September 1, 1991

We met Gordon (Marketing Manager of Oddbins) at a crowded Heathrow airport. For most travelers it was the end of the holidays but for us it was the start of our Scottish pilgrimage to the whisky distilleries of Islay and Orkney. The Horse Shoe Inn, Glasgow Gordon has just given us an architectural tour of the city, starting with the Macintosh Art School and then Sauchie Hall Street, Renfield Street and Buchanan Street. After the Art School it was Henderson's jewelers and the Willow Tea Rooms that stood out - saved from developers by a quirk of fate.

This bar is one of Gordon's old haunts when he was at university here - a really old Victorian bar in Gordon's words.

Wandering through a Northern city on a sultry Sunday afternoon was a disembodying experience, especially with those wide streets lined with sandstone Victorian and dark Gothic buildings, cheek by jowl as if they had been squashed together by a giant hand. We passed through the station with its acres of marble flooring and trickles of passengers coming home from their country breaks in shorts and summer attire, their faces set into expressions of preoccupation, preparing for the working weeks ahead.

Our hotel, 1 Devonshire Place, consisted of a row of gracious terraced houses with wide bow windows and stained glass panels crowning the staircases. Our room was furnished to match the grandiose atmosphere with a four-poster bed, carved wardrobes and a gold and marble bathroom.

After 'freshening up' as we always call it, we enjoyed a pre-prandial drink at 'The Ubiquitious Chip', a large and jolly restaurant in a converted warehouse down a narrow mews lane. Gordon decided that we should try a Californian wine, Robert Mondavi, 1980 Cabernet Sauvignon. The first taste revealed that the wine was 'all show' - with lots of oak, but where was the fruit, we wondered. Still, it was worth a try out of academic interest.

Our Menus:
1. Ralph: Vegetarian Haggis and Neeps.
Fillets of Ayr Cod on a bed of Clapshot with Roasted and Chillied Red Peppers.
2. Gordon: Vegetarian Haggis and Neeps.
Lightly spiced vegetarian strudel with yellow pepper sauce.
3. Me: Dill-marinated peat smoked Finnan Haddock with a quail's egg. Fillets of Ayr Cod.
Wine: Valpolicella D.O.C. Quinterelli (your friend and mine)

Monday, 2^nd September

We woke up early to find a mist hovering in the small park opposite.

8.50: Flight Loganair LC421 to Islay which is the most southerly of the Hebridean islands, part arable, part moorland peat with farming, fishing and whisky - also early Christian sites - I read in the airplane magazine.

Our plane was a forty-seat twin propeller. There was mist on the runway and a glow in the sky as the sun struggled to show itself. We climbed the mist into the sunshine. Hills appeared in the distance, pale grey and blue, before plunging back into the mist like whales playing in the shallows. Along the coast the mist rolled back to reveal the sea stretching its pale canvas to the horizon.

Now we could see the coastal landscape of field and woodland, the landscape of estuary rather than ocean. A row of houses outlined the margin of a beach. The land lay warm toned against the matt blue inlets of water. There were red uplands and smooth green valleys and a river that looked as if it had been gouged out with a penknife. There were isolated settlements, islands the size of my thumbnail and a bright white lighthouse guarding one island tip. Water and land alternated. A turreted manse sprawled on a promontory - reminiscent of a chateau on the Loire. Then, the sea again, blue and flat through my scratched window. A deserted island of yellow rock and green scrub. A fishing boat like a fly crawling across the table of the sea.

Descending towards Islay atolls and archipelagos sped beneath us. A white church surrounded by sea. The sides of a natural harbour curve into the water. Stone buildings gleam in the morning sunshine and there are rocky uplands with glassy lakes, a crofter's stone cottage. Suddenly we've landed on the runway. I can see sheep across the fence.

After lunch:

We sit on a grassy bluff overlooking the bay at Port Charlotte. It has a short stone pier, and white cottages huddle against the Port Charlotte Hotel. Behind us is a white-washed cafe and the Islay Museum which we have still to visit.

We were met this morning by Jim Macewan, manager of the Bowmore Distillery. He drove us in a smart red mini-bus with the Bowmore logo on the side - along country lanes, past swathes of purple heather. He pointed out the river Laggan whose waters are used for making the whisky. We passed the peat channels where the locals pay ten pounds for the right to dig for their winter fuel.

Bowmore Distillery is right on the edge of the sea. It consists of a group of white buildings dominated by the towers of the kilns where hazy peat smoke drifts out, scenting the air with a fragrance that mixes with the sea-weed smells of the sea.

Up in the drying shed the barley grain is poured on to a vast floor and regularly raked and turned to prevent the grains from sprouting. This ensures that soluble starch is produced. The barley lies a foot thick and the raking makes it look like wind ripples on the desert sand. The treated barley is smoked over peat and stirred in huge mash tubs and then poured into vats. The condensation flows through copper pipes as a clear liquid.

It was very warm among the copper tanks and stills. I had the impression of a Heath Robinson invention with all those rivets and contorted copper tubing. The inspection windows could have come from Captain's Nemo's Nautilus. The hundred year old spirit safe (kept under lock and key by order of Customs and Excise) had been built by Robert Armour of Campbeltown in the Mull of Kintyre - a solid piece of machinery if ever I saw one: ('AND DINNA FERGIT THE RIVITTS, MACANNA!') wrote Gordon.

We stayed for some time at Port Charlotte. Ralph swam in the freezing sea and I climbed among the rock pools as if I had been transported back to the 1950s and very English seaside holidays where I did the same thing but with my skirt tucked into my knickers in those days. I don't think I ever had a pair of shorts. We didn't in those days.

The Museum of Islay life was housed in a converted stucco church. Its sloping graveyard accommodated the Islay notables of yesteryear. The Museum was well stocked with artifacts donated by Islay families - agricultural implements, miniature whisky stills, household gadgets, cradles, wooden beds with clothes laid out to evoke the daily lives of the Islay people of a hundred years ago.

We took the road to Bruickladdich and its 19^th century distillery and followed a sign towards Lake Gorm across the plateau due west. The landscape, inspite of its bleakness or because of it, was spectacular. The brown and rust-coloured grassland turned into slate grey in the distance and merged into slopes of purple heather and pasture dotted with buttercups. Away in the distance, three or four hills away, we could see a crofter's lonely cottage with neatly painted window frames and piles of peat stacked at the back. Kiloman Church, which appeared more distant in the sunny haze looked lonelier than the crofter's cottage - and then down to Machir Bay where the stiffening wind and the thin sunshine gave another aspect - a vast expanse of sky, sea and sand.

We had supper with Jim and his wife, Barbara, at the Lochside Hotel in the street that leads up to Bowmore's round church. Later we decided that Jim looked like Albert Finney and that Barbara looked like Alma Cogan. Jim regaled us with anecdotes about distillery life and how people found ways to sneak whisky out of the distillery under the nose of the Customs Officer. There were various methods - filling hot water bottles and salad cream jars, for example. Then there was old Jock who had a bad hip. He would sidle past the Customs Man holding his hip as if in terrible pain. "Och!" he would murmur, "I've got trouble with my back again!" and he would hobble by with his Wellington boots full of whisky.

Thursday, 3^rd September

I am sitting against an old stone wall by the distillery cottage where we are staying. The sun is bright and warm and the sea is calm, like a sheet of glass. Jim showed us the fish (grey mullet) jumping by the edge of the shore, graceful shapes gliding through the shallows and making ripples spiral on the surface.

Ralph has gone into the distillery to take some more photos and I shall simply sit here and enjoy the sunshine.

Sitting in Jim's metal rowing boat. A group of old fishermen sit below the break-water. The hum of the Distillery reaches us. The thin sunshine casts its haze on the quiet water. The round church sits above the sloping street like the overlord of serfdom. The cottages spread out along the shoreline. We have just seen three grey mullet, their fins breaking the surface of the water. We row close to them and watch them for a while.

We have just been to see 93 year-old Davie Bell, the oldest inhabitant on Islay, in his cottage garden across the road from the Distillery. We walked through a blue wicket gate. Purple clematis framed the bright blue windows. It was a long narrow garden with a stream running alongside, a shed made from tarred roofing sheets and wooden batons and a small greenhouse full of tomato plants. Beyond these and the pocket handkerchief lawn was the vegetable patch with rows of lettuce, carrots, cabbage, leeks and beetroot intermingled with dahlias, nasturtiums and marigolds.

Davie appeared from his garden shed, stooped and small with a brown tweed hat, baggy corderoy trousers held up by braces, black leather boots and a smile of welcome that lit up his lined brown face. He fetched an old dairy stool from the top of a wood stack in the corner and sat down so that Ralph could draw him. He kept still and self-contained, his hands poised carefully on his knees, with the hint of a smile playing on his lips. He had been a cooper at the distillery and is still to be seen there, talking to the visitors about times past and, of course, he is always given a 'wee dram' when he appears.

We walked up the steep village street to the round church. A black funeral hearse had drawn up outside. Its back doors were open. Mourners spilled out of the church and down the steps. The men wore shiny Sunday suits, the ladies were sombre in blacks and dark blues. Suddenly we heard the squirrel of bagpipes and the mourners followed the slow progress of the hearse with the piper in front to the graveyard at the back for the burial. Ralph brazenly took some photos. I hung back behind a post office van parked by the small post office, afraid to intrude on the community mourning the departed soul.

We had lunch at the Harbour Inn - fresh mussels and crab-feet with garlic sauce. Delicious!!

After lunch we headed out again and took the road for Port Ellen. We saw a buzzard flying low and a mist rolling towards us. There were peat channels and piles of peat. Past the airport we saw peaks in the distance and banks of yellow ragwort.

Laphroaig Distillery:

It was an imposing white building with a chimney and overlooked a bay of black rocks and irridescent water. It was a pity about the beach littered with polystyrene barrels. The water that lapped on the stones was green and scummy - contrasting with the pristine distillery buildings. It was quiet - just the hum of the distillery machinery.

Lagavulin Distillery:

Here the bay was peppered with rocky islets and the ruins of Dunyveg Castle. There was a long wooden pier with a few boats moored to the stilts. On the eastern side there were three whitewashed houses on a grassy ridge.

Ardbeg Distillery:

Its view was of a wilder bay with rocky islands far out to sea. We sat about 50 feet up on a grassy knoll. There was no familiar hum coming from the distillery since they are not distilling at the moment. All I could hear was the whirr of Gordon's video camera and the lapping of the water. We saw a seal swimming in the bay, snorting out of the still waters before diving into the depths.

4^th September

Islay Airport

Our flight back to Glasgow has been delayed for an hour, so we are sitting in the tiny airport cafe. It is the only airport I've seen with a cattle grid at the entrance.

Last night we ate with Alastair Ross and James Munro. We were served local lobster and afterwards I had bread-and-butter pudding (homemade) - delicious and crispy. James is somehow involved in the transport/ferry business. He was a dour man with a visage like W.C. Fields and a face like a beacon. Alastair seemed to embody the entrepreneurial spirit with business interests in Uruguay, associations with South Africa, dealings with the King of Butan, rich Arabs and old Scottish aristocracy. I enjoyed a nightcap of Glayva - blended whisky with hints of aniseed and mint.

Arriving in Glasgow a smart chauffeur driven limousine saw us from Glasgow to Aberdeen. (Bannockburn, Stirling, Gleneagles, Perth, Aberdeen). We stopped beyond Perth to make our rendezvous with John Hughes (Sales Director for Matthew Gloag of Famous Grouse, Highland Park and Tam Dhu.) We stopped in the carpark of a pub set amongst golden cornfields. We transferred our baggage to John's car and carried on towards Aberdeen through sun-soaked rolling countryside and stopped in a cornfield for a picnic of wine and sandwiches from Marks and Spencer. It was a nice touch. John, on the face of it, seems like a typical business director, but very thoughtful and with a dry wit.

Orkney: Gone was the temperate climate on Islay. Here it was windy and overcast. As we descended through the clouds we were aware of the wide horizon, green slopes and a slate grey sea. Kirkwall is a small town of old stone houses around a sheltered harbour with rocky breakwaters. The Kirkwall Hotel overlooked the harbour and was of the same stone as the rest of the town. Our room overlooked the fishing boats, cranes and the old customs house.

Thursday, 5^th September

We had a jolly dinner at the hotel with John Hughes and Tony Troon, a journalist on The Scotsman. I had my favourite aperatif, Glayva, but afterwards Tony produced a special bottle of Highland Park. By the end of the evening it was empty. Not being a whisky lover, I was left to finish the bottle of Bordeaux we had been drinking with the meal.

The Merkister Hotel:

It had views of a wide loch with white birds bobbing up and down on the wind-rippled surface. We went through Highland Park Distillery and saw the same processes as before - wooden wash-back tanks, the smoking floor of barley over its peat fire and the three distillery cats called Malt, Peat and Barley. Then along the coast road for lunch - the landscape reminded me of pictures I've seen of the Falklands - wide green pastures, bleak stone houses across shallow valleys, glimpses of the frisky, wind-stirred lochs, sheep and cows. The weather is fresh and sunny.

We stopped by an old stone house with flat stones on one roof and green turf on the other. An old lady in a blue overall came out and fed her hens from a small slate shed. There was another shed which was circular with turf on the top. There were lace curtains at the windows, a seagull on one of the chimneys and a rusting Andersen shelter against a bank of low shrubs and trees. The long grass went right up to the house and behind was a loch reflecting both sky and pasture. A pile of rusting iron lay nearby and the chicken hut had blue polythene sheeting over the window. An old rose bush and white daisies grew by the side of the house and the waving pastures met the pale blue sky in a vast sweep.

We stopped at Stromness which overlooked the Hoy Sound and the island of Hoy, its narrows streets of mainly 18^th century houses gave sudden glimpses of the water below. The Hudson Bay Company ships used to call here for refurbishment and to recruit young Orkneymen for the fur stations of Canada and the whaling ships called on their way to and from Greenland.

On the Bay of Skaill stand the prehistoric settlement (at least 4000 years old) of Skara Brae. Covered up until the 20^th century, storms revealed it on the knoll above the bay. It was built of carefully arranged local stone and still look eminently lived-in with shelves, cupboards and partitions built from the same stone.

Our final visit was to the Ring of Brogar, a circle of neolithic standing stones. In the pre-dusk light they were dark and mysterious against a purple sky and the purple peaks. There were masses of purple heather too. So with the deep blue of the sea the scene was dramatic.

Friday, 6^th September

We had supper at the Creele Hotel in St. Margaretshope. On the way we stopped at the Italian Chapel at Lambhom. It was built by Italian prisoners of war, captured during the North African campaign in World War II. They were sent to Orkney to work on the Churchill Barrier, a series of concrete causeways designed to seal the eastern approaches into Scapa Flow. The Chapel was painstakingly converted from two Nissen huts with an Italianate facade. Inside was beautiful stone work and ornamentation painted on the walls with frescoes of saints. It was a moving experience to see it, a religious one, in fact, to stand in this dim chapel with the sun setting over the loch.

We had woken early to catch the morning plane from Orkney to Aberdeen. From there we were driven to Speyside to see yet more distilleries.

The first on our route was Chivas Bros. to their modern factory for blending and quality control - not very interesting except that the conveyor belts moving the barrels became quite mesmerising and the quality control area where we 'nosed' the whisky. The blends were tested at every stage. Sample bottles labeled with dates and code numbers stood in rows on shelves.

We had lunch at the Craigellachie Hotel, Craigellachie, Speyside, Banffshire with Patrick Glendinning. He greeted on our arrival. I was confused and for some reason thought that his name was Ian Grant. Could he, I wondered, be Mr. Grant of Grants Whisky. I thought he was bound to be a Scottish Laird who lived in a Highland Castle in great splendour. I could have been forgiven for he was resplendent in kilt, sporran and all - with a monocle too. He was actually an ex-army officer, ex-teacher who now worked as a tour guide for the distillery. He looked very much like the actor, Ian Richardson. He was a charming man who quickly caught on to our feelings of distillery-overkill.

Strathisla Distillery was set in a dip between rolling hills and was old and venerable with grey stone walls and a water wheel. We walked through the Distillery, knowing exactly what we were going to find, but nevertheless appreciated the shiny copper stills, the great backwash tubs and fermenting malt.

Then, on to Longmorn, which Gordon said we had to see because Oddbins were promoting it for Christmas. Then we had a quick look at Benriach and Queen Anne.

Patrick was happy for us to give in to our fatigue and we were dropped off at the Glen Rothes Hotel at four o'clock. It was a beautiful place, an old hunting lodge with rounded turrets and pointed roofs like a Loire chateau. From our room we looked out on to a wide slope purple with heather and woods dipping down to a cup-shaped valley. Shaggy Highland cattle grazed there - an idyllic situation which we appreciated in spite of our tiredness.

We had dinner with the publicity manager of the Glenlivet Distillery, Mark Lawson, a nice man. He encourages the whisky trade to sponsor the arts rather than sport, which must be a good thing: Plague and the Moonflower, perhaps – that's what we thought, anyway.

Saturday, 7^th September

Now we are on the last leg of our whisky journey - flying home from Aberdeen. We had a quick visit to the Glenlivit Distillery so that Ralph could receive one final explanation of the distilling process and then we were driven to Aberdeen where we had time to shop for the right colour inks for the Whisky List - orange for whisky and browns, purples and greens for the landscape. The hillsides had patches of mist on their slopes. Aberdeen was a grey city under grey skies.

So here we come to the end of my diary, short as it is. How I envy the Victorian diarists who had more time on their long journeys to observe and reflect on their surroundings.

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