Raw Spirit (39 page)

There’s a Visitor Centre here so it’s not as though you need to ask somebody nicely before you can see all this, which basically sounds like exactly the sort of Big Engineering Stuff that I’d really get off on, but the trouble is that when we pass here we’re usually either, as today, on the way to catch a ferry, or on our way back after a holiday and just wanting to get home. Plus it is a great bit of road, so we tend to have already gone whistling past by the time we think it might be an idea to stop and have a look. Still, one day.

At Connel, tyres swishing through the remains of a light shower, we look for the Falls of Lora, but the tide’s wrong. The falls are tidal rapids caused by a broad lip of underwater rock at the narrows where Loch Etive joins the sea; twice a day, unless it’s a neap tide, the whole width of the narrows fills with wild, surging surf. It’s kind of nature’s equivalent of the Ben Cruachan pump-it-up/let-it-flow-down setup. Actually it’s mildly surprising it hasn’t been dammed with a tidal barrage.

The falls lie almost underneath the bridge at Connel. This is an old, narrow girder bridge which used to carry both road vehicles and trains, when the line still ran to Ballachulish; traffic lights stopped the cars when a train was approaching (I remember seeing this happen, back in the early sixties when we were on holiday and Mum and Dad’s car was stopped at the Connel side. The steam engine roared past only feet away from us. I recall being immensely impressed). Even without the trains the bridge is still too narrow for two-way traffic, so the lights at both ends remain.

The ferry is inbound a mile or two out of port as we arrive in Oban. I’ve always liked Oban; it can get so busy in the height of the season that the whole town is basically full, with nowhere to park and nowhere to stay, but I suppose that’s down to geography. The place grew up around its harbour, and the same intricate foldings of the landscape that made the
anchorage
sheltered by hiding it from the open waters mean that the land nearby is highly convoluted, all steep hills, cliffs and outcrops of rock with relatively little flat ground available. At such times, if you don’t need to go through it but it lies en route, it’s arguably quicker and certainly much more pleasant to take to the network of wee roads east of the town which I tend to think of as the Oban bypass, but for all its its dizzy bustle the place has real charm and the ferries, fishing boats, yachts and trains give it a buzz that by Highland standards makes the place positively colourful.

As the ship quits the harbour, we pass the ivy-smothered ruins of Dunollie Castle. I climbed this once, on a day trip by train from Edinburgh, and did a circuit of the walls’ broad summit. That was after the first instance of What Happened To My Car, back in 1987, when I was travelling by train quite a lot because I’d picked up a twenty-month ban for drunk driving. Broke Jim’s ankle, wrote off a very large Volvo and demolished a not insignificant part of a Kentish farm. Long story.

I do not have chicken curry and chips on the ferry.

We pass Duart Castle shortly before docking at Craignure. This is another much filmed location; the most recent film I remember seeing it used in was
Entrapment
, but it’s been in a few others. We’re staying at Druimard Country House Hotel, in Dervaig, right beside the small but perfectly formed Little Theatre of Mull, about twenty minutes away from Tobermory, the island’s capital.

The food at Druimard is excellent, though only Michelle and I turn up for breakfast. Tom, like Ann, seems to number Sleep and Having a Long Lie amongst his hobbies. I am tempted by the kipper, but we’ll be in the M5 for a good few hours today, and in-car belching etiquette dictates that scrambled eggs are probably a safer bet. When we eventually round up our respective spouses we head over the wee twisty road for Tobermory, like Oban another clinging-to-the-land-by-its-fingernails kind of town, but very colourful.

Tobermory has probably been on more postcards and magazine and book covers than any other Scottish town of its size
just
because it’s so picturesque (and these days it’s almost better known as the BBC’s Balamory); every harbour-front building save the church seems to be some freshly painted and very bright primary colour – usually with contrast detailing round the edges and apertures – and the whole wildly motley crescent is backed by wooded cliffs and reflected in the clear waters of the harbour. One of those places you practically have to have a degree in camera klutzhood to take a bad photo of.

At the distillery, we register an interest in taking a tour – they need a few more than just us to make a quorate tour group. However after a look round some interesting craft shops and a chandlers on the spectrum of seafront, we get together with some more people to do the look-round.

Tobermory distillery instantly gets the prize for Hottest Still Room So Far. It’s not even that hot outdoors but the still room is small and relatively cramped, and with the stills operating as they are now, you can feel the heat increase with pretty much every step you take up from the room’s floor to the walkway set around the stills’ centres. I remember walking uphill in the largest of the big quilted-looking biomes at the Eden Project in Cornwall the summer before, and experiencing the same feeling there, each pace underneath the giant bubble-wrap semispheres seeming to make the air hotter and more humid. It doesn’t feel too claustrophobic in the still house because there’s a big new window looking out onto the road outside, but the heat is such that you can see people start to wilt almost as soon as we walk in.

The distillery sits in a relatively cramped site jammed against the bottom of a cliff, across the main road from its old warehouses, which have been turned into rather attractive council flats. The main road down into the bay-front centre of town runs past them, but the traffic noise must be partially masked by the susurrus of sound coming from the distillery’s water supply, the Tobermory River, which tumbles down the steep stepped channel between the flats and the road. These days the spirit is taken to be matured in that big old converted mill by the Teith at Deanston, near Doune. Usually reliable sources indicate that this has, as you might expect, changed
the
character of the whisky so that it’s less island-like in flavour, missing some of the seaweedy notes it used to display and tasting a little more like a Lowland malt.

The water is so naturally heavily peated there’s no need to add peat to the malt for a hint of the flavour to come through in the finished dram, though phenolised malt is used for the Ledaig expression. Ledaig means ‘safe haven’ in Gaelic and was the old name for Tobermory, which – just as Oban is protected from on-shore winds by the island of Kerrera – is sheltered by Calve Island. The washbacks, housed in a Velux-windowed building set hard against a precipitous tree-lined slope, are made of Douglas fir, replacing the more usual Oregon pine.

The stills each have an odd-looking Lyne arm which looks like a drawn-out S lying on its side. Incredibly, Tobermory risks setting the entire atmosphere of Earth on fire and sending the planet spinning into the Sun by letting people take flash photos in the still house. Obviously these people don’t know the primal forces they’re meddling with. However it’s not my job to set the poor fools straight so I keep shtum and click and flash away with me Minolta.

The 15-year-old Ledaig I buy at the distillery is a nicely rounded dram of some peatiness and smoke, halfway between a typical Island Whisky and a Lowlander; a peninsular whisky, perhaps. There’s a kind of high, keen edge to it that then fills out into a kind of spicy chocolate flavour. Tobermory itself, usually bottled at ten years old, is a lighter whisky which still seems to have that touch of peat and sea about it, and focuses the spiciness of Ledaig down to a sort of nutty pepperiness.

I don’t grudge the people in the flats opposite the distillery their homes, but you do wonder what the expressions of the last couple of decades would have tasted like had they been matured within sniffing distance of the sea.

The last thing we do before leaving for the ferry is buy some Mull Cheddar, one of the best, tangiest, most fiercely flavoured cheeses you can buy.

A couple of weeks later on a hot, bright sunny day Ann and I take the wee car through Glen Devon to Crieff and Gilmerton
and
back round to the Famous Grouse Experience at Glenturret. We go via the small, very peaceful little chapel at Tullibardine, an old family chapel no longer in use but sitting very prettily in a stand of beautifully shaped Scots pines, and wonderfully cool inside on such a hot day.

The route has also taken us past Gleneagles, the stupendously grand but surprisingly welcoming überhotel where, in the big art deco bar to the right as you enter through the main doors, there is a very thick brown book detailing lots of whiskies. Lots of old, rare whiskies. Lots of old, rare, very expensive whiskies. Lots of old, rare whiskies which are so expensive the prices make you blink and look again, because you could buy an entire case of quite decent whisky for the price being asked here for a glass. It is a decent glass, in the sense that the standard measure is a small double – 50ml – but even so.

I have never gone entirely mad with this big brown book, but even keeping to the humbler examples there are interesting and out-of-the-way whiskies to be sampled if you choose carefully, and it’s really rather comforting to know that you’re in the presence – at the other end of the scale – of Extreme Whisky Pricing. I only hope that the people who do shell out hundreds of pounds for a dram aren’t doing it just to impress partners or people they’re trying to do a deal with. And that they don’t add bleedin Cola.

We stayed at Gleneagles over a long weekend with the McFarlanes, three years ago. Gleneagles has wonderful staff, brilliant food and drink, and has all sorts of sports and activities to take part in if you feel so inclined, or you can just be outrageously pampered. I believe golf is played there on occasion, too.

We went in opposite directions at the end of the weekend, the McFarlanes north to Glenfinnan, us south to North Queensferry. Ann and I were in the Defender at the time, which we’d bought a week or so earlier. It was still unchipped, with its original lowly horsepower quotient, and as we headed out of the car park towards the Glen Devon road, we were behind a brand new silver 911 Turbo. I naturally expected this beast to disappear into the distance in a red-shifted blur within about
half
a second of exiting the hotel grounds, but it didn’t. Instead it dawdled, rarely doing much more than 50. We stuck behind it in the Land Rover, driving fairly sedately, easily keeping pace. I swear if I’d really wanted to there were a couple of places I could have overtaken the guy. I didn’t – it would have seemed almost sacrilegious, and would basically have been showing off, even borderline aggressive – but I could have. I have no idea why the car was being driven so slowly, but it just goes to show; it ain’t what you drive, it’s how.

Glenturret is one of the smallest distilleries in Scotland (just one pair of stills), and one of the oldest (founded 1775), however it’s also one of the most up-to-date and visitor-friendly. It lies leafily beside the river Turret, only a mile or two from Crieff, and is set up to receive lots of visitors in a Centre displaying all the shiny newness of that Visitors Centre Vernacular, Reformed: blonde wood, lots of wee halogen spotlights, serious glass and cable-linked stanchions. Oddly, the stills themselves are one of the less visually appealing parts of the whole experience; they’re inelegant, almost square-looking things, but I suppose of all the qualities of a still its looks are the least important. There’s good Scottish food in a proper restaurant, various audio-visual bits and bobs, a well stocked shop and two statues; one of a giant grouse, at the entrance to the car park (for this is the Famous Grouse Experience, both it and Glenturret being owned by the Edrington Group), and another, much smaller one of Towser, the old distillery cat credited in
The Guinness Book of Records
with offing just under 29,000 mice. Actually with offing 28,899 mice, which is a very suspiciously precise number.

Roughly on a par with that warheads-ready-in-45-minutes piece of shite, come to think of it.

Well worth seeing, Glenturret, and well worth drinking, too. I go for the standard 12-year-old, which is all fruit and nut, like an extremely alcoholic chocolate bar. There’s dryness too, especially in the finish, with lolloping hints of grass and flowers. So; a chocolate bar sampled in a sunny meadow. Like an ad-exec’s dream from the seventies, really.

It’s a whisky that would probably particularly benefit from a vertical tasting, where the same drink is sampled at various ages. Reading what people have written about some of its older expressions it sounds like Glenturret changes more than most as it matures, and keeps on developing and getting better. Would that we could all perform the same trick.

14: The Ends of the Country

Welcome to the Free World
.

IN THE JULY
17th 2003 edition of the
Guardian
, in an article headlined ‘We are now a client state’, David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor set out the case for Tony Blair having finally surrendered to the United States of America most of the few remaining shreds of British sovereignty.

They point out that Britain cannot target, maintain or fire its Tomahawk cruise missiles without US authority, that this same restriction has applied to the Trident missile system for the last decade and a half (so that Britain’s ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent never has been; basically the British taxpayer has been paying for at least one sturdy spoke of the US’s nuclear umbrella all these years), that Britain has already entirely and formally given up sovereignty in various British mainland bases and several overseas ones, like the Indian Ocean bomber base of Diego Garcia, where the native people were thrown out 30 years ago and left on the docks in east Africa, that we spend a fortune gathering intelligence at GCHQ, share all of it with the US intelligence services – those paragons of vigilance who did such a brilliant job preventing the atrocities on September 11th – but they are under no obligation to share all they know with our lot, that (and this is ongoing through recent and envisaged purchasing and equipment standardisation decisions), Britain is tied into the US war-fighting
machine
to such an extent that it will no longer be capable of fighting a war without the US’s approval and connivance, while being, by extension, entirely expected to muck in with any American military adventure where such participation will help make this year’s invasion look less like the exercise in naked imperialism that it in fact is.