Raw Spirit (44 page)

The M5. North to look for Speyside distillery again on the way to Dufftown and then Glen Garioch at Old Meldrum. In quest terms, this is a culminant trip, a raid into the distant hills and forests to a place of richness, a descending upon, to lift the treasure. I’m fairly brimming with anticipation, though I’m just a tiny bit nervous too, in case the cupboard is bare (of course, I could just have rung up and checked, but somehow that seemed like cheating).

Near Kingussie I finally find the way to the Speyside distillery, but it’s up a steep, rough track with formidable-looking stones and rocks where decent law-abiding tarmac ought to be. If I’d brought the Defender I’d be up there without a second thought, but in the M5, with its foot-wide low profiles, it’s just asking for trouble. I continue towards Dufftown instead.

Another hot day on Speyside, but this time it’s not unseasonable; it’s early August and the whole of the British Isles is having a proper summer heatwave. Records are being broken, tarmac is melting, rail tracks are buckling. I haul into the car park at Glenfiddich and buy so much whisky I’m invited to come to the rear door of the shop to load up from a pallet. This is the Gran Reserva I’ve decided is pretty much the bee’s knees. How good to make its acquaintance again.

Then I head east, for Old Meldrum, road-bagging as I go. This means spending at least some time on the A96, the much-used and much-abused main road between Aberdeen and Inverness.

There is an alternative way; the rail way, and that Aberdeen–Inverness line is also quite a good route for distillery-bagging, swinging through so much of Speyside. A book called
The Iron Road To Whisky Country
makes it sound like the only way to travel, though if you want to get round lots of distilleries, a car still seems the obvious choice. Especially if somebody else can do the driving.

Old Meldrum (innocent of the gratuitous ‘Old’ charge – it’s
just
the name of the town) is a pleasant little place on a low hilltop, deep in the fine farming land of Formartine. Formartine. Now there’s a word, a place I’d never heard of. It’s symptomatic of my relative ignorance of this whole corner of the country that the name of this regionette is completely new to me. It’s not an old county name, at least not one that I’d ever heard of, and yet there it is, on a couple of Ordnance Survey maps, and easily Googled – there’s a Formartine football team – so obviously the right name for the district but just one I’d never heard of. Whatever; Old Meldrum is home to what is now the most easterly distillery in Scotland, given that the old distillery at Glenugie near Peterhead has closed.

Glen Garioch, it turns out, is a real contender for undiscovered gem; a little-known belter. It has had its share of ups and downs, closures and changes over the years, and the expressions reflect some of that variability; not so much in outright quality but in the differing spectra of tastes they present. The peatiness has come and gone over the years for a start, but it may be making a comeback, depending where Morrison Bowmore/Suntory want to go with this particular distillery’s expressions. In the relatively recent past, certainly the bottles-still-available past, Glen Garioch has presented, at fifteen and 21 years old, as one of the last of the old-school Highland whiskies, full of peat and smokiness. This is balanced by lots of fruit and herbs and a degree of sweetness with a long, rich finish. More recent expressions may not be so olde-worlde characterful – much less peat for one thing – but the spirit being laid down over the last few years appears to be returning to its roots, which in Glen Garioch’s case you would swear you can smell. Entirely worth seeking out.

To Oban by train. Ann and I take the Fife Loop from North Queensferry to Waverley, the Embra–Glasgow shuttle service to Queen Street, then the combined Fort William/Oban West Highland train, which splits at Crianlarich.

I’ve always liked trains. When I was a child I loved going down to the station at North Queensferry and climbing the steps of the footbridge to wait for a train to pass underneath.
This
was the early sixties, so most of the trains were hauled by steam engines. The steam and smoke exploded out around you as the engine’s funnel slid beneath the metal plates protecting the bridge’s wooden structure. For a few moments you were completely enveloped in a oil-scented white fog of warm steam and coal smoke, just lost to the world, ears ringing. I think I fell in love with that feeling of wild abandonment, that noise, that smell, that sense of power and raw, released energy – those of you who’ve read my book
The Bridge
might recognise this description. When they started using diesel multiple units for the Fife Loop, our school playground would stop as we all stood and stared, fascinated, at this strange engine-less group of carriages coming trundling across the Bridge.

The first part of the journey to Oban is unremarkable, leaving Queen Street and looping round from north to west, through the undelightful schemes before coming back down towards the Clyde after Dalmuir and Kilpatrick (I get a good look at that Art Deco-ish sports pavilion I spotted while I was trying to find a way to Auchentoshan distillery). The line heads under the Erskine Bridge – as elegant and minimalist as the Forth Road Bridge is dramatic and muscular – and then along the shore towards Dumbarton, where those red summits of the Inverleven distillery rise like bricky echoes of Dumbarton Rock, then heads along the coast again, with Port Glasgow, Greenock and Gourock present across the river and the hills and mountains of Argyll visible in the haze down river. The line starts to rise after the outskirts of Helensburgh, then clatters along the hillside. Out of the town we head towards the sheer bloody disfiguring awfulness that is Faslane, the greatest physical manifestation on British soil of our Not Even Remotely Independent Deterrent; our US-owned, Brit-managed McNuke franchise.

Last rant before the end
.

I have been in Faslane. Ann and I stopped off at the base once to see my cousin Katrine when she was Press Relations Officer
there
– she’s a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, and, as I write this she is, thankfully, just back unharmed from the Gulf (another whisky connection; Katrine’s father, my uncle Peter, ex Fleet Air Arm, used to fly the private plane for the Distillers Company). Faslane is home port to the giant submarines which carry the US/UK Poseidon missiles with their Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicle warheads (how nice to find something that claims to be Independent that actually is).

It’s a big place full of impressive buildings. There’s one colossal shed that can house an entire mega-sub, and then raise the whole 30,000-tonne bulk of the thing right out of the water. So, massive, Thunderbirds-worthy machinery, entirely worth the ten billion of hard-earned taxeroos that went into the whole system. The base is full of helpful people, too; we’d limped in with a flat tyre on the Drambuie 911 after some arguably over-optimistic road-bagging on some very small and badly maintained roads in the hills not far away, and the guys from the base Engineering section helped me change the wheel (for one of those horrible space saver tyres – we had to crawl back to Fife at 50. I almost fell asleep).

Meanwhile the guys in the Officers’ Mess were, Ann reported, to a man unfailingly courteous, pleasant and witty. She loved the way they called Katrine ‘Ma’am’, too.

Tyre changed, we had lunch with the base commander, another deeply professional and quietly impressive guy, with a good line in deprecating, humanisingly funny stories about the base, like how the government gave him more money per head to feed the guard dogs than the men, and how some bored MoD police, sent out to a distant part of the site to make sure traffic was sticking to the base speed limit, had turned their radar gun on a guy out running, and put him on a charge for exceeding said speed limit (if I recall correctly, he was let off and they were reprimanded for wasting a superior’s time).

We had a good lunch in stimulating company and as we left to make our slow way home, past the peace people’s caravans outside the gates, I remember thinking that, given the fact that we had these weapons of mass destruction, and the whole Poseidon missile and sub system to house, deploy and launch
them,
the men and women we’d met on the base were exactly the sort of responsible, sensible, well-trained, eminently sane and thoroughly capable people I’d want to be in charge of them.

The point – for crying out bleedin loud – is that we shouldn’t have the damn things in the first place. They’re a moral obscenity, and it’s only one of their less poisonous consequences that all these smart, capable people devote their undoubted talent, sometimes their entire careers, to maintaining such horrors in preparation for a day they too hope will never come. I have enormous respect for these people, but, frankly, when I hear some bunch of bag-arsed feminist nutters have thrown a load of equipment off a Navy barge, or taken hammers to the nose cones of fighter bombers on an airbase, they’re the ones I truly admire.

I suppose my dad would say they were pissing into the wind, too. But that’s not the point.

The ugliness that is the whole McNuke Statelet takes a long time to go; there are further jetties up Loch Long, fuel tanks for conventional ships dotting the hillsides below the rising track and then the entrances to the deep ammo stores disfiguring Gleann Culanach. The views of Loch Long do a lot to ameliorate the grisly presence of this awfulness.

I travelled this way once just before New Year, maybe twenty years ago, with Jim and various other members of the Greenock card school, on our way for Hogmanay at Les’s. There had been a lot of snow over the previous few days, but on the evening we travelled it became a still, clear night with a full moon. Through opened windows we looked from the gently rocking train down to the ink-black loch under the pitch star-pitted sky, with the mountains on the far side of the loch shining pale blue-white under the moon and the trees all dark but dusted with the snow. The old train’s engine became almost silent for a while, sound soaked up by the trees round a bend ahead as we coasted down towards the head of the loch, just the clicking of the carriage wheels left. A few tiny navigation lights winked, lost in the emptiness and the silence.

Another time, again in winter but on this occasion in the bright milk light of day, the train was crossing the waste that is Rannoch Moor, where the whole line floats on sunken, bundled branches, when it startled a whole hundred-or-more herd of deer. They went leaping away across the page-white snow, dark bodies like liquid shadows, as though made from some quickened negative of mercury.

Then there was the time Jim and I sat across the table from each other on the same journey, completely stoned, and had an Extreme Close-Range Water Pistol Fight.

Ah well. Boys and toys.

It’s a hottish journey in the train, even with all the windows open (no AC for the West Highland Line, though on the few occasions when you’d welcome it, you’d really welcome it). The views are worth it though.

Oban. We stay at the Caledonian Hotel, as it’s close to the station. Once dowdy, the place has become positively funky. Our room has a view over the harbour even better than the one at Kirkwall, and a big free-standing bath in the generously sized bathroom, with a separate shower big enough to bend over in for soap retrieval purposes without the risk of impaling oneself on the plumbing. Lots of stripes and bright colours. And themed, too, in a nautical and sailorish sort of way. There are some nice little flourishes; our room on the third floor has a wee turret with a single curved window, and the curtains hang from the rail via boating shackles rather than ordinary curtain rings.

The view is magnificent, across the arms of the busy town spread out enfolding the harbour, with sheltering Kerrera just off shore, Lismore, Morvern and Mull in the distance. A few long banks of mist spill over the far sea, brilliant white in the August light.

Oban’s a proper urban distillery, even more so than, say, Tobermory, however it’s still very close to the sea, or at least the harbour. Good Visitor Centre, interesting tour (unique double worm-tub condensers, so there) and a well-stocked shop very definitely in Modern Vernacular style, with walls of thin-slabbed greenish glass, pale wood abounding, well
up-tarted
iron columns and lots of steel stanchions. All a bit cramped and crammed in, with a bustling town around it and a cliff behind, but interesting. Busy, at you might expect, given that it’s in the centre of one of the West’s prime tourist spots and the whisky itself is well promoted as part of the UDV/Diageo Classic Malts range.

As a dram, Oban is an interesting amalgam, with hints of Island – even Islay – and Highland characteristics. The standard expression is a 14-year-old with only a thimble of peat and wee breeze of sea about it. It has lots of caramelly, smoky sweetness, a sort of luscious thickness in the mouth and a reprise of seaweed towards the end. A little pot of gold at the end of a fabulous railway line.

The wait for the journey back isn’t too much fun, though the reason for the final delay is not one you could blame on Scotrail. The 1320 train had almost every seat reserved and so we stay in Oban – strolling, shopping and sitting in the bar – until the 1810 is due to leave. There is, however, a problem. There’s been a bad road accident just out of town which has created a huge tailback (and caused the wee roads I’ve referred to as the Oban bypass to jam up for hours). Our train driver is on the wrong side of the jam. For a while there’s talk of the train being cancelled. Oh well, I tell Ann, we’ll just stay another night, what the hell. We already know the Caledonian is fully booked for tonight, but I just walk round to the Tourist Information Centre, attractively housed in an old church … only to discover that Oban is having one of its Full nights, with no hotel rooms or B&Bs left. There might be some people left who didn’t normally do B&B who would put stranded tourists up, but even they might all be full …

Redman’s Blues
.

Les and Aileen did this once years ago, when somebody from the Fort William tourist office got their number and – in some desperation – rang up about ten o’clock in the evening to say, look, they had all these people and nowhere to put them
up
for the night (Fort Bill Full); could they help out?