Ep. 109 - Talking Ghost Dogs, The Last Wolf of Scotland, and Scottish Highland Distiling

Transcript

Drew | Whiskey Lore (00:02.606)
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Drew | Whiskey Lore (00:17.006)
Welcome to Whiskey Lore, The Interviews. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, the Amazon bestselling author of Experiencing Kentucky Bourbon and Experiencing Irish Whiskey, along with my new book called The Lost History of Tennessee Whiskey. And today, well, I'm digging back into the archives and bringing forth a full length interview that for the last couple of years has only been available to my Whiskey Lore Patreon members. But today,

In honor of my re -releasing of my Whiskey Lore Stories podcast episodes on YouTube, I decided it was time to give everyone a fair shot at hearing this long lost interview. Normally I'd be telling you who my guest is, but in this case, I am the one that is actually the guest. We're going to be walking through the woods across the highway from the Tomaten Distillery in the Highlands of Scotland with Duncan Brighton. Not only is Duncan the expert in local history and lore,

He's also a rural regeneration and development specialist who has a deep interest in preserving these lands for the future and also inspiring tourism. He agreed to meet me on my second trip to Scotland back in 2019. He was going to give me some stories to fill out my whiskey lore stories episode called the haunting of Tomaten. But in the end, he gave me a whole lot more.

Now, not only are we going to hear him tell stories related to the ghost dog, Kubakin, who is the dog that once graced the package of a smoky Tomaten single malt. He's also going to share stories of the witch of Lagen and other local ghost stories, as well as giving us the lay of the land, talking about the last wolf of Scotland and covering some other historical figures like Bonnie Prince Charlie. So sit back, relax, enjoy a dram, enjoy my interview with

Duncan Brydon. We're in Strathdeurn this afternoon. We're walking down a track heading towards the southern exit of Loch Moai, which is a track to the Loch that drains into the River Findhorn, which runs through Strathdeurn. Strathdeurn is a big bowl in the hills south of Inverness and the Tomaten Distillery is

Drew | Whiskey Lore (02:36.93)
centre in this bowl, but it has quite a long history when one goes back in time. And we're walking down over a moor area and if you close your eyes and think back, this was part of a military road which was built in the 1720s when transport through Scotland was really very tricky. And these were the main routes. And just coming into view in the distance,

is Dalmagari Farm. Now this was a pub or a staging post. It was also home to the McQueen family who still farm this area today. They're still here on many generations and they were some of the early distillers in the area and they eventually bought the area around.

the distillery at Tomaten when distilling became legal. Prior to that distilling was an illegal practice and one can still see signs of that practice in the hills. There's a hill just on the back there called the Hill of the Worm and this was where they hid the worm which was the key bit of the illicit still, that curly piece of metal which was

so precious to the illicit distillers because it was quite hard to make all the rest you could make but that piece was difficult so it was often hidden from the excise men.

Well, about what time did the distillery, do you think prior to it becoming a legal distillery, what time frame are we talking about with the family moving in here and setting that up? Well, we're on Macintosh ground at the moment, which is still the Macintoshes today, but a lot of these clans had little sort of smaller clans sort of supporting them and around them. And the McQueens had this area which goes back to, oh.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (04:46.006)
you know, probably the 13th, 12th, 13th century, if not before. So you're talking about 800 years maybe of almost continuous occupation. And illicit whiskey distilling was really quite a profitable pastime back then. And of course you were sitting astride the main road, north and south. So it was quite easy to transport.

There's a great story about in the pub there where the excise men found this cask of illegal whiskey and they took it up to their room to store it, to take it away for evidence. And the chambermaid was asked to sneak up and work out where on the floorboards this cask was sitting. So then the owners of the cask went into the room underneath and drilled a hole through the floorboards right into the barrel and drained all the whiskey out.

so all the evidence had vanished, therefore there was no case against them. It's a beautiful area. Yes, I mean it's lovely area. This was probably farmed, it still is farmed today. They would have grown the barley for the whisky locally. And the peat, this is quite peaty soil would have been harvested to then use to dry the peat off and give it that sort of...

dry the barley off and give it that characteristic smell. So most of the people who were distilling at that time illegally were probably doing a much more smoky and probably potent whiskey than we're used to these days? Well, maybe not necessarily. The peat would have been used to dry the grain and certainly would have imparted some degree of peatiness. So,

Yes, but once you distill it, the other interesting vegetation that was used, and it's still in the name of Tomatin, which means Hill of the Juniper, was that juniper wood was favored by illicit whiskey distillers because it burns with almost no smoke. And the last thing you wanted on the open hillside was a big stream of smoke going up, telling the excise man exactly where your still was. So they would...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (07:03.724)
harvest the juniper wood because it burnt with almost a smokeless flame so you couldn't see it and then you wouldn't be found. So juniper wood was really quite an important part of the distilling process. Most likely they weren't aging the whiskey for very long if at all back then either I would imagine which would keep the black sides of the buildings and trees from emerging.

from the angels share. Well absolutely, I don't think it has lasted long enough. I think it was drunk pretty quickly. It's a fairly fiery spirit, the illicit distilling. I think keeping it undrunk for three years would have been quite a challenge, as is the case today. So yes, that sort of kind of blackening fungal effect that you see on bonded warehouses today wouldn't have been a

problem back then. So there's a lot of stories that I'm following here and trying to figure out. First of all we'll talk about the name of this ghost dog. It's a Scotch Gaelic name as I understand it, meaning ghost dog, which is pronounced... Kewbocken. Kewbocken. Yeah. Okay. And yes, I think the ghost dog is an interesting one.

quite where it came from is maybe not entirely clear and maybe that adds partly to the mystery as we discussed before. The number of more supernatural sources connected to witches and other various sort of traditional mythological beings and then there's perhaps maybe a slightly more pragmatic

story relating to the last wolf in Scotland. And this is one of the sites where it may have been dispatched. History doesn't fully relate as to the numbers around that time, but this date is fairly well documented in 1743. And interestingly, the birthday of Thomas Jefferson.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (09:27.726)
The wolf, I think, was probably maybe an elderly female who resorted to rather easy tactics of killing sheep and that sort of thing and therefore was seen as something of a pest. And the story goes that the local laird, the Macintosh as he was called,

was getting a lot of complaints about sheep being killed by this rogue wolf and he convened a meeting and all the various tenant farmers were summoned to attend. However one was missing, the McQueen from the Dalmagarry area which we mentioned earlier. He eventually came into the meeting late clutching a bag over his shoulder and...

He was taken to task by the laird for not turning up on time to this meeting. And he said, well, I've been rather busy and threw his bag down on the floor and out rolled the head of a wolf. And of course this was this last wolf. He had come across it in his travels. He had taken out his, his dirk, which is a sort of long knife, the Highlander's were on the side. And.

dispatched this wolf in short order and brought the evidence of the head to the laird. So thereby hangs the tale of this wolf that may well have been seen as something of a ghost predator wandering the hills and forests of Strathdurn in times gone by, which partly may have contributed to this ghost dog Kubochan story.

So that killing of that last wolf, I wonder if there was knowledge at that time that the wolf population was drastically low and that this man knew what he did in that. I don't think so. It's interesting when one looks at the literature of the day, it wasn't until the...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (11:47.182)
the late 1700s, early 1800s when we started to move into a more, well in Britain we'd call it a Victorian period. And what they called the Romantics started to look at the wild lands of Scotland and indeed many other parts of the world in a more romantic way. Prior to that all the literature was about how savage this wild place was. You didn't want to go there. It was hard to travel.

wet and cold and it was full of people who were eking out an existence and almost savage -like in their behavior. Whereas over a relatively short period we started to suddenly see these areas in a much more romantic light. So when the wolf was killed the uplands were still seen as a savage place, therefore getting rid of savage creatures was seen as doing everybody a favor.

Right. And it was only laterally we started to look at things in a different light. And of course conservation really didn't become a thing until probably the 20th century where we really got serious about saying look at the numbers of this particular species and how can we protect it. Indeed I think that was the case and in fact many of your countrymen were

very much to the fore, a lot of the conservation movement. Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt, exactly. And indeed John Muir, who actually came over from Scotland, but was very much part of the American psyche when it came to conservation. I think you realized in America that the West was disappearing, but you also had...

Ralph Waldo Emerson and various other writers of the time who recognized the value of nature. But over here we were moving into the industrial revolution, so nature was seen as providing resources. So we dug it up or we cut it down or we burnt it. And the uplands were very much focused on producing food and fiber like wool. So...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (14:14.338)
conservation came possibly a little bit later in Britain. So I'm guessing the other thing about getting rid of wolves was because you have so many sheep and wolves tend to like sheep that getting wolves off of your property was a pretty high priority. Well absolutely and if we sort of look across in the woods just across from us there, there are remains of old

wolf traps. Now these were probably also aimed at foxes and other predators because come the early part of the 19th century many of these areas were being developed as sporting estates. Now this where they were cultivated for for grouse and for deer and so anything that predated on them.

such as wolves or foxes or birds of prey were seen as a threat and therefore they were fairly heavily persecuted. So Scotland became quite a managed landscape and we can still see the remnants of these traps, so very much sort of pitfall traps. You would put some piece of meat or something in the bottom, basically a big hole and wait for the creature to fall into it.

but they are still there, which again reflects the fact that wolves and other predators were still prevalent in the area. So the traps are? They're just in behind this mound here. You can sort of see them if we go in there, but they're just really... You'd hardly know unless you know what you're looking at. So they're just big, dig a big hole and...

We almost have them, some places still have them slightly today, they're called stink pits and what they do is put dead bits of animals in there and they're attracting in predators and they can lay traps around them but increasingly public opinion is swinging against this type of management and I think in...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (16:39.246)
another sort of few years we'll see even more controls coming in on that type of activity. So talking about the other legends that have come about with Kubaken, there's one that's about the Witch of Lagen. Is that the correct pronunciation? Yes, the Witch of Lagen, usually. And Lagen, again, is from the Gaelic. It means a hollow in the hillside.

And that was one that has been quite prevalent. There was also the witch of Newd and I think the witch of Glenbanker who are similar sorts of areas to the south of here. And they basically all revolve around the witch being this mythological creature that people thought would do them harm. So...

What happened in the case of the witch of Lagan was that the witch had invited somebody in to... because she was in normal human form like a woman and she invited somebody in for tea and this farmer had two dogs and the witch tried to tie these dogs with some hair but...

The farmer had some suspicions that this woman was a witch, so the hares, he didn't tie them properly. And the idea was that the witch would come out of her normal persona and become a witch, and then the dogs would be corralled by these hares that tied them to a part of the house. But...

the farmer had realized this was going to be the case. So when she came out of her persona and took on the witch form to attack him, the dogs broke free and sprung on her. She managed then to break free from the dogs and raced over the hill to seek sanctuary in one of the churchyards where the dogs couldn't get her. But there's various stories as to whether she did make it or she didn't. A few of the...

Drew | Whiskey Lore (19:00.808)
stories say that she did make it and then the ghost dogs were the ancestors of these dogs that were chasing her, that were roaming around the churchyard waiting for her to come out. But equally there's also a story that a traveller came across the devil that was pursuing her and the devil asked this traveller had he seen this witch and he said yes and

she was being pursued by two dogs who eventually caught her before she got to the churchyard. And the story goes that somebody then again saw the devil riding back with this remains of this witch slung across his saddle and the two dogs behind her. So they'd obviously done their job. Again, these perhaps reflect the various sources of the ghost dog story.

So did you kind of grow up, you grew up around this area? I didn't grow up around this area entirely. I mean, I've been here about 30 years. Okay. And I've got a particular interest and I kind of walk the hills and uh...

walked and cycled many of these routes. So I have to say, if she was running over the hills from where she reputedly lived to the churchyard, she was some verging on Olympic athletes sort of status, I think. So was she from the village of Lagen? She was from the village of Lagen, which is a long way. I cycled that way, and it took me the best part of a day to get over the hills.

down to Lagan. She clearly was very fit, but I think they were in those days. They did tend to walk a lot further than we do. She was on an all -out sprint though. She was, yes she was. But maybe if you're being pursued by two sort of rabid as dogs and the devil, you may well find additional powers you didn't know you had. Yeah. So have you heard any stories of people who have been haunted by these?

Drew | Whiskey Lore (21:12.024)
ghost dogs? There's been local tales whether they have been accompanied by...

rather large intake of uskaba as they wandered back home from a convivial night in somebody's house and they happened to see something they thought was a ghost dog or indeed somebody out exercising their dog late at night. I don't know. I'm sure there's some stories like that and they obviously grow in the telling. But I think probably there is some...

mythological sort of roots in certainly in the witch tales and people did sort of believe in some of these quite significantly in the past and the wolf story that we talked about earlier again I think these all contribute to the rich sort of history and tradition that is prevalent in the area and it's something that we're trying to retain because it is very much part of the character.

Yeah, these stories, it's amazing how this all started with me reading the back of a whiskey box and reading about a distillery employee who saw this ghost dog one evening and decided to try to grab it without any success in that. But also heard of a woman who was

riding her bike down, I guess she was down near the church. Maybe that's that little road that I went driving down to get to the church, a road that I almost wish I hadn't taken my car down, but had walked instead. Yes, I'm sure these are great sort of little local stories. And you never quite know because there was a case about 30 years ago where

Drew | Whiskey Lore (23:18.456)
a local farmer, not immediately in this area, but in the adjacent area, found a lot of animals being killed and he saw this kind of ghostly creature sort of stalking his sheep. And this happened on quite a few occasions. Eventually, nobody would believe him, eventually he decided to take matters into his hands and he set up a proper trap.

and lo and behold after several weeks he called himself a cougar. Whoa! And again, this cougar who is christened Felicity lived out her life in a local wildlife park and is now sitting stuffed in the museum in Inverness. Somebody had obviously let her go or she'd escaped or something like that.

and she'd turn to taking sheep as an easy option. So cougars are not native? Cougars are not native here, no, no. Okay. But it's surprising what can live undetected in the woods. So I think these are all factors that might have sort of contributed. People can see these creatures from time to time, you know, flipping about.

talking about the last wolf in Scotland gets me thinking about St. Patrick driving out the snakes in Ireland. So there was that question in my mind as to whether there actually were wolves or that was just a way to explain that there weren't any wolves in Scotland. Yes, I mean wolves have, I mean they were here after the last Ice Age.

and they were here, as we've said earlier, pretty much up to about the sort of the 1700s. You have fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood that obviously relied on the wolf story, but they were pretty heavily persecuted and they finally were killed out in Scotland.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (25:41.262)
in the early part of the 1700s. If you look at again the the Gaelic place names, Wof, Vady, features quite commonly. There's a number of place names. There's even out in the islands there's a town today still called Loch Vady, and it means Loch of the Wolf, or sometimes it means Fox. There are mountains in the Isle of Skye.

called Benavadi which means sort of hill of the wolf. So it is evident in the landscape that they were very much part of Scotland in years gone by.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (26:28.782)
Ah, looky there, that's beautiful. Yes, well we're just about to look down on Loch Moai, which again has quite a big history. There's an island on it which we'll see as we get up around the corner here. And it once held what they call a Cranog, which was a sort of lake dwelling.

which was an area that provided some protection for the owners from marauding tribes and others in the area. And then it was used as a burial ground and there's actually also a memorial on it, a sort of Cleopatra style needle that you can see on the island as well.

It's got quite a long history to it. So there's a mention of a forest in one of the stories. And I know it comes down from a mountain behind the Tomaten Distillery. What is that? I almost want to say it's like Mona Leia or something like that. Is that, does that? Yeah, there's a, there's a big area to the, basically to the west of the distillery and

It's the big areas called the Mauna Lea, which means the grey moors. And it contrasts with the mountains, the Cairngorms to the south, which are often known as the Mauna Ruaa, which mean the red hills. And this often reflects the geology. So the grey moors, it's predominantly a sort of grey coloured rock. And it's a much more rolling wild area. It's probably one of the wildest areas we've still got in Scotland.

and there's a number of tracks and trails through it but there's much fewer people, many fewer people actually passing through the the Monalia but the the water for the whisky at Tomaten Distillery rises high in the Monalia and then seeps down to a spring where the distillery picks it up and the name of the stream or the burn as we call them in Scotland coming down through the distillery is called Altnifree or the Free Burn.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (28:51.342)
And it's not free as in no cost, it's free as in the Gaelic word which means the sort of wild uplands. So it's the burden of the wild uplands. And it's angle -sized as the word free.

So can we see that mountain from here? This is all part of the Mauna Lea that we're looking at. This mountain just directly behind the distillery, which is that one you can just see to the left of the trees there, that's Tom Nahuli, which means the peak of the treasure. And history never quite relates what that treasure was. It's arguable the treasure might have actually been treasure in the form of spirit. So that sort of whisky treasure.

It does occasionally mean sort of financial treasure people buried gold or whatever and there's a number of places in in Scotland where you you've got that that word hoolie, which is treasure one of the areas was during the the 45 rebellion this was 1745 when the French Decided to bankroll this This is rising in Scotland because basically it was a

religious rising in the sense that the French were Catholic and Bonnie Prince Charlie who met his end ultimately at Culloden or he was defeated at Culloden, he was seeking funding from the French and they delivered a whole load of gold and money and history doesn't quite relate where it ended up but somebody thinks it was buried up there and there's a hill called the peak of the treasure.

and it relates back to that. There's still a few people, hopefully, wandering around looking for it, but nobody's actually found it yet. If you see a new distillery pop up next door and it's got shiny new equipment, you probably know where the money came from. They found the treasure, yes. So I take it the Macintoshes, when they were distilling here, they weren't in quite such a wide open area. If

Drew | Whiskey Lore (31:02.168)
if during the illegal era before 1823? Well, the hills would have been quite bare still then because there probably wasn't as much tree cover. Unlike many other countries in Europe, Scotland has been very poorly covered in trees until relatively recently. About 17 % of Scotland is now covered in trees. The average across Europe is more like 30.

and in the United States I suspect it's about that if not higher. And this partly reflects climate, it partly reflects activity of grazing animals, stopping trees, growing. But what it means of course is that we had these wild open hillsides so you had to be quite clever and so many of the illicit stools were tucked down in gullies where...

streams and things were because what you needed for illicit distilling was a source of water, a source of wood to heat your water, to allow you to evaporate off the spirit and then obviously your source of grain. So like any good industry you worked out what was heaviest which was usually water and fuel and then developed your

your operation close to them and you carried in your barley that could be brought in the back of a horse or a pony and then you would set up your illicit still. And obviously, crucially, you wanted to be far enough away from the main road so you couldn't be seen by the customs or the excise men but not too far from your markets because you then had to put it into bottles or jars or barrels and then take it to market.

So like any good industrialist, you had to get all these factors about right and not get caught. And that's really where illicit stills came in. So they were quite careful as to their locations. So they were mostly using what they produced for trade, kind of as their means of financial.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (33:24.052)
stability or what was the... I think you're probably right there Drew. I mean I think that the whiskey was a very good additional source of income because living as a small farmer up in this area we're up at about a thousand feet quite far north often in poor weather conditions in the winter it was a tough hard life and so whiskey enabled you...

to actually probably survive because it gave you that additional income that you had to supplement the basic livestock and other small elements of crops that you could sell. Most of the time, your livestock and crops were just there to keep you alive. The whiskey manufacturer was giving you a little bit of an extra income that allowed you to continue to live in places like this.

And as a result of course, when we had developments in the economy, when we had transport, roads, railways improved, there was quite a large exodus of the population out of the Highlands and other countries, similar countries like Ireland, many of them ending up in North America. And a lot of the moonshine skills that developed in North America were

honed in the hills of Scotland and they took those skills and that knowledge over there because they thought they could get a better living and possibly the first settlers didn't but their subsequent generations probably did. So that massive economic exodus was quite a factor in the Scottish Highlands. Some of them were cleared.

by the landowners in a more forceful manner, but a lot of the more economic migrants, as we'd call them today, they were seeking a better life. And they all moved around where I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Well, absolutely, yes. I mean, these were strongholds, I think, of the Scots and the Irish moving out. And then laterally, they would then go off to New Zealand and Australia too. So.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (35:52.206)
We have this massive sort of Scots and Irish diaspora around the world.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (36:00.238)
You can see the island. Yeah, and there's the Cleopatra's needle. That sort of tall, sort of stone structure. Okay. You know, right on top of the island. Yeah.

And what's the mountain behind there? Yeah, that is Mielmoor it's called. And it really is the gateway into Strath Durn because you can see a bit of the hollow here and out to the left of Mielmoor is the Alten Slanach where the road goes now, the new road. And the military road went down there as well. It was the most obvious route to Inverness.

But the old road used to go through the other side of Mealmore and round.

So this was this high basin and these gateways, there's another one to the south called the Slocht, which again the road and the railway go through. And it may not look hugely daunting today, but if you imagine you're trying to get your stagecoach or your road built by hand through these places, they were quite a barrier. Was this ever a...

stronghold of any type militarily I take it that this is not leading to a river that is a strategic river of any sort. No this drains down to the Finnhorn and it's one of the sort of feeder lochs but if we go back in geological time or at least glacial time probably about 20 ,000 years ago there was a glacier that ran straight down there and

Drew | Whiskey Lore (37:54.126)
The river probably at one time went straight down there as well. And then when the ice retreated, it left this hollow where the river slowed and then filled it up to create this lake. And then it cut a new path to the east through the mountains and then down to the sea. But if you look at it on a map, you can see it take a right -hand turn where it probably shouldn't. And it didn't in the past, but it was just...

due to glacial action over the last sort of 10, 15 ,000 years that it changed. The lack of castle ruins is what made me feel like this was probably not a military point of interest. Yeah, there's a good story though. Just at the head of the lake, head of the loch there, is Moy Hall and it would have been a staging post on the way north to Inverness and it was the home of Colonel Anne.

Now Colonel Anne was one of the rebel ladies of the 45 rebellion. They came out in favour of the Prince and the story goes that the Prince, Prince Charlie, Bonnie Prince Charlie was staying with them at the time when Lord Loudon's force in Inverness heard that he was here and so they decided to mount a night attack.

So the story goes that about 1500 men of Loudon's regiment marched south from Inverness, which is about 15 miles over the hill there, to try and catch him by surprise. But apparently a servant in the pub in Inverness where the soldiers were based overheard this plan, so he sent word down to Moy Hall. So the prince was raised.

and got out of his bed and taken to safety. Meanwhile Donald Fraser, who was the local blacksmith, gathered a handful of men and set off to meet this 1500 strong force coming through that gap in the hills. And in a narrow gully in the dark they constructed one of your classic historical deceptions by pretending to be a much larger force than they were.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (40:16.782)
So they made lots of noise, they lit fires, they fired off muskets, and the opposing force thought they were facing this sort of the Prince's army, and they turned tail and ran back. So Donald Fraser is actually buried in the churchyard over here, and there's a marble, a marble gravestone that remembers his bravery.

when he saved the prince from capture. So it was quite a story, I think, at the time. And Colonel Anne, because back then women didn't have sort of huge role in military activity, but she obviously was a fairly redoubtable lady who managed to organize this escape and this defense.

But this area pretty much remained unscathed through the centuries for what we know. Well, after the rebellion in 1745, because Culloden, the actual battle was just again a few miles to the north here, this area was quite heavily suppressed by the government. But quickly the government realized that these soldiers that they had been fighting actually made very good soldiers. So...

What we then do is recruit them into our army and send them off to fight Britain's foreign wars. So the Highland regiments then became some of the shock troops of the British army because they were very good, they were very tough, they were used to living in hard environments. And all the campaigns that Britain's been involved with, right up to the present day, you have Highland regiments. But meantime, the area started to be gentrified. These areas became...

big estates. We're talking about the start of the Victorian period. There was huge amounts of money coming in. That's when all the whisky distilling started to take off legally. And these estates were turned into basically large sort of hunting parks and big houses were built. People were employed to look after the grouse and the deer. And that continued very much.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (42:45.528)
up until probably just a few decades ago. Things are changing a bit now, land patterns are being addressed by our new Scottish Parliament and we've got new industries like wind turbines and that sort of thing that are starting to appear on the hillsides and there's a big wind farm up over that hill and another one just round the corner here.

So the Highlands is moving into a new phase, but whisky distilling still remains a major part of the Highland economy. As long as we don't have too many tariff wars with our trading partners. Absolutely. I'm not a fan of that either, since it makes my Scotch a whole lot more expensive than it should be. So the viaduct goes right through town. When would the train have been?

run through this area. When did they build it? Well, the story goes that the lines were being built by the Victorian industrialists because they saw the technology of the trains being hugely important to moving goods and services and people. Highlands were still a bit of a barrier because of the terrain and so the line north from Perth to Inverness took a bit longer than many of the others. They first started by building

from Perth up to to Aviemore and then they took a big detour around this area in Strath Dern because of the geography we had some big river valleys to cross so they went east and built a line to Inverness that way but then in about the 1890s they decided that they would come in a more direct line so the viaducts all date from about the 1890s. Okay.

and they were built by a chap called Mitchell and another engineer called Murdo Patterson who were really excellent engineers and they managed to build them over quite a short time period and even today when you look at them you think this is a pretty impressive bit of engineering. Just at the moment the national company that owns all the railways in Britain is strengthening all the bridges and

Drew | Whiskey Lore (45:09.262)
I was talking to some of the engineers who are putting rock at the bottom of the piers of the viaduct to stop the river eroding them. And they have these huge machines, they can move rocks and all the computers to design things. And they are, they said, look, these guys were pretty impressive in terms of what they could achieve well over a hundred years ago with what they had to work with. So they built the death spray.

Straths Bay railway was the one that was built up to kind of detour this direction. Yes, there was the Highland Railway companies back in those days. Most of these railways were self -financed by very wealthy individuals who could almost dictate whether they had their own station to stop at their Highland estate so they could come up in August to shoot grouse and hunt deer.

Nowadays most railways are built with government money but back then these were big private ventures and there were several different railway companies all competing. So one might argue that it was actually back then there was more choice because the railway companies were competing for trade much more than they are now. The Strathspey line, yes, it was built primarily to service the distilleries who again the wealthy industrialists said we need to get this

market. To market and we need the railway lines to come in close to our distilleries and most of the distilleries including Tomaten had their own siding off the main line that would allow whiskey to be moved and it had a major impact on on farming on fishing because once the railways were open you could get let's say fresh salmon or whiskey it could be in London within

sort of 10 or 24 hours, you know, that was just impossible before. So people would get all this wonderful produce and enjoy and understand what the Highlands had to offer. I'm thinking in those early days of the distillery here, they were selling probably mostly to Inverness. And then when the railway came through, that's when it really had its chance to expand and grow. But.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (47:36.398)
Yes, I mean correct. I think they could shift much larger volumes when the railway came through in the 1890s. There would have been some road travel, but it would have been an unserviced road quite quite hard. Interestingly, there's a road further south of here, not much further south called Cummins Road and it connected two areas across the mountains and this was built by

the come in as he was known he was a clan chief and the story goes it was to carry his wine and his beer from one castle to another over the mountains without breaking all the bottles so there's quite a long history of moving liquid refreshment throughout the hills and glens of scotland they didn't have any packing

peanuts or anything to, uh, styrofoam was a little. I'm sure this, they probably use this stuff. This is Bracken. Um, this is a fern that grows and one sees it in all sorts of places. I lived in a house for a while and they, they had an outside toilet. Um, have to say when I, when I came to the house, uh, we had an inside one by then, but, but the rooms of the old outside one and the walls were all packed with Bracken.

And you'd put it on the floor, you would use it for insulation, you'd use it for packaging. So it's a bit like you sometimes used to see the old, the old whiskey crates full of straw. It was the same, same purpose, but why waste straw when you had this raw material that just did exactly the same job. So, so bracken was used as a packing and insulating material. And.

The story goes as well, if you're making your porridge and you're cooking things in a kind of slow cooking, you would boil it up and then you'd put it in a box surrounded by straw or bracken and it would continue to cook for a bit longer. Oh, That's a little insulation. Yeah. Yeah. So the other two stories that you were talking about just when we got out of the car, or we were still in the car, was two other witch stories.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (49:56.206)
Can you recall those? Is there much detail on those? There was a group of witches or something that... Yes, there was the witch of Newd, and that is another place to the south of Aviemore, and there was a witch there. And again, the story goes that that witch took the form of a hare.

Now this was quite common in the highlands.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (50:32.334)
The farmer saw this hare drinking the milk off cows. The hare would go along in the field and then reach up and attach itself to the udders of the cow and take the milk. And of course this was something that the farmers didn't really think was... it wasn't a good idea for them because after the witch had drunk, or the hare had drunk, the cows went dry.

Now, there was probably a reason for it if you look back. There's various types of plants that if cows eat these plants, it stops the flow of milk and what have you. But it was convenient to blame something else. So often they would then try and shoot the hare. And the story goes that the witch of Newd was taking the form of a hare. And the hare...

then was shot and they went to the house where the witch lived and they found this woman with a gunshot wound in her. And the other story relates to the hare trying to escape again over the hills to Strathdurn to find sanctuary in the church and a kind of healing role. So not quite a ghost dog, but a ghost animal, this hare.

And that was the Witch of Newt story. Lots of little tales in this area, I'm sure, that floated around through the years. And there was a guy named Peddler who was keeping a lot of these stories. Yes, his name was John Ferguson, but he was called Peddler basically because he spent a lot of time cycling around on his bicycle. And

He produced a book which recorded a lot of these stories, including the various witches ones. There's been a number of authors. The area that we're in, there was a lady who set up the first folk museum in the Highlands and it's still open. Today it's quite a big venture down near Newtonmore, south of Aviemore.

Drew | Whiskey Lore (52:59.34)
Isabel Grant and she was another collector of of of of of you know myths and folktales. So if you look back you often find they've all got them from the same source. But I do think there was a certain amount of greater knowledge of place names and.

and folklore than there is today, we have too much in the way of Netflix and Amazon these days. Whereas in the past, entertainment was provided by the telling of these tales. And if it was accompanied by a bit of a few drums as well, they probably added a bit of color to them, I'm sure. And stretch them each time they told. That's right. Yeah. Yeah.

I hope you enjoyed this stroll through the woods as much as I did. Don't forget that if you want to hear the full tale of the Witch of Lagan and my journey towards finding this story, listen to episode five from season one of the Whiskey Lore Stories podcast, available to enjoy on this very same podcast app. And next week, join me as I head back to Kentucky and chat a bit about historic brands with my friend Jerry Daniels from Stone Fences Tours. We'll be running down a list of our top 10 favorites.

be giving our reasons for why we rank them as we did. In the meantime, have a great week. I'm your host, Drew Hanisch, and until next time, cheers and slonjava. Whiskey Lore is a production of Travel Fuels Life, LLC.