The Immeasurable Wilds: Travellers to the Far North of Scotland

Illicit Scotland: Smuggling & Distilling

When it comes to classic Highland scenes, you can usually rely on Sir Edwin Landseer to capture it in all its romantic glory. Above is my rather battered engraving of Landseer's painting The Highland Whisky Still which can be found in Apsley House, London. It was painted in 1829, which makes it quite an early work from the artist born in 1802. Landseer had first visited Scotland in 1824, in the company of the painter Charles Leslie, and the trip was said to have made a deep impression on the young man.

Two years earlier (1822), George IV had made his notable visit to Scotland, an event that in many ways initiated the whole concept of the Romantic Highlander that painters like Landseer then bought into and developed. A huge effort was made to present the King with a truly Scottish event, and this included the culinary experience, as Elizabeth Grant explains:

   "Lord Conyngham, the Chamberlain, was looking everywhere for pure Glenlivet whisky; the King drank nothing else. It was not to be had out of the Highlands. My father sent word to me - I was the cellarer - to empty my pot bin, where was whisky long in wood, long in uncorked bottles, mild as milk, and the true contraband gout in it. Much as I grudged this treasure, it made our fortunes afterwards, showing on what trifles great events depend. The whisky, and fifty brace of ptarmigan all shot by one man, went up to Holyrood House, and were graciously received and made much of, and a reminder of this attention at a proper moment by the gentlemanly Chamberlain ensured to my father the Indian Judgeship." (Memoirs of a Highland Lady, Murray 1898).

It was no secret that the whisky distilled illegally was much to be preferred to that produced legally. Catherine Sinclair, in Scotland and the Scotch stated simply that "the most popular whisky is made clandestinely, without a government license, and goes by the name of 'moonlight', while that which pays duty is called 'daylight', and is considered so contemtibly inferior, that even His Majesty George IV, during his residence in Edinburgh, drank the 'mountain dew', in preference to the 'Parliamentary whisky.' "

Illicit stills could be found all over the Highlands - it was one of the few ways that the impoverished Highlander could make some money. Sinclair recorded that one had been discovered "with the boiler buried beneath a stone-gate post, which had been hollowed out for the chimney; and another was detected within the precincts of a Roman Catholic Chapel, where the priest conived at the trick, and sold whisky...under the name of 'holy water.'"

It wasn't just whisky, though: James Hall, on his tour in 1803, reported that "the greater part of the northern coasts of Scotland are swarming with them [smugglers], and foreign spirits of all kinds, of an excellent quality, are everywhere to be found." He himself enjoyed a fine wine when given hospitality at the house of an excise officer near Cape Wrath. It had come from a shipwreck.

Excise Officers scoured the land for any sign of these hidden distilleries. Sinclair reported that sometimes cows gave the game away, attracted to the site by the pleasant smell! On Arran, the geologist Necker de Saussure writes that "the inhabitants, little accustomed to strangers, took us for customs-house officers; thus we saw men flying before us, and shutting up, at our approach, all their huts in which they had established private distilleries of whisky, which is prohibited by law."

There is no better description of the whole thing than that found in the Diary of Thomas Guthrie (1803 - 1873): 

     "When a boy in Brechin, I was quite familiar with the appearance and on-goings of the Highland smugglers. They rode on Highland ponies, carrying on each side of their small, shaggy, but brave and hardy steeds, a small cask, or 'keg', as it was called, of illicit whisky, manufactured amid the wilds of Aberdeenshire or the glens of the Grampians. They took up a position on some commanding eminence during the day, where they could, as from a watch-tower, descry the distant approach of the enemy, the exciseman or gauger: then, when night fell, every man to horse, descending the mountains only six miles from Brechin, they scoured the plains, rattled into the villages and towns, disposing of their whisky to agents they had everywhere; and now safe, returned at their leisure, or often in a triumphal procession.....I have seen a troop of thirty of them riding in Indian file, and in broad day, through the streets of Brechin, after they had succeeded in disposing of their whisky, and, as they rode leisurely along, beating time with their formidable cudgels on the empty barrels to the great amusement of the public, and mortification of the excisemen...."

Guthrie concludes that "everybody, with a few exceptions, drank what was in reality illicit whisky - far superior to that made under the eye of the Excise - lords and ladies, members of Parliament and ministers of the Gospel, and everybody else."

Such illicit behaviour wasn't confined to alcohol. Salt was a crucial  requirement in the herring business, and Dr Garnet, touring in 1800, noted that the iniquitous salt tax led to a lot of smuggling of that substance. By 1819, Robert Southey indicated that the government was allowing it duty-free for the Highland fisheries. "The people are not content with obtaining it for this purpose, and for their own domestic use.; they carry on an extensive contraband trade in it with the Lowlands, and this will probably render it necessary to deprive them of an indulgence which, being reasonable in itself, is thus grossly abused."

Two early views of the Talisker distillery on Skye at Carbost, one postcard sent in 1905. Thoroughly licit whisky!