Day 7: Inverness, Culloden, Dufftown, Speyside
“A short trip to Dufftown”, words that will live in infamy almost as long as the Duke of Cumberland’s orders of “No quarter” at Culloden.
Travelling with a member of Clan Donald, a visit to the battlefield of Culloden was on the itinerary. You won’t get a history lesson here, as a chunk of what I know is derived from reading the Dr Who novelisation of The Highlanders as a pre-teen. The visitor centre was a decent experience, more balanced than I expected, but I guess we’ve got to a point in time where we can interpret events like this with a more nuanced view, looking at world context, the personalities involved, and presenting both the Government and the Jacobite sides.
As such a well informed historical scholar in this event as I am (reference Dicks, T, circa 1985) the events can be distilled down thus: Bonnie Prince Charlie (BPC), descended from Charles II, felt that the divine right of kings had bestowed him with a dick big enough that it needed a throne to rest it on; George III, who barely spoke a word of English and whose pee would one day turn blue, delegated sorting out BCP to the army. The army, who’d rather be fighting the French, delegated this to the entitles work experience kid, twenty-something the Duke of Cumberland, who thought his dick was so big it needed a sausage named after it.
After both armies did a bunch of touring around between Manchester and Inverness, Cumberland parked his troops on Culloden Moor, and as it was his birthday proceeded to break out the rum and cheese. Not too far away, BCP’s army, possibly jealous of the cheese, and having walked through every peat bog around, tired, unpaid, and wet right through their kilts, were ordered to form up and go and take the cheese, hopefully trimming Cumberland’s sausage.
The Government forces, who also included Hessians, Scots, and assorted mercenaries, as well as English, put down their cups of tea, gently wrapped up their uneaten cheese, loaded their cannons, and said the 1746 equivalent of, “Come at me bro.”
The Jacobites, who also included the French, Irish, Mancunians, and assorted mercenaries as well as Scots, who’d marched all day and night, hadn’t had cheese, and were starting to doubt the divine right of sausage, nonetheless girded their sodden loins, said the 1746 equivalent of, “Screw you Jimmy,” loaded the couple of cannons they had and started running a couple of hundred metres up a slight incline.
The next hour was pretty predictable, “the blue team” as one US tourist was overheard to describe the Jacobites, basically died by the hundreds, before deciding that they weren’t going to get any cheese here, so heading home where at least they might be able to get into a dry kilt and a cup of tea would be the preferred option. “The red team” then proceeded to do all they could to finish off the Jacobites, so they could finish their cheese and go back to doing what they’d signed up to do, which was fighting the French.
Sadly for the Jacobites, by the time they got home kilts and tartan had been banned, but on the bright side so had bagpipes. And history kept ticking along, dominated by insecure tyrants concerned about sausages. And the size of their dicks.
After much walking across the windswept moor, the next part of our plan involved, as requested by G, a “short trip to Dufftown”. For what seems like for ever he has been telling us about how Dufftown has the world’s greatest whisky shop, and all manner of marvellous things up to and possibly including unicorns that pee rainbow single malt. Dufftown bills itself as being a regional whisky capital and the centre of many amazing whisky experiences. So we were convinced this would be the Speyside whisky day of our lives.
(I’m doing a catchup blogging day so I’m writing this and the previous entry, and I’ve just worked out I stuffed up and put Cawdor into day 6 and not day 7, as this was a stop on the way to Dufftown. So feel free to skip back to that one and read it, I’ll wait.)
Driving through Speyside was like browsing at a good whisky store, almost every town is a recognised distillery name, with many other distilleries inbetween. We tried to visit Macallan, but they don’t take any riff-raff drive buy custom, one must book in order to be welcome there. Distillery pagodas are everywhere, producing millions of litres of wonderful amber fluid. We passed Balvenie and Glenfiddich jusr before Dufftown, arriving in time for a lateish lunch.
Dufftown. Food options at 2pm are sandwiches at a cafe, or maybe something at the one pub that appeared open. There doesn’t appear to be a bakery in town, which I thought was a compulsory thing. The Chinese restaurant, basically ubiquitous in this neck of the woods, was closed. They do have a whisky shop. The manager was quite friendly, the whisky selection good but generally were current expressions, none of the crazy expensive drool worthy rarities I saw at Pitlochry. Managed to leave with a couple of miniature bottles.
The search for food. Google threw up the Sidings Cafe, which we drove past on the way into Dufftown. Some reviews weren’t great, but we were a bit hungry so took a punt, and found it to be a bit of an unexpected highlight. The Sidings Cafe predictably is at the old railway station, that now only operates a tourist train on weekends, but the cafe is in a rail carriage. The food range was limited, soup of the day, sandwiches, baked potatoes, and some other fairly low key options. No Michelin stars here, but Anya, the manager, made up for this with a wonderful personality, the sort who is great if you’re generally agreeable (us), and rather firm and direct if you get presumtious (the group of Spanish tourists that came in just after us). I went for the baked potato with haggis and a highland cheddar, and it was really good. Nothing fancy, but unpretentious good flavour, solid and decent. Enjoyed it a lot.
Heading back towards Inverness I noticed that Aberlour was on the way, so persuaded the gang to make a stop there (and they were totally unwilling, I mean, really, must we stop at a distillery, I mean…) so we swung into the visitor centre. I do like Aberlour, but my D&D DM P has them listed as his favourite distillery, so to give him the shits it seemed a good idea to pop in. Here we met the lovely Claire, who snuck us a taste of a couple of 11 year olds (only available at the distillery) of the bourbon and sherry casks. And they were also delightful, there was a bunch of distillery-only bottlings that were very tempting. I was curious about the whole Aberlour now starting to release bourbon expressions, and my question got a wonderfully fascinating answer, in that only really since single malts coming to prominence has Aberlour been seen as a sherried dram. Through most of its history, Aberlour has been using a lot of bourbon casks, but that has generally gone into blends. Now they are starting to release some of that as single malts. It was a great visit, so take that P!
We’d aimed to head homeward then, but a random sign pointed us towards Caorunn Gin/Balmenach distillery, which M has been drinking and enjoying on her travels. It was just after 4pm, closing time, but we pulled up just as they were shutting shop and they kindly agreed to stay a bit later. Due to this generosity, we kindly agreed to spend a bit of money there. M, an avid gin fan, has proclaimed Caorunn gin to be better than god, Nick Cave, hipsters, and topless men wearing kilts, or something (she likes it a lot).
Then it was really time to go home, and the fun started. Not being experts at the joys of Scottish traffic management, and being foreigners on vacation, we hadn’t done things like googling the local news. Had we done this, we would have seen the headlins proclaiming that the A9 was closed due to a traffic accident, and as a result the shortest diversion was a 70 mile detour (the UK pretends to use metric, all traffic stuff is still miles and yards). Not having seen this, we headed back the way google maps told us (the same google maps that has been sending us down the most narrow back lanes it could find). We wondered why we were seeing a bunch of cars heading the other way, and chalked it down to long weekend traffic. We went past a few signs by the side of the road that said road closed ahead, but without anyone to provide directions, or any redirecting info, drove past until we hit a police van. at this point it was all hands on google to work out how to get home. At this point we stumbled across the road closures, and recommended routes, and off we went. I also called the bar/restaurant we’d booked for dinner, and explained we’d be a little late so if it was possible to change the booking.
Much much later, after more narrow roads, dealing with idiots who don’t understand the Scottish passing place system, and other assorted craziness (pretty sure we saw one person just park in a passing place so they could get out of their car and take pictures, either that or they didn’t know what hazard lights were for) we rolled back into Inverness, about 7 hours after we started our “short trip to Dufftown”.
Turns out there was a serious traffic incident on the A9 involving a car and a lorry at approximately 6am, and the road didn’t reopen until 11pm. I have no idea how any of those involved fared.
We quickly unpacked and changed before heading to the Whisky & Rye bar/restaurant, whose menu promised a number of interesting delights. I went with the little deep fried haggis balls, and the deep fried pickles, long with the bacon and cheese loaded fries. The menus did have burgers and other things, but these were what I felt like rather than a big main. The haggis balls and loaded fries were wonderful, full of flavour. The deep fried pickles less so — I don’t know if it was the moisture in the pickles that made the batter burst, but the end result was crispy batter, with rather dry pickles. I also had a flight of the beers on offer, an excellent wit bier (Moon something), interesting local pineapple pilsener, and a local American Pale Ale, which was also decent as it wasn’t totallt dominated by hops. Sadly our table at Whisky & Rye gave us a full view of the bar, and that was in all accounts a disorganised mess. While our server seemed to have a sense of organisation, other staff let empty glasses pile up on the bar, placed clean glasses on dirty trays, and they even ran out of wine glasses at one point (when they got fresh glasses steaming from the washer these went straight out to the floor without allowing time to cool).
Our way home included a stop in at The Malt Rooms, a little whisky bar just off the main street that had an eclectic mix of good drams. I opted for the local dram flight: Dalwhinnie 15, Tomatin 14, and Dalmore 15, all wonderful drams that I don’t drink as often as I could. We had a little chat with the bar staff, curious that they had a couple of Feis Ile 2023 bottles already, and apparently those in the trade got a sneak preview a couple of weeks ago, and came back with full suitcases. The perks of some jobs.