Raw Spirit (15 page)

As a piece of architecture, Ben Nevis distillery is nothing special; a bit overly industrial, though the lines are softened by lots of barrels in the grounds. Established by the very tall ‘Long John’ MacDonald back in 1825, it was closed for five years in the late nineteen-eighties before being rescued and reopened by the the Japanese Nikka firm (Japanese whisky really falls outside the remit of this book, but I think it’s briefly worth making the point that Japanese whisky can be very good indeed, and that Japanese firms which have taken over or bought into the Scottish whisky business have generally treated the industry, the people and the product itself with more respect than a lot of our home-grown entrepreneurs). Hopefully with an experienced firm like Nikka behind it, Ben Nevis will continue to flourish and develop; the 10-year-old I bought is a enjoyably big, chewy thing, like eating a nut-sprinkled chocolate liqueur.

Past the entrance to Inverlochy. The old Inverlochy castle, nearer the town, is that rarity among Scottish castles; a moated one – or in Inverlochy’s case a once-moated one, as the moat is just a shallow depression on the castle’s three landward sides, the fourth facing the river Lochy. Off the top of our heads, as we’re taking a look round the impressive but only recently de-scaffolded ruins, Les and I can only think of two other moated castles in Scotland: Rothesay and Caerlaverock. Old Inverlochy was off-limits because of safety and remedial work for so long that we’d both kind of forgotten about it, but now it’s open to the public again and it’s a large and impressive site; worth seeing.

The newer Inverlochy Castle, a little further out of town, is a very grand country house hotel indeed. It doesn’t actually have that many rooms but that’s because they’ve wisely kept the apartments pretty much as they were when the place was a private house; big. Ann and I once stayed in a room about the size of a tennis court. You had to stand up and take a good look round – or shout – to determine whether you were alone in there or not. We’ve stayed at Inverlochy a few times; once with Mum and Dad and on a couple of occasions with the McFarlanes. Hearing that the place is occasionally frequented by some very famous film stars, Les and I always make a point of playing a frame or two of snooker, just in case we bump into Sean and Clint and get to thrash them in a doubles game, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Usually when the five of us have stayed there we’ve had a private dining room. No way is this because we are noisy and might upset the other, more respectable guests.

Our most recent stay at Inverlochy was last year, when Bentley, for some bizarre reason, suddenly took it into their heads to let me have one of their extremely expensive motor cars for a couple of days. Even the invitation to drive the thing was classy; a framed piece of art made up to look like the cover of one of my books (back in the black-and-white days), with the word ‘Bentlicity’ emblazoned on it. How could I refuse?

A shiny silver-grey Continental T was duly delivered to our house and Ann and I immediately zapped off to Inverlochy
before
Bentley could change their minds, inviting Les, Aileen and Eilidh to be our guests.

The Continental T is by far the most expensive car I’ve ever driven (with the possible exception of the Formula One car at Magny-Cours). At not a kick in the arse off a quarter of a million pounds, this was a seriously pricey machine. And more money – a
lot
more money – for less car; the Continental T was the short-wheelbase go-faster coupé of the range, while the longer four-door version, even with the same turbo engine, cost over one hundred grand less. I mean,
what
?

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.