Monday 29th July
I was keen to get some contextual background to the island
of ISLAY and so a visit to the Museum of Islay Life was a must. Housed in a small
converted church, the eclectic collection of images and artefacts take the
visitor on a snapshot- JOURNEY across 10,000 years of the island’s history. The
display begins with flints used by the people who first arrived on Islay after
the retreat of the Ice Age glaciers -Mesolithic hunter-gatherers who lived off
the rich supplies of shellfish, wild animals, nuts and berries. Then there were
the tools and pottery of the Neolithic inhabitants who developed a farming
economy; significantly 50 yards from where Bellulu
is pitched, there are the remains of a chambered Cairn created by these ancient
islanders. Other displays tell the story of the important WHISKY industry (more
of this later), and the equipment used by craftsmen including the wheelwright
and blacksmith who were so vital to the rural island economy which has long
been heavily based on farming; obscure items of farm machinery and implements
used for dairy processes like butter and cheese making and old veterinary
paraphernalia all evidenced the need for self-sufficiency in this remote part
of Scotland. Reconstructions of a 19th century croft kitchen and a Victorian
bedroom also threw light on life on the island across the social divide. In
more recent times, I learnt of the tragic shipwrecks of the troopships Tuscania
and Otranto and the squadron of Sutherland Flying boats that were based on
Islay in WW2; I was inspired to buy the book ‘The Tartan Pimpernel’ as my holiday read, which tells the story of
the Rev. Donald Caskie, a Church of Scotland Minister from Islay who worked
undercover in Paris and helped 2,000 allied service men to freedom, during the
dark days of the Nazi occupation. The
Curator kindly brought out folders of information from the Museum archive about
weaving on the island for me to do research from, and it included written
accounts by surviving workers from the 1950’s, samples of tartans and tweeds
from the local mills, and photographs of the workers and machinery of this once
thriving industry. I resolved to search out the one remaining Woollen Mill on
the island to do some primary research that I could share with my students who are
keen on this traditional craft.
Islay is of course famous worldwide for its whisky and has 8
distilleries that have their own distinctive products. Kate is a fount of
knowledge about all things whisky, as
it was the golden drink that first brought her to the island several years ago,
when she attended one of the Whisky
Festivals, that are a heady mix of tastings, fine food and Scottish music
and dancing. She is now an avid collector of the specialist bottles that are
released at key points in the year, and her passion has even involved driving
up to Islay and queuing in a distillery car park over night to get her hands on
one of the limited edition releases to add to her connoisseur’s collection. On
a previous Scottish tour, I had been to the Talisker Distillery on the Island
of Skye and developed my own interest in whisky from that experience. The tour
of our first distillery- Bruichladdich,
was educational, and I learnt about the JOURNEY the whisky takes from the
smoking of the barley using local peat, to give it the distinctive Islay
character, the pure spring water brought by the farmer from the field above the
premises, the recycling of the spent barley to the farmer’s cattle as fodder
(very sustainable), and the other stages in the highly skilled production of
this important Scottish export. We were shown into one of the storage sheds
where hundreds of carefully labelled wooden barrels of whisky worth several
million pounds are stored, and often bought for investment purposes and kept
for decades. Back in the Distillery Shop we had ‘wee dram’ tastings of several
types of malt whiskies and I selected an affordable bottle of 10 Year Old Laddie 10 to take home, (my preferred
choice Octomor turned out to cost £110!) along with a couple
of the specially designed Bruichladdich tartan scarves and a throw for
Kate. As the whisky worked its magic and
the warm glow it imparted led to good-humoured chat about using the
ever-present Ruskin for their next whisky bottle label, we reluctantly left our
generous hosts and travelled onwards to Bowmore.
In Bowmore the major town on the island with a population of
800, we saw the unusual circular church (built in the round “so the devil would have no corners in which
to hide”), and bought supplies from the good old Co-op, where even my essential Earl Grey Teabags were sourced.
That evening Kate was wined and dined back at Bellulu and brought along her
delicious version of summer pudding. We enjoyed a blind tasting competition of
the various whiskies we had bought (me rubbish, mistaking bog-standard Bell’s for Bruichladdich’s finer single malts! Clearly more practice needed
before the Islay JOURNEY comes to a close methinks…)
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| 'Heaven' is an open-air sunshine breakfast of porridge drizzled with cream, whisky, and Scottish heather honey, and this view ... |
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