Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A soliton is a single wave that propagates along a channel over long distances, losing
very little energy. It's all to do with the width and depth of the channel and the wavelength
and height of the wave itself; if these figures are all in a certain proportion to each other
a kind of harmony is established that sets up a soliton, and it'll just sweep calmly along a
channel for a long, long time. They were first noticed in Dutch canals, where they could
keep going for kilometres. This miniature example (assuming that's what this is and I'm
not deceiving myself) eventually hits the shallows at the far end of one of the little con-
crete channels after ten metres or so, but while it lasts it's beautiful.
I shout, 'Woo-hoo!' the way people who are of a certain age and have watched The
Simpsons and South Park too much will tend to.
Everybody else is looking at me like I'm a bit of a mad fellow, but, hey, I'm used to
that.
Via St Cyrus to Fochabers; we have a fine lunch at a hotel called The Ramsey Arms,
just through the town's impressive arch. I take a photo of the Fettercairn distillery. This is
another whisky I've always been - to use John Peel's phrase - somewhat underwhelmed
by, though it's not without its fans, and does well as a component of the Whyte and Mack-
ay blends. Maybe it's something to do with the 'Old'. It's marketed as Old Fettercairn
and somehow that first word just annoys me. In what sense 'old'? We know the stuff in
the bottle can't have been made last week, for goodness' sake. It's most commonly found
as a 10-year-old; that isn't old either. The distillery was founded in 1824, but that doesn't
make it particularly ancient - lots of distilleries had been founded in the latter years of the
previous century, and many of them are still going today … so what the hell's old about
it? Still, could be worse, I suppose; could be Ye Olde Fettercairn or something.
Heading north again, we pass William Gladstone's old family home at Fasque, just
outside Fochabers. As a prime minister, Gladstone probably did more for the whisky in-
dustry than any other, repealing the punitive Malt Tax in 1853 and legalising the retail
sale of bottled whisky. I recall reading - again in Michael Broadbent's Vintage Wine -
about a wine cellar in the house that had lain unopened for 45 years until 1972. It was
full of wine and port that had just lain there, undisturbed, at a nice, steady eight degrees C
since 1927 - with perfectly drinkable vintages stretching back way into the 1800s - and
it hadn't been opened in all that time because nobody could find the key. Toffs, eh?
The B974 rises from the fertile coastal plain that is the Howe of the Mearns - Lewis
Grassic Gibbon territory - towards the first low, rounded hills of the eastern Grampi-
an Mountains, wriggling up out of the broad wooded glens, stretching across the heath-
ery moors and up to the summit at Cairn O' Mount. This is a brilliant road. Not busy,
well maintained, shrugging off the tight, blind, tree-obscured corners lower down to as-
cend into sinuous progressions of open, sweeping, climbing curves and gently undulating
straights. In a car with plenty of power and torque like the M5, even fully loaded, it's
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