We’re running shrieking through an icy, blasting spray, grins on our faces. The steepling basalt cliffs above the settlement of Cleadale just inland from us hold long, snaking waterfalls which have been reversed and turned into fountains by the storm winds. Below us burns which flow over the sea-cliffs are getting the same treatment, and sticking to the path means an invigorating shower.

A flock of geese rises into the blast, disturbed, we assume, by us. They hang like helpless rags in the air at first, then as they turn to get the wind behind their tails they’re transformed into sleek low-flying jet-fighters, hurtling inland to a new roosting ground.

We’re walking from Laig Beach on Eigg to the Singing Sands, the next bay north, across a low rugged headland, and not for the first time is it clear that if you go to a place like Eigg the weather is likely to make itself part of the story.

If you go in winter, it’s an absolute certainty: you’ve got to be prepared and equipped to embrace the elements and the excitement and uncertainty they bring.

Setting off from Mallaig, our CalMac ferry is delayed by 90 minutes because of the high winds and the rolling seas.

Once afloat we’re worried, because even if we get there we’ve been told there are times the boat can’t dock. The tension is relieved a little by the first of many remarkable sights on this trip: a pod of half a dozen porpoises cavorting around the boat, leaping through the swell.

There’s a 40-minute wait off the island for the waves to subside, then the ramp goes down and we let our breath out: even so we have to pile into the back of the island shop’s delivery van among the lemons and leeks as the water is too deep on the ramp to wade through.

Our relief at reaching dry land is hard to conceal, but there’s no point in coming here without some sense of adventure: the sheer drama of the place is best enjoyed in the raw. And it’s all made easier if you have a warm, dry, very cosy bolthole to retire to. Our home for the weekend is the Laig Beach Bothy, run by Saira Renny and George Carr, and on the pier Saira meets us with her sturdy red Land Rover.

First stop is the store, to stock up with food. Not shopping at the Mallaig Co-op to avoid toting extra bags aboard turns out to be a good decision. There’s a surprisingly wide selection of fruit and veg, fresh and frozen meat and fish, and pretty well everything we need. (Townies should watch out for the opening hours, though: we only just got there before 5pm next day to get the custard we’d forgotten to go with our fresh rhubarb.)

In true island fashion we shove our bags aside in the Land Rover to make room for a young Czech artist who’s also heading for Cleadale to stay in a log cabin, and head off up the steep road that leads from the pier at Galmisdale.

Over the spine of the island and then down a rough sandy road that leads to Saira and George’s farm, the “bothy” is in fact a new well-insulated cottage of simple, understated luxury, with pale elegant beachy styling and a wood-burning stove. The main bedroom is downstairs and there’s a mezzanine with two more beds above the main living area.

A large picture window frames one of the all-time great views, the mountains of Rum, named by the Vikings Askival and Hallival, Trallval and Ainshval. They tower above the sea like something from Norse mythology, and at this time of year they’re snow-capped, too.

Saira tells us the remains of Viking longships were found behind the bothy, and the farm was a Norse fort. Pictish chiefs are buried in one of the fields, and there have been other remarkable finds.

That evening we take a hot flask and walk along Laig Beach for 15 minutes as the light fades, finding a little shelter among the stones and looking out with awe on the sea and mountainscape. The black basalt and white shells that make up separate strands in the sand form glittering patterns as the tide retreats. Later we sleep lulled by the rumble of the waves, snug and secure against the hail and rain.

Those views, the cliffs, mountain views, wild moorland, and stunning coastline are reason enough to come to Eigg, but it also has a unique social set-up and ethos.

The island is famous for being the subject of the first major community buyout in Scotland, 19 years ago, after years of neglect and dubious decisions by its owners. Outside of summer, with fewer tourists, visitors probably get the best chance to find locals with time to talk and explain what makes this speck of land off the west coast such a special place to be.

Renny, who’s from originally from Laggan, and Carr, whose family is from the island, built the bothy with a view to making money, but they want to use that to make the farm better, and the nature of their tenancy is such that they can’t make a killing by selling it on, or pass it to their family.

They say they want to improve the place for its own sake, for the next people who take it, and in that they seem in harmony with the way things are done on Eigg. As they say, no-one comes here to make a fortune: success is being able to enjoy the island life.

Just up the road from the farm is Sweeney’s Bothy, like Laig Beach a holiday let on the Eigg Time website, which advertises a fraction of the island's accommodation. It’s on the hill behind the home of Lucy Conway. She shares its rental with the Bothy Project, which lets simple properties as artists’ retreats. Conway is also the brains behind Eigg Box, a project to encourage artists to come to Eigg for inspiration, which she hopes will soon be able to provide studio space in a “creative hub”.

“People come for a week and are wondering if they’ll find enough to inspire them: by the end of it they’re panicking because they have found so much to do and can’t get it finished,” she laughs.

Sweeney’s is a different animal to our accommodation: a perfectly designed miniature space with a bed in the eaves, a composting toilet and an outside shower. But the latter, say the weekend’s inhabitants, is fine: the water is hot enough even on a windy winter day to make it a luxury, not an ordeal, to soap yourself surrounded by the crags, moorland and sea.

On the Saturday night we decide to enjoy the social life of the island, and on the bikes that come with the bothy cycle the steep hill up and down to Galmisdale to the pub/restaurant. Along with the shop and other facilities it is run by the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust (IEHT), which carried out the buyout.

Such a place has to be family-friendly here, and with islanders aged nine months upwards around us we enjoy a drink with John Chester, the island’s long-standing warden from the Scottish Wildlife Trust. The charity helped in the buyout and is represented on the IEHT board because of the sheer abundance of bird and sealife on and around Eigg.

Chester identifies the long-beaked birds seen at the bothy as curlews, classed by the RSPB as a “red” category threatened species. We watched a flock of a dozen peck their way across the short-cropped grass.

And those geese? Chester tell us we probably missed a sea eagle: if the geese rise and then keep moving, it’s usually because one of these huge predators is in the area.

There’s always a local at the bar who will beat you at pool, and always someone who will offer you a lager or a pale ale, so the cycle home across the ice-blasted moorland to Cleadale later that night was an epic one, but the bothy was like a warm embrace which made the ride-walk-stagger worthwhile.

It’s worth not being shy and taking up any social opportunities on offer, and on the Sunday afternoon we escape from the weather to a show organised by Conway of TV films about the community’s purchase of the island.

That lets us meet more islanders – Maggie Fyffe, a central figure in the buyout, is there leading the chorus of laughter that greets pompous statements in TV interviews by the former owner, Keith Schellenberg.

It also lets us have a snoop at the film venue, the island’s big house, a yellow-painted affair that has a touch about it of Portmeirion – remember The Prisoner?

It’s now an environmental education centre being run by its new owners, Norah Barnes and Bob Wallace, a pair of ecologists determined to make a go of the place and restore it. Their purchase saved it when the IEHT was at a loss as to what to do with the old building.

On the day of our departure we still haven’t walked the island’s mighty Sgurr or those basalt cliffs above our cottage, and we pray for ferry problems to keep us there. But the CalMac puts in as it almost always does – the island’s new causeway and pier mean missed landings are a rarity.

We enjoy the longer boat-trip back via Muck and Rum on calmer seas, and as Eigg fades into the distance we know we will be back, come rain, shine, or blasting hailstorm, to feel the wild island’s welcome again.

Travel notes

You can travel to Eigg by train to Mallaig/Arisaig, or Mallaig is about a three-and-half hour drive from the central belt. Calmac Ferries sail from Mallaig to Eigg, Much, Rum and Canna all year. In the winter the Calmac ferry to and from Eigg runs on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays only. www.calmac.co.uk

The MV Shearwater sails from Arisaig to Eigg from April to September www.arisaig.co.uk/

Laig Beach Bothy sleeps four and costs £600 a week in winter and £750 in summer; shorter stays are available. Sweeney’s Bothy is £65 a night (£70 from April), or £400 for a week (£430 from April).

www.eiggtime.com