West Coast Whisky Trail

The Whisky Coast

The Whisky Coast Journey Part 2

Welcome to the second instalment of Robin Laing's Whisky Coast Journey:

 

Campbeltown

It felt like an adventure taking this road down the Kintyre peninsula to Campbeltown, especially since the weather was wild and the sea was driving in from the west. Once you leave Gigha behind, the sea that pitches up on this coast comes all the way from the Atlantic Ocean. As if to underline the point, one of the first things I saw was the broken hull of an old boat sticking out of the sand. I got out of the car at one point to take a photograph and the wind nearly whipped the spectacles off my face.

Kintyre is very aptly described as a peninsula and I saw a sign proclaiming ‘Kintyre – the mainland island’. In 1098, the Treaty of Tarbert granted King Magnus Bareleg of Norway all the western islands around which a ship could sail. The Viking king immediately dragged his boats over the narrows at Tarbert to prove that Kintyre was an island and should belong to him too. I don’t think he won the argument but it did prove just how ‘almost an island’ Kintyre is.

There are places worth stopping on the way down this road. At Clachan, just south of Kennacraig, is the attractive Ballinakill Hotel. At Ballinakill, nearly all the rooms have open fires. They also specialise in romantic breaks, providing flowers, champagne and chocolates as suitable amative accessories. Further on, at Bellochantuy is the old hunting lodge of the Dukes of Argyll, now a hotel with views out to sea and a whisky bar that won the ‘Malt Whisky Bar of the Year’ from the Scottish Licensed Trade Newspaper in 2006. An unusual place with boars’ heads mounted on the wall and an amazing range of whiskies, including e.g. a 55 year old Benromach. A mural painted on the wall above the bar starts with the usual castles, landscapes and tartan princes but finishes with depictions of some of the more gruesome punishments the locals have thought up, including sawing people in half and slicing off bad girls’ breasts. You choose your place at the bar, depending on your nature and predilections, or perhaps the stage of inebriation you have reached.

At Westport, the road goes overland towards Campbeltown, but the coast swings round Machrihanish Bay to the village of Machrihanish. This extensive beach is a magnet for surfers. Access can be gained from the north or the south end. I stood at the south end on the first tee of Machrihanish golf course with Peter Currie, from Springbank distillery. Peter is a young guy who spends most of his leisure time in the water, surfing, windsurfing, boating or whatever else beach bums do. While we watched the long waves breaking on the beach, he explained the different wave qualities that surfers get excited about and the weather conditions that create them. That first tee, by the way, was voted ‘the best opening hole in golf’ by golf architects and players. Standing there in the wind, I remembered the old folk song ‘Machrihanish, bright and bonnie, and on the beach the waves are rolling; Machrihanish, I adore thee, never more may I behold thee’.  

These few lines remind us that in the old days the sea was the highway and a source of livelihood for many people up and down this western coast, a fact that goes a long way to explain why Campbeltown was the whisky capital of Scotland for much of the 19th century. Now that heavy goods vehicles cruise a tarmac ribbon instead and the sea is not so busy, fortunes have changed and Campbeltown is cut off and isolated. The rise and fall of Campbeltown as a whisky centre is described and documented in David Stirk’s excellent book ‘The Distilleries of Campbeltown’.

 

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