Just as former BBC Radio 4 ‘Desert Islands Discs’ host Kirsty Young buys her own island, another on the coast of Maine goes on sale for just £250,000; Ducks Ledges Island comes with a tiny cottage (but lacks a proper Thomas Crapper)
When The Steeple Times featured the £79,000 ($106,000, €94,000 or درهم391,000) sale of a ruined castle on a tiny plot of just 0.54-acres on Lough Key in County Roscommon in Ireland in November 2018, the story went viral. It continues to attract huge amounts of interest to this day and now we can share something similar and equally bizarre currently for sale off the coast of Addison, Maine in the USA.
Offered for £252,000 ($339,000, €300,000 or درهم1.2 million) and slightly larger than its Irish sibling at 1.5-acres, treeless Ducks Ledges Island comes with a slightly less substantial – in terms of its wooden construction – 540-square-foot cottage.
Built in 2009 by William ‘Billy Milliken’ – a realtor who specialises in island properties on the Bold Coast of Maine and whose motto is “we’re LOCAL and AVAILABLE’ and whose firm is selling the property via the Maine Listings website also – for his own use, the fully-furnished cottage comprises of a ground floor room with a lofted bedroom (where you might need to duck to avoid banging your head) accessed by a ladder above.
The building is “fully equipped” with the Internet and electricity according to Globe.com, but though lacking in an indoor lavatory, has an outhouse for what might be called “the ablutions” in British army slang nearby.
Of that feature, in October last year, Mr Milliken told the paper’s Megan Johnson: “It’s a one holer. We’ll even throw in a half bag of lime… At some point, you got wash your ass. You can do that in the ocean, but it’s awfully cold in Maine.”
Going further, Milliken remarked of the compactness of the setting and added: “It makes you feel small when you’re on the island. The seals, the seabirds, the eagles, and the noises they make at night. And what’s interesting about an island with no trees, you really get that sense of how small you really are.”
Previously, in July 2021, Madeline Bilis for Apartment Therapy declared of the island:
“[I] have a crush on this property. There’s one place my mind drifts to when summer’s heat and humidity melts me down into a puddle: Maine. Vacationland’s cool, breezy coast seems like the perfect place to be right about now, and this private island for sale up north is my daydream realised.”
“This stunning hunk of land is up there. Way up there. Sandwiched between the shores of Acadia National Park and the Canadian border lies the 1.5-acre plot. There are two towns on the nearby mainland, Addison and Jonesport, with marinas for you to launch a boat to get to it.”
Elsewhere in Scotland last week, The Scottish Sun reported that the former BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs host Kirsty Young has ironically turned fantasy on air into reality by paying £1.55 million ($2.09 million, €1.85 million or درهم7.66 million) for a 103-acre “neglected” private island on Loch Lomond in Scotland. Inchconnachan Island comes complete with a colony of 60 wallabies, but no human has lived there for two decades.
More Pictures – Ducks Ledges Island, Wohoa Bay, Addison, Maine, ME 04606, United States of America
Treeless in Maine doesn’t just give you a sense of how small you are but how vulnerable to the snow, rain and wind. How desperate would you have to be to leave the cottage in, I use the phrase advisedly, crappy weather?
No thank you. Utterly awful. Kirsty Young’s island and the Irish one are far preferable.
Indeed, Mr Agnew. I’ve lived in two islands in my life, Great Britain and Manhattan. I’ll stick with them, not just for the indoor plumbing.
Put Ghislaine there and then let her try her survival skills! She wouldn’t last two minutes.
I spent my summers on this island in the ‘70’s