by Iain Banks
Went like the squits off a Teflon shovel but you always had the feeling you were basically torturing the tyres, forcing them to deal with nearly three tonnes of very accelerative car moving smartly along a twisty road. No sat-nav, bleep parking or room for anyone older than about six in the rear seats, but it did have a two-stage horn – one loudness setting for Town and another more strident one for Country. As a car for saying I Have So Much Money I Just Don’t Give A Fuck, this struck me as very much The One.
At Spean Bridge we turn right, heading cross-country for Speyside on the A86. This is another great road (not a Great Wee Road, just a great road). There’s a sort of modern Highland open-country A-road standard which consists of long, usually fenced straights punctuated by clear sight-lined, constant radius curves and torque-testing gradients, all of it through impressive scenery, and this baby, from Spean to Kingussie, is an exemplar. It’s a classic example of the breed, too, in that in places its spacey, high-speed wonderfulness suddenly runs out to be replaced by that sort of twisty, randomly variable width but effectively one-and-a-half-lane carriageway which is great fun to drive if there’s nothing slower in front of you, and exquisitely frustrating if there is.
The A86 has mostly been brilliantly upgraded over the years, but there are still some stretches where you basically need somebody’s cooperation if you are going to overtake them. Still; great views of Loch Laggan, Creag Meagaidh and, at Kinloch Laggan, Britain’s largest inland beach. I’ve always found this to be a slightly surreal sight, just because it’s so far inland and – at 250 metres – more than a little above sea level. That surreality only comes from knowing where you are, though; we’d been passing that freshwater beach for years before a flippant remark of mine that the tide was out again revealed the fact that Ann had always assumed this was a sea loch, and there was nothing remotely unusual about all that sand. Oh well.
A few hundred metres after the slightly surreal beach there’s a wee gatehouse by the river that seems to be everybody’s favourite example of Scottish Baronial in Miniature, itself just round the corner from the modestly proportioned but highly snap-worthy falls where the river Pattack performs a one-eighty between Inverpattack Lodge and Feagour.
It’s all exceptionally photogenic round here. And filmic. This particular bit we’re passing is where they do the outdoor stuff for Monarch of the Glen, and back in Glenfinnan Les and Aileen sat and watched them shoot bits of the original Highlander film right outside their window many years ago. There’s been a lot of film and TV stuff since – my friend Brad’s Rockface series for example, and the film of my book Complicity to name but one not-quite-straight-to-video British film of the last few years – plus, recently, quite a few locals have been taking part in the filming of the second and third Harry Potter films.
Last year and this, a hundred-plus children from Lochaber High School were HP extras, mainly for the Hogwarts Express scenes (that viaduct again), and Eilidh was one of them – wizard’s cloak and all. Les and Aileen also got to be part of the fun, as two of the legally necessary chaperones a film company needs when employing that many children. The only real problem the third HP film caused locally was really due to the exceptionally dry winter; the steam train playing the part of the Hogwarts Express locomotive set fire to the hill behind the viaduct. This usually only happens in the summer, when the sporadic clattering of the helicopter scooping water from Loch Shiel to drop on the gaily burning heather, bracken and sun-dried grass on the hillside becomes all just part of the primordial Highland scene.
Eilidh was and is a serious fan of Harry Potter and I felt really happy for her getting to be part of the films but I was secretly deeply miffed that I’d finally been out-extraed. Until now I’d been the only one of our group of friends (plus, now, their children) who’d been in a cool film; Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
By the sign for a wee place called Fersit, we pass the place where I rolled a 911 a few years ago. This was all my own fault and there was nobody else involved. We’ll come to this properly in What Happened to My Car.
We press on, crossing the youthful upper reaches of the river Spey at Laggan. Aileen seems to be enjoying driving the M5.
‘I know. Let’s do the new funicular that goes up to the top of Cairngorm,’ I suggest, somewhere around Newtonmore.
‘Is this strictly in accordance with the terms of your brief, Mr Banks?’ Les asks. Les usually addresses me as ‘Mr Banks’ when there’s a hint of criticism involved.
‘What do you mean?’
‘There’s no distillery at the top.’
I think about this. ‘Ah, who cares,’ I argue.
The funicular railway up to the top of Cairngorm is a hoot. There was a terrible kerfuffle about building it – an even greater kerfuffle than there was over building the gondola system up Aonach Mor, on the north-west shoulder of the Ben Nevis massif. Both are there for skiers and ordinary tourists, plus the gondola is equipped to take mountain bikers and their bikes up the 2000 feet to the top station so they can plummet down the laughably graded track back to the bottom again (watching lunatic mountain-bikers skittering down the rocky excuse for a trail – more like a dried-up 45-degree river bed than any sort of path – is probably the single most vicariously hair-raising thing you can do while in Lochaber – highly recommended).
The Aonach Mor gondola system also happily ferries hill-walkers to the top, whereas the Cairngorm trains won’t; various notices in the bottom station tell you that in the summer there is no access from the top station onto the hill itself, and people with serious backpacks will be asked to leave them behind or be refused passage. This was one of the conditions that had to be met before the funicular system got the go-ahead, the idea being that such restrictions would keep non-dedicated trekkers off the summit, where the delicate flora and fauna might suffer from the added numbers of walking boots trampling the heather (people who are absolutely determined to get up there can, of course, just hike from the bottom).
I don’t want to see native species die out, or all of Scotland become like the Lake District, but I still can’t help feeling the place needs more stuff like this; a few more gondolas, funiculars, mountain-top restaurants and so on. And don’t get me started on the lack of decent alpine-style roads on Scotland, or dead-ends that should be joined up …
The day we visit Cairngorm there’s still enough snow for skiing and boarding, and plenty of people are doing both, so the ways out from the visitor centre onto the hill are open. The weather is positively balmy for Cairngorm, which pretty much has the very worst weather in Britain. We do the standard tourist things; take photos, browse the shop (I add to my growing collection of wooden train whistles and buy a notebook that you can allegedly write on in the rain which I’ll almost certainly never use) and have a fairly bog-standard chips-and-beans-with-everything lunch.
We stand breathing in the clear mountain air before taking the funicular back to the car. Les looks around as though trying to gauge something. ‘Altitude?’ he asks.
‘Eh? What?’
‘You mean you didn’t bring your altimeter?’ Les says innocently. ‘Dearie me.’
‘It’s in the car,’ I say, lamely.
Altitude problem.
The altimeter is something of a sore point. I bought it many years ago in Nevisport in Fort William.
I have a weakness for these outdoors-gear shops. I have far too many hiking jackets, pairs of gloves, Swiss Army and other knives, torches, compasses, camping stoves, sets of binoculars and other assorted outdoorsy paraphernalia. I long ago collected all the 50,000-scale maps covering Scotland and now I seem to have started doing the same thing with the orange-cover 25,000 series. Les claims that there must be a bell that goes off when I enter one of these establishments, and possibly a red flashing light as well. Probably in the staff room or manager’s office. Maybe even a sign that illuminates: Attention! A fool and his money have just entered the building! Opportunity! Opportunity!
The altimeter is
his first and favourite example of my gratuitous overspending. I saw it in the shop and just wanted it. It’s a proper piece of precision engineering and it had an orange lanyard and everything. I justified it to myself as a safety measure; out on the hill you might think you knew where you were on the map by compass bearings and all that sort of stuff, see, but double checking via the contour lines would definitely help confirm that you really were where you thought you were. Sold. However, I didn’t want to be too extravagant, so I even looked at the price, first: £39.99. Very reasonable for such a quality piece of kit, I thought. I took it to the counter and the shop assistant rang up £139.99.
I stared at the figures glowing on the till read-out and then at the price sticker on the altimeter itself. Yup, the first numeral on the sticker had printed across the left-hand edge of the little box the price was supposed to be printed inside, and it really was a hundred quid more expensive than I’d thought. I couldn’t even get away with just keeping quiet about this piece of gratuitous overspending, because Les was there at the time, at first looking on incredulously and then trying to suppress his laughter. He didn’t quite get to the stuffing-the-hanky-into-mouth stage, but it was a close-run thing.
I never did take the damn altimeter hillwalking. It lives in the M5 now, slotted into one of the cup holders. It works off atmospheric pressure and every time I pass the Slochd summit sign on the A9 south of Inverness, or the sign at Rannoch Moor summit (both of which have the courtesy to tell you exactly how high you are, though not in a druggy way, obviously), I dutifully reset it. Apart from that it’s of no earthly use to man nor beast, but it still looks kind of cool. I did once take it on the flight from Barra to Glasgow – wee daft plane, unpressurised – and was able to confirm that when the captain said we were cruising at an altitude of 4000 feet – we really were! Handy, or what?
In the afternoon we head into deepest Speyside, via some fun little back roads and the primly quaint but very pleasant town of Grantown-on-Spey, its grey granite buildings positively sparkling in the sunlight. We have to refuel, and Les expresses some horror at how quickly this comes around in the M5.
‘I’m getting 22 miles to the gallon!’ I protest (Les and I are both of an age where we still think in terms of mpg rather than km per litre). ‘For a five-litre engine, that’s bloody good. Actually it probably means I’m not driving the car hard enough. I’ve been known to get 350 miles out of a full tank on a long run. In an M5 that’s probably some sort of record.’
‘Yeah, but our A6 gets 800 miles between refills,’ Les says.
‘It’s a diesel!’ I screech. Not unreasonably, I think.
‘Yeah. So?’
Dear Enzo preserve us true petrol-heads from the smugness of oil burners. Les likes fast cars as much as I do but I can see he’s on the cusp of being turned by that damn five-cylinder diesel. The sooner we get him behind the wheel of the M5 the better.
‘Well, anyway,’ I splutter. ‘I mean, it’s just not fair to compare … hold on. Wait a minute. Where’s Aileen?’
‘Uh-oh. I think I saw a sweet shop back there.’
G-on-S has a great sweet shop called the Candy Box; one of those time warp places where they measure boiled sweets out of big jars and sell stuff you thought they’d stopped making years ago, as well as having lots of intriguing-looking modern sweets and some terribly tempting Belgian chocolates. Aileen beelines for shops like this the way I go straight to outdoor outlets.
Astoundingly, we don’t bump into anybody who knows Les the whole time we’re in Grantown. This is genuinely remarkable. I’ve never known anybody more prone to meeting people he knows where all concerned least expect it. Usually this happens abroad in the middle of nowhere, and I speculate that maybe we’re just too close to home. Then Les reminds me that actually he did bump into another Lochaber High School teacher while we were at the top of the funicular.
We eventually drag Aileen out of the sweet shop before she can do a deal on buying the whole stock for less than trade and sweep off along a wee road through the woods towards Glenfarclas distillery, though only after promising her there are bound to be things like whisky-flavoured fudge and similar goodies to be had in the distillery shop.
The three of us plus my notebook take the tour at Glenfarclas. The tour costs £3.50 each, which seems fairly close to standard for distilleries with decent Visitor Centres (though there are exceptions); as a rule you get vouchers with the tickets which entitle you to get almost all the money back if you buy a bottle in the shop afterwards, which is not such a bad deal. It would be nicer – and feel more like proper Highland hospitality – if all distillery tours were free and ended with a complimentary dram, but visitor facilities cost money and the charges don’t seem to have put many people off.
Besides, at the end of the Glenfarclas tour you get to see the beautiful wood-panelled room in the Visitor Centre which is constructed from pieces salvaged from the old Empress of Australia. The liner was built in 1913 and broken up in 1960, in Ward’s ship-breaking yard, by Inverkeithing, a mile or so away from where we live, in sunny North Queensferry. I have to declare a personal connection here; quite a few of my family on my dad’s side worked in Ward’s over the years.
Whatever, the tour at Glenfarclas is worth doing. It’s not a huge distillery but it does have what looks to me like a pretty enormous malt mill, equipped with dirty great magnets to weed any metallic stuff out of the barley, and the big, bulb-shaped stills are the biggest on Speyside. More interesting than all the technical stuff though is how truly autonomous, cohesive and family-run the distillery is.
The Grant family have owned and run Glenfarclas for five generations, with the sixth generation learning the ropes right now. It’s a reflection of the fact they have to do all their promotional and other bureaucratic work in-house – rather than leaving such overhead-heavy stuff to be done by a central HQ somewhere else – that while the distillery itself employs only eight people, the office side needs fifteen. Mash tuns, washbacks and stills just fill the warehouses up; it takes dedicated desk-work to keep the whisky moving out of them, onto the market.
A true independent in an industry that has grown increasingly corporate over the centuries, and especially over the last few decades, it would arguably be something to be treasured even if the whisky they made was only good, but it’s much better than that. The Glenfarclas 105 (the 105 proof translating to 60 per cent alcohol by volume) has long been one of the best strong whiskies widely available, and it’s hard not to make comparisons between its robust, self-confident style and the independence of the firm that makes it. Given that the effectively cask-strength 105 is only about eight to ten years old, this is a sweet, full and amazingly rounded whisky. The bottle I bought was the 21-year-old, which is even more developed, smoother – only to be expected given that it’s 43 per cent rather than 60 per cent – and quite spectacular in its complexity, packed with spicy, fruity flavours all wrapped in a subtle smokiness.
In a sense, it ought to make no difference who makes a whisky, or where it’s made; all that should matter is the taste, and that’s it. Yet, part of the reason for visiting a distillery is that seeing where the stuff is made, meeting the people who make it – and often breathing in the scent of the place where it rests for umpteen years – undeniably adds to the experience in the future, just for the simple reason that that is what we are like; we are connection-making creatures. You might be on the other side of the world, sweating in a climate Scotland hasn’t seen since the pre-Cambrian, when most of its land mass was somewhere over the Equator, but the smell of a dram from a distillery you’ve been to years before will suddenly whisk you back to a collection of black-walled buildings on a chilly hillside in Angus.
It’s a subjective encounter, drinking a whisky. You’re bringing as much to the event as the drink is; maybe more. Just as touring a distillery adds to the sensation of drinking its products subsequently, bringing in resonances that have nothing directly to do with the smell or taste or fee
l of the liquid, so knowing you’re making a link to a proudly independent family firm, not a vast conglomerate, however well run and relatively benign, allows you to enjoy the dram with just a little extra relish.
In any event, on taste alone, Glenfarclas is one of the Speyside greats, and deserves to be ranked with the more heavily promoted brands.
We stay at Muckrach Lodge. The owners turn out to be called McFarlane too, though they don’t seem to be any sort of close relations to Les and Aileen (I mean, not that we’d actually have asked for a discount if they were. I have a brother-in-law who’s a Penfold, but do I ever ask for a discount on Penfold’s Grange Bin 95?).
Faced with the irresistible attraction of the Muckrach’s Full Scottish Breakfast – pretty much the complete whangy; a typical Highland-hospitality-gone-mad wide-spectrum belly-banging megabrek – I go into Hotel Mode, which consists of having one of these big-boy breakfasts (well, you tell yourself, you’re paying for it so you might as well eat it), a snack for lunch – usually just soup – and then the equally generously proportioned evening meal. The temptation is to have a big lunch as well, because your stomach is getting kind of used to these enormous portions, but this leads to Expanded Waist Syndrome and is a Thoroughly Bad Thing. I suspect a lot of tourists go into Hotel or B&B Mode while they’re here.
We get down to some serious research. Speyside is the focus of the Scotch industry, its epicentre, its spiritual headquarters; if the industry was ever going to have a theme park (may the thought perish), this is where it would be. Whisky Land! Whisky World!