Raw Spirit (19 page)

The water park is part of a larger fun-and-games area with slides and climbing frames and so on, but you can find that sort of stuff anywhere; what fascinates me is this set of broad, gently sloped, interconnecting concrete channels, with little taps, gates and controllable fountains. To a long-time incorrigible dam builder like me this is something like heaven, albeit a sort of restricted one. There are about a dozen kids splashing around in it, shoving the little dam-gates this way and that, turning taps on and off or ferrying water from one channel to another by bucket, and a couple of young boys – maybe eight or nine years old – who are throwing themselves into the shallow pools and dancing over the fountains spraying water at each other, getting utterly soaked. This looks, the four of us agree, cold. It’s sunny, but there’s a breeze coming off the North Sea and even I’m glad I put my jacket on before we got out of the car. What a great place though; like having a dam/channel system you’d have to work for days to create,
all
set up in concrete with water on tap. Whoever designed this was a genius, I tell myself, then I see the soliton and just whoop for joy, because I’ve never seen one before.

A soliton is a single wave that propagates along a channel over long distances, losing very little energy. It’s all to do with the width and depth of the channel and the wavelength and height of the wave itself; if these figures are all in a certain proportion to each other a kind of harmony is established that sets up a soliton, and it’ll just sweep calmly along a channel for a long, long time. They were first noticed in Dutch canals, where they could keep going for kilometres. This miniature example (assuming that’s what this is and I’m not deceiving myself) eventually hits the shallows at the far end of one of the little concrete channels after ten metres or so, but while it lasts it’s beautiful.

I shout, ‘Woo-hoo!’ the way people who are of a certain age and have watched
The Simpsons
and
South Park
too much will tend to.

Everybody else is looking at me like I’m a bit of a mad fellow, but, hey, I’m used to that.

Via St Cyrus to Fochabers; we have a fine lunch at a hotel called The Ramsey Arms, just through the town’s impressive arch. I take a photo of the Fettercairn distillery. This is another whisky I’ve always been – to use John Peel’s phrase – somewhat underwhelmed by, though it’s not without its fans, and does well as a component of the Whyte and Mackay blends. Maybe it’s something to do with the ‘Old’. It’s marketed as Old Fettercairn and somehow that first word just annoys me. In what sense ‘old’? We know the stuff in the bottle can’t have been made last week, for goodness’ sake. It’s most commonly found as a 10-year-old; that isn’t old either. The distillery was founded in 1824, but that doesn’t make it particularly ancient – lots of distilleries had been founded in the latter years of the previous century, and many of them are still going today … so what the hell’s old about it? Still, could be worse, I suppose; could be Ye Olde Fettercairn or something.

Heading north again, we pass William Gladstone’s old family home at Fasque, just outside Fochabers. As a prime
minister,
Gladstone probably did more for the whisky industry than any other, repealing the punitive Malt Tax in 1853 and legalising the retail sale of bottled whisky. I recall reading – again in
Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine
– about a wine cellar in the house that had lain unopened for 45 years until 1972. It was full of wine and port that had just lain there, undisturbed, at a nice, steady eight degrees C since 1927 – with perfectly drinkable vintages stretching back way into the 1800s – and it hadn’t been opened in all that time because nobody could find the key. Toffs, eh?

The B974 rises from the fertile coastal plain that is the Howe of the Mearns – Lewis Grassic Gibbon territory – towards the first low, rounded hills of the eastern Grampian Mountains, wriggling up out of the broad wooded glens, stretching across the heathery moors and up to the summit at Cairn O’ Mount. This is a brilliant road. Not busy, well maintained, shrugging off the tight, blind, tree-obscured corners lower down to ascend into sinuous progressions of open, sweeping, climbing curves and gently undulating straights. In a car with plenty of power and torque like the M5, even fully loaded, it’s bliss. Faced with a tight bend followed by a steep upward gradient, the car just hunkers down, snarls politely and rockets away.

We’re not actually travelling outrageously quickly, usually staying within ten or so m.p.h. on either side of the speed limit, partly in deference to my three passengers (who, I’m pleased to report, have no complaints) but the sheer pleasure of stringing together the sequences of bends on the way to the car park at the viewpoint is just wonderful. We stop at the top to admire the view and take photos, though the best view is to the south, and it’s a bit hazy and into the sun, so not great for photography.

We set off again, heading gradually downhill towards the Glen of the river Dee through a succession of nicely cambered, generously open bends, gradually encountering stands and small forests of old Scots pine, their scaly red roots curling out of the sandy soil like dragons’ claws.

This is, very understandably, a popular route with bikers. You can tell that because every few miles, pretty much since
Fettercairn,
we’ve been seeing yellow roadside signs telling us things like 34 ACCIDENTS ON THIS ROAD IN THE LAST YEAR, with a little symbol of a motorbike underneath.

I don’t recall ever seeing signs like this, anywhere in Scotland, so you get the impression that not only is this a very popular road with bikers, but that it really must be one where they have a
hell
of a lot of accidents. This is slightly mystifying; it’s twisty, certainly, but so are hundreds of Scottish roads. There are a fair few deciduous trees in the lower reaches to the south that might cause problems in the autumn when they drop their leaves and it gets slippy under-tyre, but not that many, and once you get above the tree line, that’s that problem gone. There doesn’t seem to be any particular reason for the road to be especially prone to gravel or stones or mud, and it’s not as though the views are so gob-smackingly wonderful that you’d end up staring open-mouthed through your visor at them and forget to steer back out of the corner or whatever, so what’s the problem? Maybe it’s one of those trial things, where they choose one bit of road to try out a new signage system; we’ve got one of those on the M90 north of the Forth Road Bridge, opposite Dunfermline; thin posts on the far edge of the hard shoulder whose tops flash when there’s a problem ahead.

I find myself wondering if the signs are digital and update themselves in real time; if you wrapped your RS-1 round one, would it suddenly click up from 34 to 35 ACCIDENTS ON THIS ROAD IN THE LAST YEAR …? Probably not.

Deeside; all very civilised and terribly nice. After the exposed heroics of the broad hilltops, the roads curl themselves up comfortably amongst the farmed, forested folds of the Dee’s middle reaches, dappled under the new green leaves of spring. We take the 976 on the south side of the river, heading for Balmoral.

Lochnagar is a fine whisky and a really neat, smart, manicured little distillery, sitting in the grounds of Balmoral Castle like a model of a distillery put there for the royals to play with, a bit like Marie Antoinette had a pretend farm built in the ground of Versailles. I mean, it’s not; it’s a perfectly serious
and
professionally run distillery producing a fine whisky, but there’s a still a sense of it bearing the same relationship to real distilleries as show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show do to real gardens. It doesn’t actually smell of new paint – you know that thing about the Queen thinking the whole world smells like that – but it’s almost too tidy and well formed. A lovely place, though, unless you abhor things being just-so. It lies resplendent under a bright spring sun when we arrive there, and we see some butterflies jolting their unsteady way around the well-kept shrubs, the first of the year.

For some bizarre reason which I realised at the time I was not fully aware, or indeed in control of, we had, over the past few days, started to critique the toilets of the distilleries we visited. Something to do with being in critical mode, I suppose, and this rubbing off on the people I was doing the touring with (a week later my pal Dave would demand a separate critical category for distilleries’ car parking spaces.
Car
parking spaces? I mean, really). I’d even drawn up a special table in my rapidly filling notebook for this purpose (under ‘T’, obviously), with columns for Roominess, Nice Pong, Decor, Cleanliness, Worth Leaving a Comment in the Visitors’ Book For and Just Generally Brill, and so I can report that the facilities at Royal Lochnagar came out with a cut-to-the-chase Just Generally Brill commendation.

The whisky (ah yes, finally we return to the whisky) is – at least in the 12-year-old version we chose – very redolent of the second-fill sherry casks it spends its time in, while showing malty and slightly smoky notes, with touches of honey. If I lived in Balmoral I think I’d be quite happy to have it piped the mile or so into the castle, to appear from a third tap in every bathroom. Well, maybe not for every guest.

Apparently Queen Victoria used to mix Lochnagar whisky with her claret.

Oh dear.

While we’re wandering the grounds, enjoying the sunlight and breathing in the wonderful scents of the gardens and surrounding countryside, Les and I spot a weird-looking pyramid-like structure poking up from the trees on a nearby
hill.
We never did ask about it, but having now looked at my OS map I strongly suspect it’s a personalised royal cairn. There’s Princess Beatrice’s Cairn (it’s probably that one), Princess Helena’s Cairn, Princess Alice’s Cairn, Prince Albert’s Cairn … the hill is littered with them. Some family tradition, perhaps. Anyway, so now we know.

Highway the Hard Way: a Road Bore writes
.

Urgh. I think I may be drooling. Because now we come to the A939. In the M5. Actually the first bit from Crathie isn’t the A939; it’s the B976, but it leads there, then on to the notorious Cock Bridge to Tomintoul stretch. This is the bit of road that’s always first to get blocked by snow at the start of a Scottish winter. Sometimes they call it the Lecht road, after the summit pass, where the Ski Centre is. Dear goodness flipping michtyme, what a road.

Partly it’s the fact it’s just such a gloriously clear, brilliantly sunny spring day, and there’s so little traffic – most roads are at their best in these circumstances. Partly, though, it’s the openness, the fact that you can see so far, with no trees, no foliage, no lumps of landscape in the way to obscure sight lines round corners. This near agoraphobic bright-sky exposure also lets you make certain there are no sheep preparing to wander across the road, or oncoming traffic that might prevent the use of the road’s full width. Partly it’s the long, rising, undulating, rarely perfectly smooth nature of the road surface itself, and partly it’s just a succession of brilliant bends and just pure plain boffo straights or near-straights lancing towards the horizon or propped against the sheeny slope of heather, aimed into a cobalt sky.

This is a truly magnificent, spectacular, spellbinding, addictive road. If I was alone I’d already be very seriously considering turning around somewhere ahead and coming back to do the whole thing again in the opposite direction, and then turning once more, back this way, to resume the route we’re on. Les actually says something to this effect and I laugh and
agree,
but really it’s a petrol-head thing and neither of us think it would be fair on Ann and Aileen. Just this one-way scoot is enough.

Again, we’re not going anything like scarily fast, so the whole process feels smooth, with no savage braking, mad-boy acceleration or limit-testing cornering, really just a sequence of balanced stances the car takes up, pitching forward or back and from side to side, all of it way, way within its capabilities. It feels strong and safe and secure, as though it knows exactly what it’s doing, and is positively flattering my driving.

We reach the Lecht itself, the emptyish-looking pass where the Ski Centre sits; broad expanses of pitted asphalt braided with gravel washed off the slopes, a few cars and trucks, many grey, shed-like buildings of folded steel, and a thin network of ski-tows straggling off up the hill on both sides. It all appears a bit raw and desolate, already out of season at a time of year when, at the the end of a long hard winter, the whole place might still have hundreds of people skiing and boarding. We slow for the deserted-looking complex, treating it as a built-up area, then start the descent. In amongst such skiing territory (albeit Scottish-type skiing, with, as a rule, the concomitant freezing winds, short steep narrow slopes and face-stinging sleet), it’s hard not to feel you’re settling into a sweet, curvy downhill slalom-like rhythm, carving the tyres from curve to curve. In an old car, or just something with narrower tyres and less grip, you’d actually feel you were using the shoulders of the tyres the way you use skis’ edges, canting and cutting into the turns, the chirp and squeal of rubber on tarmac a synonym for the swish and rasp of ski on snow. As it is, the M5’s lawn-roller-broad tyres just tear stickily over the road, barely stretched.

The route descends into the trees and a few mid-afternoon shadows. More wonderful driving, the sort that would be the highlight of most days, but not after the Lecht road.

We arrive in Grantown-on-Spey – just time to stock up on some sweeties – then we head via Tomatin to Inverness and a bit of shopping.

Tomatin distillery lies just off the A9 – on a stretch of smaller
road
that used to be the A9 before the road was improved in the seventies – under a bridge that carries the main railway line from Stirling to Inverness. This is the same line that passes close by Dalwhinnie, and like Dalwhinnie this is a high-altitude distillery, lying at over a thousand feet. It’s not quite as snow-prone as Dalwhinnie but it must be a good place to make lots of whisky because it’s a deceptively huge distillery with 23 stills, though not all tend to work at the same time. The first distillery to be wholly owned by a Japanese company (and another case of the place basically being rescued from overseas), the tour and tasting are free, which, given that it’s so close to the main road, should make it better visited than I suspect it is.