The birthday of Robert Burns on 25 January is an opportunity to celebrate Scotland’s southern-most whisky distillery.
We probably all associate Robert Burns with his love of whisky, but we sometimes forget that he was also an excise officer – fighting the smugglers and illicit stills.
Poetry wasn’t big business in those days and when he realised a farm could not support his family he started work as an exercise man in 1788.
Burns was based in Dumfries and was promoted after a couple of years, however we learn it might not have been a particularly comfortable career choice for him. Yet he was still employed as an exercise man at the time of his death in July 1796.
Most famously, Burns was involved in the capture of The Rosamond, a smuggling ship, in the Solway Firth. The south-western coast of Scotland was a paradise for smugglers with its cliffs, coves and long roads between remote villages.
In my teens we used to stay at a cottage overlooking Luce Bay in Wigtonshire. It had been built in the 1820s as the barracks for “one excise officer and 50 men”. A couple of months ago I was staying in the area again and visited a distillery that was founded just 13 miles away in 1817.
At Bladnoch, farmers John and Thomas McClelland were granted a distilling licence and their family went on to grow the whisky business until it was hailed as the “Queen of the Lowlands”, producing about 230,000 litres of alcohol a year. After the Second World War, Bladnoch Distillery had a chequered history until 2015, when an Australian entrepreneur, David Prior, acquired it and invested in its refurbishment.
Today, the distillery – just a mile from Scotland’s National Book Town at Wigtown – has a visitor centre (with a welcoming cafe) and interesting whiskies to taste after a tour. There’s even a royal cask – one signed by Charles and Camilla at the official re-opening and maturing nicely.
The distillery is open for tours (check for timings) Cheers!
The GIN CLAN 