and chops wood, and even brews his own drink. Ken Smith, who has been living in isolation in the Scottish Highlands, came back to Glasgow for the 1st time in over 30 years to attend a premiere of a movie about his life.


The Hermit of Tragi Documentary

Ken Smith's lifestyle has been the subject of a documentary by director Lizzie Mackenzie. Lizzie met Ken in 2012 and developed a friendship with him, and ultimately convinced him to be the star of the documentary, 'The Hermit of Tragi.' The documentary shows Ken Smith's way of life in the wild and how he manages with solitude at an older age. It shows Ken through changing seasons and challenging health problems and shows the friendship both Ken Smith and Lizzie Mackenzie have constructed in the process.


Ken Smith Lifestyle 

Ken Smith is called the Hermit of Tragi, who has lived in a log cabin near Loch Tragi without electricity or running water. He is 74 years old and hunts and grows his own food and fetches his water from a nearby stream. But Ken decided to come out of the Highlands to travel to Glasgow so that he could attend the premiere of the movie about his life. Ken also posed on the red carpet with the director ahead of the movie's first outing. 


Ken Smith About The Hermit of Tragi Documentary

BBC Scotland documentary "The Hermit of Tragi" followed Ken's journey over the last 2 years as he fought health problems in isolation. Ken Smith talked about the process of being filmed after living by himself for so long. He said, "I had no problem at all with it. It was quite good really because we ended up doing some unusual things like hill-climbing in the snow. She (Lizzie) was filming on and off for about 2-3 years, so I can't remember much, really. The filming went on and on turned out better and better."