Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I do not have chicken curry and chips on the ferry.
We pass Duart Castle shortly before docking at Craignure. This is another much
filmed location; the most recent film I remember seeing it used in was
Entrapment
, but
it's been in a few others. We're staying at Druimard Country House Hotel, in Dervaig,
right beside the small but perfectly formed Little Theatre of Mull, about twenty minutes
away from Tobermory, the island's capital.
The food at Druimard is excellent, though only Michelle and I turn up for breakfast. Tom,
like Ann, seems to number Sleep and Having a Long Lie amongst his hobbies. I am temp-
ted by the kipper, but we'll be in the M5 for a good few hours today, and in-car belching
etiquette dictates that scrambled eggs are probably a safer bet. When we eventually round
up our respective spouses we head over the wee twisty road for Tobermory, like Oban
another clinging-to-the-land-by-its-fingernails kind of town, but very colourful.
Tobermory has probably been on more postcards and magazine and book covers than
any other Scottish town of its size just because it's so picturesque (and these days it's al-
most better known as the BBC's Balamory); every harbour-front building save the church
seems to be some freshly painted and very bright primary colour - usually with contrast
detailing round the edges and apertures - and the whole wildly motley crescent is backed
by wooded cliffs and reflected in the clear waters of the harbour. One of those places you
practically have to have a degree in camera klutzhood to take a bad photo of.
At the distillery, we register an interest in taking a tour - they need a few more than
just us to make a quorate tour group. However after a look round some interesting craft
shops and a chandlers on the spectrum of seafront, we get together with some more people
to do the look-round.
Tobermory distillery instantly gets the prize for Hottest Still Room So Far. It's not
even that hot outdoors but the still room is small and relatively cramped, and with the
stills operating as they are now, you can feel the heat increase with pretty much every
step you take up from the room's floor to the walkway set around the stills' centres. I
remember walking uphill in the largest of the big quilted-looking biomes at the Eden Pro-
ject in Cornwall the summer before, and experiencing the same feeling there, each pace
underneath the giant bubble-wrap semispheres seeming to make the air hotter and more
humid. It doesn't feel too claustrophobic in the still house because there's a big new win-
dow looking out onto the road outside, but the heat is such that you can see people start
to wilt almost as soon as we walk in.
The distillery sits in a relatively cramped site jammed against the bottom of a cliff,
across the main road from its old warehouses, which have been turned into rather attract-
ive council flats. The main road down into the bay-front centre of town runs past them,
but the traffic noise must be partially masked by the susurrus of sound coming from the
distillery's water supply, the Tobermory River, which tumbles down the steep stepped
