I spent my early childhood on the island of Eigg, a small, ruggedly beautiful spot, set between the Outer Hebrides and Scotland's mountainous west coast. It's the sort of place that lends itself to flights of imagination. History and folklore sit cheek by jowl and, in the untamed landscape, it's easy to picture the arrival of Vikings in longboats, clansmen clashing broadswords or even mermaids seducing foolish suitors to a watery death. I had an itinerant upbringing but Eigg, inevitably, made the biggest impression on me and became my clandestine touchstone, a place by which I judged all others.

Eigg stands 15 miles from the mainland in the tempestuous waters of the Minch. It's remote but, if winter storms allow, a boat makes the 75-minute crossing four times a week. There's a more regular service in the summer, when the vessels unload a curious mixture of holidaymakers, nature lovers and perennial visitors. In terms of infrastructure, there's not much here: a small grocer's and craftshop, a tea room and ceilidh hall, a doctor's surgery and a single-classroom primary school.

From the air, the island's five-by-three mile aspect looks like an inverted comma, with a single tarmac road snaking the length of it like a liquorice strip. A patchy phone signal can be found at the pier or up the highest peak, but a recent switch to wireless broadband means that the internet connection is decent, as long as the receivers haven't been blown down by gales.

It's a tangle of paradoxes: isolated but with a close-knit community of 90 people; bucolic and peaceful, but with wild weather that can take you off your feet; old-fashioned but, like many Highland communities, undergoing a period of cultural and social adjustment. Eigg was, in the late 1990s, one of the first Scottish communities to buy itself out of private ownership, and more recently pioneered an island electricity grid powered by wind turbines, PV panels and a hydro dam.

For some, living in a place like this would be the equivalent of banishment. Perhaps equally mystifying is the fact that I came back to Eigg last year at the expense of a hard-earned, cosmopolitan lifestyle. I was assistant editor on the Observer Music Monthly and gigs, press trips and festivals punctuated my weeks. Home was an airy, noisy, former shoe factory in Hackney with a loose cast of east London arty types. I was, however, increasingly melancholy. At 31, being a music journalist was starting to feel like a prolonged adolescence and I couldn't face seeing the same trends coming back round, diminished by repetition. I disliked sitting, day after day, in front of a computer's sterile glare, and often found myself slyly birdwatching out of the second floor window (mostly seagulls). The internet had ruined my attention span and swallowed hours which I wrote off as pop culture research but was, more accurately, just time spent arsing about. Don't get me wrong, London's vibrancy still excites me, but the craven levels of consumption instilled a sense of unease that I couldn't shrug off. I felt alienated from the self-reliant values that I grew up with, which centred on steadfastness and probity. I'd bristle uncomfortably at regular encounters with flaky, trend-obsessed networkers who'd trample their own granny to get ahead. When the Music Monthly closed I took voluntary redundancy, used some of the money to clear the stack of debts I'd amassed since university, and decided to lead a simpler life. A life on Eigg.

There wasn't really a plan. I thought about putting my name on the waiting list for a croft. Crofting is a distinctive Scottish land tenure system in which smallholdings are held in tenancy, and there are rights to use common grazing. You can't earn a living from these diminutive plots, however, so like many people on the island I'd need to do an assortment of jobs, such as cleaning holiday houses or picking whelks to support myself. In the meantime I could maybe stay at my parent's place – they'd moved back to the island six years earlier from Herefordshire for Mum to take up a teaching post. However, in an unlikely turn of circumstances, an uncle whose family has lived on the island for generations decided to retire the tenancy of his hill farm. The lease could be passed to a family member, and my parents were keen to take it on. Without a great deal of persuasion, as they are in their mid-50s and don't fancy the hard graft in their old age, they generously agreed to include me as a partner.

This wasn't as drastic a career change as you might think. We'd moved from Eigg years ago because my father became manager of a bull farm in Devon. Ever since attending Young Farmers meetings and spending long summers looking after calves, I had yearned for a farming life of my own. As a child swot, though, I felt a responsibility to my family to enter a "respectable" profession (I dutifully studied law but found journalism's raffish camaraderie more accommodating). Now that an opportunity had presented itself, and on Eigg of all places, my gut instinct was that this was an opportunity I couldn't pass up.

Sandamhor is the former estate farm. In the 1930s, under island lairds the Runcimans, it was a vision of modern agriculture. There was a spotless dairy, an extensive fencing and drainage programme, and a hill herd of 75 Galloway cross Aberdeen Angus cows. The ground extends to 2,500 acres of rough hill, wind-clipped moorland and coastal heath, with small parks of green in-bye. Nowadays, things are a bit different. If Sandamhor was presented as a Dragon's Den enterprise, you'd get booted off in an instant. The fabric of the buildings is in a sorry state: antiquated and uninsurable. Periodic gales snatch away sheets of salt-rusted corrugated iron like stiff autumn leaves. Fence posts list like storm-blown trees, the gaping holes flagged with tufts of wool. In high summer, grappling fronds of bracken grow to chest-height, encroaching on rich grassland like an invading army. You could sink a small fortune into the place. Offsetting the start-up costs of about £60,000 for livestock and machinery alone is going to take us at least five years.

Then there's the fact that hill farming is unprofitable and heavily dependent on subsidy: the typical yearly income is only £8,000. A Scottish Agricultural College study, called Farming's Retreat from the Hills, reveals that in some areas of Scotland sheep numbers have decreased by 60% since 1999, and the squeeze on profits and available land make the life unattractive to a new generation of farmers. The average age of a farmer these days is 58. Doomy prophecies envisaging the Highlands as a vista of holiday parks, grouse moors and forestry plantations are not far-fetched. An added burden for island farms is the cost of transporting animals, fuel and feed. A tonne of cow cobbs here costs 25% more than on the mainland. In truth, taking on Sandamhor as a family enterprise would be an impossibility without my mother's salary as a headteacher on a neighbouring island.

Subsidy aside, our income will come from selling our lambs and calves in autumn as store livestock: that means that farmers with richer pasture can fatten them to a killing weight. We'd eventually like to market our own hogget (older lamb), but with the current set-up, sending beasts away to an abattoir and transporting them back for butchery is too expensive. It's frustrating because the few we do keep back for home kill taste delicious. The meat is moist and full of flavour, without the tough oiliness of mutton. It's something to aim for in the future.

The sheep are North Country Cheviots which, along with Blackfaces, are the most common breed on marginal Highland farms. We bought 200 of my uncle's flock, a hobby number for a hardened stockman, but plenty for a novice. Unexpectedly, after droughts in New Zealand and an increased demand for lamb in China and Africa, sheep prices are at their highest for a long time (about £110 for a gimmer – a young ewe). In the next few years I'd like to increase to at least 400. My dad prefers working with our herd of 47 Aberdeen Angus and Limousin cross cattle (made up of cows, heifers and young stock), so has largely left me to get on with it.

I've been back on Eigg for little over a year now. It took me several months to slow to island pace, where nothing – aside from drinking – happens fast. I am master of my own time but the day's activity is usually dictated by the weather. Most of our ground sits beneath the shadow of An Sgurr, a 1,289ft solidified lump of pitchstone lava. It can loom ominously under a felt grey sky or sit benevolently in the sun, the beams highlighting a tapestry of colours amid the flora and rocks. If there's a strong south-westerly wind, it feels like a layer of your skin is being scoured off. Leave your mouth agape too long and a powerful gust will involuntarily inflate your lungs. From the summit, the hill drops to 600ft cliffs, which are frilled by roaring Atlantic waves. On a calm day, it can be quiet enough to hear the muted whisper of passing birds on the wing. I love it out here. The scale changes your perspective: people and their problems feel insignificant when set against the hugeness of the landscape.

This long horizon can be frustrating when it comes to gathering sheep. A flighty ewe will turn her heels and, in two blinks, be out of sight. So, along with a quad bike, penknife and crook, I'm very reliant on my sheepdogs. A decent hound is a valuable commodity: at this year's Skipton auction mart, the top seller commanded 6,000 guineas (£6,300).

We've got two dogs: an untrained bitch from the neighbouring Isle of Muck, and a schooled two-year-old collie, which is the most expensive thing I've ever bought (£2,000 from a farmer in Dumfries). Skittish in new surroundings, he slipped his collar just as we were boarding the Eigg boat. To add to my dismay, he didn't have a traditional three-letter name like Mac or Tan. He was called Dave. There was a certain black comedy to stumbling through overgrown heather for four days, surrounded by midges and desperately wailing his name with a can of Pedigree Chum in my hand.

Despite this inauspicious start, working with him has been the most satisfying part of shepherding, and it still makes me chuckle that he'll only follow commands if I speak them in the gruff voice of a man from Dumfries.

My biggest test so far has been lambing. I've helped my uncle in the past but this year was on my own and apprehensive about dealing with problem births, especially as the ewes are outside in a large hilly park that takes an hour to get around. The nearest vet is at least three hours away by land and sea.

Sheep are canny creatures, perfectly evolved to deal with the harshness of an exposed Scottish hillside and fiercely maternal, but first-time lambers also have a tendency to flee leaving their offspring motherless and hungry. A low moment was watching, with a hammering heart, a gimmer who'd run along a rocky promenade and jumped into a rough sea after delivering a healthy lamb. Her head bobbed precariously in the waves before she swam back to the shore, fleece dripping like a shaggy sponge.

Deaths are inevitable. On a course in Inverness, at the end of an equipment list, the instructor had added, only half in jest: "JCB or a good spade?" Lambs can choke or get stuck in the cervix. Once born they can fall prey to hypothermia, suffer attacks from black-backed gulls and ravens (who peck out the eyes, tongues and rectums); even rabbit holes are a danger (they wriggle in for shelter and can't get out). The measure of success is the lambing percentage – the number of lambs per ewe. I hoped for 90% but managed 110%, so felt a small swell of pride along with relief when it was over. 

Wrestling with 25kg feed bags, hurdles, hay bales and diesel drums has made me stronger, although over the first few months my arms felt like they'd been stretched on a rack. My clothes, which are getting more ripped and threadbare by the day, have taken on a distinct waft of sheep's lanolin, muck and diesel. But even on abysmal days, when I'm cold and snot-nosed, or the quad has a puncture, there's not a great deal from my former life that I hanker after.

Sometimes, if I've been working on my own, I miss eavesdropping on wisecracking colleagues, but that aside, most of my wants are food-related: strong coffee, exotically stocked Turkish corner shops, backstreet east London curry houses and London Fields' Vietnamese cafes. In moments of cold deliberation, my thoughts fall to the larger concerns of island living: as long as I'm tied to the farm, I'm tied to Eigg, and it's a big ask for someone not accustomed to this lifestyle to move here, but I'll have to leave that to fate. I haven't entirely renounced my music journalism background: last September I helped put on an event called Away Game with the Fife label Fence records. We invited about 30 different acts including British Sea Power, Slow Club and Johnny Flynn to Eigg for a three-day party. I'm no Michael Eavis, but it was fun and I'll probably do it again.

I sometimes wonder what my great-great-great grandfather, a ploughman, would think about my casual return to farm labour after such an expensive university education. All I know is that amid the small sorrows and triumphs, there's a levelling contentment in physical work that takes me out of myself. At the end of each day I like scrubbing the emerging calluses, like a line of little pebbles across my palms, and watching the dirt-tinged water flow down the plughole. I'll have a blether with my father about tomorrow's plans and then I go to sleep, weary in my bones, rather than overwrought with mental fatigue, wondering if the weather will play out as predicted.