THIS WEEKEND I'm actually "on the road" as the column title suggests, instead of in my living room. I'm on the island of Colonsay, which to the uninitiated (shame on you) is one of Scotland's more remote Inner Hebrides. With the rolling horizon of Mull to the north, the rugged Jura to the east, and nothing to the west, except Canada, which you'd bump into eventually. It's a beautifully bleak spot to indulge in a bit of proper island quiet.

John Donne, the metaphysical poet, assumed that "no man is an island entire of itself - every man is a piece of the continent". If he's right, then that's probably why I'm always heading to islands, because if I'm just a piece of the continent, then it's nice to feel like an island every now and again. And where better to feel like that than among the Scottish islands.

Picnicking and sunbathing (with my anorak on - that unique type of Scottish sunbathing) on a Colonsay beach the colour of puff candy after walking for miles with only the sea and the sky for company, I'm struck once again by how unique the Inner Hebrides are, and how much I'd like to live on one of these islands.

I've had a few failed attempts at buying a property and moving to the Highlands and Islands over the past decade - a ruined church in Invermorriston (unmortgageable), a croft in Sutherland (condemned septic tank), and then two years ago, my wife and I ended up three weeks away from moving into a beautiful little cottage on Mull: a place I've been visiting since I was wearing nappies. It fell through because of something known as "pre-emption", a complicated law that appears to give the landowner first right to buy any house on their land. It looked harmless in small print and we were assured it was "unlikely to happen". It did happen, of course, and we were played like pawns between island landowners. It all seemed terribly archaic, and losing the house was a bitter blow, as was having to rearrange another place to live in less than a month.

The housing crisis in the Highlands and Islands is well-known: all the homes local people want to buy are generally sold at a much higher price to people who can afford a holiday home or second house. As a result, any indigenous population that remains is being pulled apart. It's genuinely sad, I find, to drive around Mull, or other beautiful spots in the Highlands and Islands, and see crofts and cottages, immaculately kept, and empty for over half the year.

None of this would ever have been a worry for Fearchair-a-Ghunna, the legendary Highland rover, or "Ross-shire wanderer" as he was known. I bought a book of his life and sayings in the Colonsay bookshop. (With the Atlantic gently lapping into the sunny bay and a chocolate-coloured dog snoozing on the steps of the whitewashed croft cum shop, it is perhaps the most picturesque place in Scotland to buy a book.) Fearchair had a love of gunpowder and guns and bummed around the Highlands, shooting and eating crows and frogs and decorating all his clothes with pebbles and twigs. Back in those days, it was perfectly acceptable to exist under the (non-) job description of a "wanderer". Indeed, there was some pride in it. The wide-open spaces of Scotland needed to be wandered, all their corners discovered. It was a landscape that you had to make your own sense of. And Fearchair, just like people today, wanted to experience this for himself, not simply to look at it through the window of a coach or hotel.

I'd like to think I've a bit of Fearchair's wandering spirit in me, with one difference being (alongside the love of guns and frog meat) that I've still got one hopeful eye on the Highlands and Islands property pages.