Month: June 2022

Scotland 2022: The Tour of Ardnamurchan Distillery

An account of a tour of the Ardnamurchan Distillery.

Welcome to the latest in my series of posts about my recent Scottish holiday. This post covers the tour of Ardnamurchan Distillery on the day of my birthday, now eight days ago.

A VERY NEW DISTILLERY

The Ardnamurchan distillery was built over the course of 2011 and 2012 and produced its first whisky in 2014. The tour was very comprehensive, taking in the warehouse and every stage of the distilling process. It ended with a sample of the product, which is very distinctive – virtually no smokiness or peatiness to it and sweeter than most whiskies. I rate it very highly myself. I will leave photographs to tell the rest of the story – click on an image to view it full size…

Scotland 2022: The Western Edge of Mainland Britain

An account of a quick visit to the westernmost point in mainland Britain.

I am continuing my series about my holiday in Scotland (after a long and stressful day of travelling back on Saturday I was far too tired to do anything yesterday). We have reached Tuesday (six days ago now), the centrepiece of which was a tour of the Ardnamurchan Distillery. That will be the subject of my next post, while this post deals with the first event of that day.

ARDNAMURCHAN POINT

The Ardnamurchan Distillery is located just west of the village of Glen Borrodale on the northern shore of Loch Sunart, which is the southern edge of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Beyond this to the west is Ardnamurchan Point, the westernmost point of mainland Britain (to give you an idea of how far west the Ardnamurchan peninsula juts out to the west, the Inner Hebridean isle of Eigg is due north of the western half of the peninsula), and our plan was to see this before arriving at the distillery for the 2PM start time of our tour.

Unfortunately, a combination of a later than intended start and the poor quality of some of the roads meant that we only had time for a very brief stop at the Western edge of mainland Britain before turning round and heading back to the distillery.

Here are the pictures from the outward car trip:

I just had time to take two pictures at the point:

The journey back to the distillery was enlivened by an encounter with someone I have dubbed ‘psycho cyclist’. We were behind him on the road and he took a long time to pull into the side so that we could get past, and did so with astonishingly bad grace – swearing at us and gesturing manically. I am normally sympathetic towards cyclists, but this individual did himself no favours with his wilfully aggressive and confrontational attitude. I took a few more pictures heading back:

Scotland 2022: The River Shiel and Tioram Castle

An account of a riverside walk centred on a 13th century ruined castle.

Those who read my first post in this series will not be surprised that following the events of Saturday we were all too knackered to do anything active on Sunday. Thus this post deals with Monday’s activity, a (mainly) riverside walk with Tioram Castle as its centre piece.

The River Shiel

For the first part of our walk we followed the road, but fortunately we were then able to divert on to a well made track following the river bank. The river Shiel is stunningly scenic, and as you will be seeing it has some quite interesting currents and whirlpools. Tioram Castle, a 13th century ruin that one cannot actually enter is located where the Shiel flows into Loch Shiel, a sea loch (for reference, what the Scots call a sea loch the Norwegians call a fjord). Here are some photos from the outward journey…

CASTLE TIORAM

The castle is approached across a causeway, and then along a path that is tricky in places. Here are some pictures to end this post…