Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
people, for arts and entertainment, interesting and/or weird shit and just life in general
that these two have. They are both very clever and good at what they do, but even more
than those qualities I think it's that existential enthusiasm that I most admire in both of
them. Sometimes I feel like I'm almost parasitical on these two, a jaded older brother os-
mosing their fresh fascination with everything remotely interesting around them.
And so to Bladnoch, the distillery that sounds like it's in Wales. Actually it's the closest
distillery to Wales. And England, obviously. Bladnoch lies way, way down on the south-
west corner of Scotland, near the town of Wigtown, which is sort of between Dumfries
and Stranraer.
This bit of countryside is just packed with great roads; my route has taken us down
some effectively deserted bits of tarmac through rotundly spectacular great hills and deep
green valleys; wonderful open, rolling scenery incised with immensely fun roads. Near
New Galloway, I stop to take a photo of a piece of sculpture sitting on a rise overlooking
the road, a giant egg-shaped thing made of small rough slabs of red sandstone. There's
no plaque or notice to say who it's by, but there's something of a tradition of this sort of
thing in this neck of the woods; further south there's a whole collection of Henry Moore
sculptures sited sitting in poses of calm liquidic ease in middle-of-nowhere fields.
The area I'm in now is the Galloway Forest Park, and the road and the scenery both
just get better. This is one of the least known bits of Scotland, and one of the most re-
warding. It lacks the grand verticality and sheer scale of the West Highlands, but makes
up for that with a more accessible, even friendlier landscape of rumpled hills, fertile val-
leys (down here they don't feel like glens), high moors, a fine smattering of castles, small,
winding lochs, lush fields of positively Irish greenness, huge forests and neat, idiosyn-
cratic towns with names like St John's Town of Dalry, Newton Stewart, Castle Douglas
and Gatehouse of Fleet. And all this is before you even get to the coast, which feels some-
times like the least Scottish bit of Scotland (with the possible exception of St Andrews on
Graduation Day). The Solway coast can feel almost like part of Dorset. Or South Wales.
Hence Bladnoch having that Welsh connection, you feel (I mean, wrongly, obviously).
Bladnoch distillery disappeared off the extant distillery map some years ago; United
Distillers - as they then were - owned it from 1983 to 1993, when they closed it down
and removed all the stocks of whisky, the pipe work and other whisky-making bits and
pieces (save for the big, expensive-to-break-up things like the mash tun, washbacks and
stills) and sold the buildings as very much not a going concern, with the condition in-
cluded in the deeds to the place that it could not be used as a distillery in the future. And
that certainly seemed to be that for Bladnoch.
Then an Irishman called Raymond Armstrong decided he wanted to buy a holiday
cottage on the Solway coast. He bought Bladnoch. Now, there is a cottage sort of attached
to Bladnoch, but basically this is a whole sprawling complex of light-industrial buildings
