Julian Worker's Blog, page 9

Isle of Islay – 5

A pot or wash still is filled about two-thirds full of a fermented liquid called wash with an alcohol content of about 7–12%. The still is then heated so that the liquid boils. The liquid being distilled is a mixture of mainly water and alcohol or ethanol. At sea level, alcohol has a boiling point of 78.4 degrees Centigrade whereas water boils at 100 degrees Centigrade. Therefore, the alcohol evaporates at a higher rate than water. This means the concentration of alcohol in the vapour above the liquid in the still is higher than in the liquid itself. This vapour travels up the swan neck at the top of the pot still and down the lyne arm, after which it travels through the condenser (also known as the worm), where it is cooled to yield a distillate with a higher concentration of alcohol than the original liquid. After one such stage of distillation, the resulting liquid, called “low wines”, has a concentration of about 25–35% alcohol by volume. In a single malt whisky these low wines are distilled again in another pot still and yield a distillate with a higher concentration of alcohol.

The tasting area at Caol Ila has the finest view of any, looking out over the Sound of Islay towards the Paps of Jura. This is the water across which the Feolin ferry heads from Jura on a regular basis to Port Askaig. With its higher elevation, the tasting room allows visitors to appreciate the tides and the currents that are flowing in both directions at the same time. 

The next thing for me to do was to catch the ferry over the Sound Of Islay to Jura. I could see the bus had already arrived and was waiting for the passengers to come. Everything is so well organised.

Spanish Football Fans in Leicestershire

Harborough Town Football Club is a football club based in Market Harborough, Leicestershire. They are currently members of the Southern League Premier Division Central, the seventh tier of English football, and play at Bowden Park.

Football tourism is usually seen at Premier League stadiums such as Old Trafford, Anfield and the Emirates, so fans of Harborough Town were stunned when 100 Spaniards arrived at Bowden Park to watch them take on St Ives Town.

Read the rest of the story here

Isle of Islay – 4

There is a footpath from Port Charlotte to Bruichladdich with views over Loch Indaal. I walked past the war memorial and a photogenic church to the village where I admired the distinct aquamarine blueness of the distillery’s design that makes its branding so distinctive. This is the place that also distills the wonderful ‘The Botanist’ gin and visitors can see the Ugly Betty still modified by an engineer to capture the delicate essence of the twenty two hand-foraged Islay botanicals listed on the bottle. When I visited, the ladder that extends towards the top of the still had the nickname ‘Bruichladder’. 

From here it’s a taxi ride to the Kilchoman distillery set in lovely farming country near the west coast of the island. Kilchoman oversees the total production of their range of whiskies, from growing their own barley to bottling the whisky. The malting process is split into three key stages – steeping, germination, and kilning.

Steeping the barley for 2 days with a soaking cycle allows all the natural starches and enzymes to form. These are the two essential ingredients required to create sugar later. Temperature, moisture content, and growth are monitored over this period. After steeping, the barley is spread out on the unheated malting floor and will stay there for 4-5 days, where it will be turned every 2-4 hours while also having its moisture content and temperature checked. At this stage, the aim is to keep the barley germinating, mimicking the ideal growing conditions it would experience in the field. Outside climatic conditions can change quickly, testing the production team’s knowledge to make the necessary changes inside to keep the germination going. Once the team are happy with how the grains have germinated, the barley is moved to the kiln for the final stage of the process. There is no substitute for experience on the malting floor where it’s a true art, rather than a science, to judge when the internal conditions need to change or the germination is completed. 

Back in Port Charlotte, I caught the bus to Port Askaig, another ferry terminal where you can catch a ferry to Kennacraig or, in my case, the ferry over to the Isle of Jura known as the Feolin ferry. First though I had to visit another distillery which I could walk to, Caol Ila. 

This is part of the Johnny Walker group and I have to say the tour I went on was rather swish, meaning smart and fashionable. A lot of money has been thrown at this distillery and it is rather impressive from beginning to end. There’s no malting floor but the rest of the process is described – as it was at every tour I went on – from the mashing where the dried malt is ground into a coarse flour or grist, which is mixed with hot water in a large container called a mash tun. This tun produces a liquid called wort with which the fermentation process begins followed by the pot stills and the distillation process.

Isle of Islay – 3

The civilian airport at Glenegedale started out as an RAF airfield during WWII and is close to the Machrie golf course and hotel. Bowmore is Islay’s administrative capital and is the second largest village on the island, founded in 1768 by the local land owner. The main road heads from the round church – designed so that there were no corners for evil spirits to hide in – straight down the hill to the pier. The distillery is on the left and is the oldest on the island, dating from 1779. Bowmore has a malting floor where the barley is dried out. The cereal is 3-4 inches deep and it is someone’s responsibility to rake the entire malting floor and turn over the cereal on an hourly basis. Visitors are encouraged to have a go and it’s a lot more difficult than it looks, chiefly because the rake is rather heavy and you have to drag it behind you, so you’re using muscles you don’t normally use. Some tastings at Bowmore take place in what I would term caves that might just be under the sea or under the beach at least. 

Skirting around the head of Loch Indaal via Bridgend, the bus goes through the village of Bruichladdich and the small town of Port Charlotte in the direction of Portnahaven. Port Charlotte is a lovely small place that is the home of the Museum of Islay Life. The museum opened in 1977 with the principal aim of conserving and displaying items representative of life in Islay over the past 12,000 years. It is housed in the former Kilchoman Free Church and has built up a collection of nearly 3000 objects and several thousand photographs. It’s the sort of place where you will find many items of interest regardless of your hobbies, pastimes, and knowledge. 

Isle of Islay – 2

Three of the most famous distilleries are close by and there is a footpath from Port Ellen to Ardbeg via Laphroaig and Lagavulin. I passed by a site where another new distillery is being built along with homes for the distillery workers to live in. Affordable accommodation is in short supply on the island, so any advantage that an employer can add for potential employees will be beneficial to that employer. 

Laphroaig means ‘The beautiful hollow by the broad bay’. The white buildings are right by the water with the giant letters of the distillery appearing on the side of a vast warehouse. Lagavulin is next, the name an anglicized version of the Scots Gaelic phrase Lag a’ Mhuilinn, which translates to “the hollow of the mill”. Again there are lovely views of the whole of the distillery from the seashore. The name Ardbeg is an anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic An Àird Bheag, meaning ‘the small promontory’. The car park has a shiny still in the middle of it. There’s an amusing signpost outside on the road with the distance to the nearest supernova provided for any intergalactic travellers passing through. Even an arctic tern would consider it a long way. The Kildalton Cross is five miles further along the road towards Ardtalla. This eighth-century cross is one of Scotland’s most important early-Christian monuments. I didn’t see this cross myself as I was told that walkers had to use the narrow road in places to get there. I decided against seeing it as I had plans to catch the bus to Bowmore from outside the Ardbeg distillery.

As the bus heads through Port Ellen northwards towards the airport and Bowmore, to the left is the rounded peninsula called The Oa. Minor roads head to the RSPB reserve and towards the American Memorial that commemorates the sinking of two ships off the coast. Near the end of WWI, two troop ships foundered off Islay within a few months of each other. The SS Tuscania,  a converted British liner carrying American troops to France, was torpedoed on 5th February 1918 with the loss of over 160 lives. On 6th October 1918 HMS Otranto was involved in a collision with HMS Kashmir in heavy seas. Otranto lost steering. Answering her SOS the destroyer HMS Mounsey came alongside and rescued over 350 men, but Otranto was wrecked on the shore with a total loss of 431 lives. Like Tuscania, Otranto was carrying American troops to France.  

Isle of Islay – 1

If you’re a lover of malt whisky or birdwatching then you will undoubtedly know about this island, the southernmost of the Inner Hebrides. 

The economics of the whisky industry on Islay are quite staggering. Islay contributes around £100 million a year to the UK government in excise duty and value-added tax. This is roughly £30,000 for each person living on the island. The nine distilleries on Islay plus the Jura distillery produce over twenty million litres of alcohol per year. Each of these distilleries offer at least one tour of their establishment per day and sometimes more than one, with the variety coming in terms of the buildings you visit and the number of whiskies you can sample. For this latter reason, careful planning is required, as it’s best to try and use the bus service on the island to visit the distilleries of Ardbeg, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Bowmore, and Bruichladdich. Don’t drive a car after visiting a distillery as they all offer driver samples which can be enjoyed later at your accommodation. There are plenty of taxis too, but these do get booked up well in advance. You will need a taxi to visit Kilchoman, Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, and the newest distillery called Ardnahoe. These four are more difficult to get to on public transport.

Islay has over one hundred species of bird present all year round in the island’s diverse habitats – wild open moorland, unspoilt beaches, cliffs, mixed woodland and mudflats. The RSPB has two nature reserves at The Oa and Loch Gruinart. From October to April, Islay hosts migrating barnacle and white-fronted geese that have flown down from Greenland. It’s not just geese that travel large distances to Islay, others come from Africa, however the arctic tern beats them all. These birds go right round the world visiting Islay to breed before heading back to the Southern Ocean for the winter.

Port Ellen is the largest town on the island and might be the best place to stay. Islay coaches run regular buses through the town, the airport is a few miles north-west of the town, and there are regular ferries from Port Ellen to Kennacraig, a hamlet on West Loch Tarbert, five miles southwest of Tarbert on the Kintyre peninsula on the Scottish Mainland. Port Ellen is a pleasant place on a bay with a white sandy beach and a marina. It’s my understanding that Diageo is renovating / rebuilding the Port Ellen distillery in the town. 

Isle of Lewis – Arnol Blackhouse – 2

A blackhouse was almost always a long narrow building, often with one or more additional buildings laid parallel to it and sharing a common wall. The walls were made from an inner and outer layer of loose stones with the gap between filled with peat and earth. The roof would be based on a wooden frame, resting on the inner stone walls. Over this frame the grass strips would be placed and over these would be a layer of thatch. The thatch would be held down by old fishing lines, strong twine, and ropes made from heather, all attached to large stones, whose weight would hold everything in place, even in the highest winds. More rocks would be laid around the bottom of the roof, where it met the inner wall.

The roof traditionally had no chimney, the smoke from the peat fire in the central hearth simply finding its own way out as it could. The smoked thatch was considered an excellent fertiliser and it was normal to strip it off, to use for this purpose, which meant of course the roof had to be re-thatched each year. The peat used for the fire was placed in a large pile outside the door.

A blackhouse such as the one at Arnol would burn around 15,000 peat bricks per year and it would take two people two weeks to cut this many bricks, a task spread throughout the year. I was told that peat smoke is not carcinogenic, although all the occupants of the Blackhouse would be constantly breathing in particulates, which would give rise to other lung problems. 

Having said that, people in blackhouses did not suffer from TB, which they did catch after moving from a blackhouse to other types of accommodation, such as the white house seen over the road. Fleas would also not have survived in this environment. The combination of smoke and ammonia coming from the byre, where the cows lived, would have caused the fleas to vacate the premises. The room where the beds were located looked cosy and the mattresses filled with straw felt comfortable. There were two mattresses, each one in a large enclosed wooden box, with a curtain on the fourth side for privacy. 

Isle of Lewis – Arnol Blackhouse – 1

The small village of Arnol lies on the north-western coast side of the main A858 on the island of Lewis and Harris. At the far end of the village is the Blackhouse Museum, an unmissable visit for anyone interested in how some people used to live in this part of the world up until 50 years ago and, as such, it’s really more a time capsule than a museum. 

Built in 1885, this traditional blackhouse – a combined byre, barn and home – was inhabited until 1964 and has not been changed since the last inhabitant moved out. The museum staff rekindle the central peat fire every morning so visitors can experience the distinctive peat smell in the interior, which I first became aware of about three steps before entering the building. There’s no chimney, and the smoke finds its own way out through the turf roof, windows, door and attached to the outer garments of any visitors. 

All homes built in Arnol up to 1900 were blackhouses. These double-walled dwellings were simply called taighean (‘houses’). But new health regulations introduced around this time, required the complete separation of byre and dwelling by a wall, with no internal communication, which was not the case with the blackhouses such as those at Arnol. Therefore, a new type of house appeared, built with single-thickness walls cemented with lime mortar. It presented such a contrast that people coined the term taigh-geal ‘white house’. The term taigh-dubh ‘black house’ was then applied to the old houses retrospectively.

Number 42, Arnol, otherwise known as the Arnol Blackhouse Museum is run by Historic Environment Scotland. It is part of a fascinating complex that comprises the blackhouse itself and an equally interesting “white house”, the cottage opposite, furnished as it was in the 1950s and representing the world into which blackhouse residents moved. Next to the white house are the walls of another series of blackhouses, showing an alternative layout to the restored Number 42.

Isle of Lewis – Dun Carloway Broch – 2

Today Dun Carloway is approached from the car park past the Doune Broch Centre, built largely underground, and containing an exhibition giving a sense of what life in the broch might well have been like. This is run by Urras nan Tursachan, The Standing Stones Trust (as is the nearby Calanais Visitor Centre), and the broch itself is in the care of Historic Environment Scotland..

A path leads up the hillside, giving views of the broch and the surrounding countryside. The side facing you is built above steep rock, and most of it remains as originally designed. As you round the broch to the entrance, on the north side, you are presented with a different picture. From here you can see that the most easily accessible parts of the wall have been removed. What you are left with is a life-size cutaway model, exposing sections through the walls and showing clearly much of their structure.

Inside the broch a number of chambers are accessible at ground floor level, an area which would probably have been used to house farm animals. The human residents would have lived 2m higher, above wooden flooring supported on a ridge that can still be seen running around the inside walls. As in other brochs, stairs are fitted within the thickness of the walls, and there would probably have been several floors of accommodation beneath a conical roof. That the broch is still standing says a lot for the construction techniques of those people, from the time before Christ, who built such large, imposing features. 

Isle of Lewis – Dun Carloway Broch – 1

Dun Carloway, or Dun Charlabhaigh, is a remarkably well preserved broch in a stunning location overlooking Loch Roag on the west coast of Lewis. Dun Carloway was probably built some time in the last century BC. It would have served as an occasionally defensible residence for an extended family complete with accommodation for animals at ground floor level. It would also have served as a visible statement of power and status in the local area. 

The broch at Dun Carloway is extremely well preserved. It was built at a time when brochs were already starting to be replaced by other forms of housing less demanding on scarce resources (and wood in particular), and it is not known how long it remained in use. It seems to have been still largely complete in the 1500s when some of the Morrison clan sought refuge inside the broch after being discovered stealing the local MacAulays’ cattle. Donald Cam MacAulay climbed the outside of the wall and threw in burning heather, smoking the Morrisons out.

The broch is next mentioned in a report by the local Minister in 1797. By this time, brochs were believed to be watchtowers used as defense against, or by, Vikings. Dun Carloway featured prominently in reports on Western Isles brochs in the latter part of the 1800s, and as a result it was one of the very first ancient monuments in Scotland to be taken into state care. By this time a large a part of the wall had been removed, probably for recycling into the blackhouses built nearby: including the one whose walls still stand nearly complete below the access path.