A Distillation of Whisky-Making in the Blane Valley
As long as there have been humans, there has been alcohol. Production of wine and beer has been dated back 7,000-odd years in Central Asia, according to archaeologists. But the origins of whisky distilling, at least as we know it today, are more recent.
Some historians have it that Christian monks brought to Scotland the science of condensing strong liquor from the steam produced by boiling a mix of malted barley and water in the era of St Columba and his fellow-Irish missionaries in the 600-800s AD. That may be, but it’s also likely that Highland farmers found this process out for themselves during the dark winter nights.
Whatever its origins, by the 1600s whisky was being distilled in some quantity around Scotland. It was known then as ‘uisge beatha’, from the Gaelic meaning of ‘water of life’. Or more simply ‘uiskie’. Another term was ‘acquavitae’. Never slow to catch on to tax-raising opportunities, the Scottish Parliament passed an Excise Act in 1644 levying a duty of 2/8d (approx. 13p today) per pint of acquavitae ‘or other strong liquor’.
After the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, English revenue staff crossed the border to begin their lengthy attempts to bring whisky production under control. And in 1781 the first of many Acts were passed to provide a legal framework for this campaign, outlawing the production of spirit from un-licensed and un-registered distilleries. These waves of legislation however served only to confuse and disrupt efforts to provide a robust legal foundation for the growth of whisky production: it was said that no two licensed distilleries were being taxed at the same rate on their output.
Illegal Stills in the Blane Valley
In the Blane Valley there were reckoned to be well over a dozen active pot still distilling operations by 1800, a few legally licensed and the rest still adhering to the traditional hillside bootleggers practice of setting up small mobile units beside a suitable burn or river and making as much rough liquor as they could before ‘The Revenue’ arrived on horses.
In The Parish of Strathblane, published in 1886, John Guthrie Smith records: “It used to be common enough to see in the early morning from the hill behind Netherton village the smoke of some 13 stills going all at once.
“Bands of men came out from Glasgow to buy and carry away the illicit spirits, and many a scene of violence and bloodshed has been witnessed between Strathblane and Glasgow in the conflicts between these desperate men and the Revenue officers.
“Mugdock Wood was a favourite place both for small stills and also as a rendezvous for the sellers and buyers of the whisky, and was the scene in 1818 of a terrible fight between them and the Revenue officers and a party of soldiers. The smugglers were victorious, and after seizing and destroying the soldiers’ weapons, pursued them from the field of battle.”
The Reverend Dr William Hamilton, minister of Strathblane from 1809 until 1835 became so exasperated by one particular corrupt exciseman, who was in cahoots with the smugglers that he decided to take the matter into his own hands. However, on the very day that Dr Hamilton was due to expose him, the “miserable exciseman” drowned when swimming in Dumbroch [Ebbie’s] Loch. The minister regarded this as divine providence!
The 1823 Excise Act
Finally, in 1823, when there were 200 legally operating distilleries in Scotland, a definitive Excise Act was passed which fundamentally shaped the future of the Scotch Whisky industry as we know it today. The Excise Act set a fee of £10 for licensing a still, set duty levels for distilled spirits, allowed warehousing of distilled spirits before duty needed to be paid, and reduced opportunities for evading tax on distilled spirits. Distillers had to follow a formal production process which involved building a stillhouse with the proper equipment. In addition to other standardized facilities, a house had to be provided for the Excise-man if one was not available within one mile.
But in return for this investment the Revenue offered the attractive rebate of a halfpence duty on each gallon of spirit from a licensed distillery.
At the same time the Excise duty monitoring force – the dreaded ‘Excisemen’ of popular song – was reinforced. Competition was also tougher. So deep pockets were required to fund early whisky producers through this period and inevitably by the 1830’s a large proportion of those 200 early distilleries had closed their doors. Commercial newspaper advertisements from that period show sales and auctions organized to sell the equipment of long-lost distilleries such as Baldarroch at Lennoxtown, on the banks of the Glazert river, founded by John Forrest in 1825 and closed in 1832.
Cockmylane
The first licensed distillery in the Blane Valley was established at Cockmylane, at the top of our ‘Horses field’, by one Alexander Parlane in the late 1820s. It operated successfully for more than 10 years before closing through a combination of growing competition and the escalating complexity of revenue and licensing rules as the authorities strove to control this fragmented economic activity. (This venture is remembered in the Strathblane street name Cockalane View.)
Meantime the early proliferation of illegal ‘bootleggers’ was being targeted by the additional force of Excisemen. For instance, according to the Glasgow Courier, in January 1822 two illegal stills were uncovered while in full operation along the banks of Bardowie Loch. Their equipment was smashed and the men who failed to escape were imprisoned in Stirling to await trial.
These illegal stills were often operated by farmers seeking another source of income from their land and its resources. There are many tales told of Excisemen’s raids on remote farms where suspicious smoke had been spotted, and of the ingenuity shown in concealing the stills and their produce. An article in the Kirkintilloch Herald tells of the farmer whose house was thoroughly turned over by suspicious Revenue officers, who found nothing. The farmer delighted in telling his son that the still had been hidden in the basement, with its chimney built into the space between a false wall in a bedroom and the house’s exterior wall.
Burnfoot
It was therefore during an exceptionally active period in the evolution of the Scotch whisky industry that in 1833 a licence to malt its own barley as well as triple-distil spirit was granted to the established Burnfoot Distillery, located in the picturesque glen in the shadow of Dumgoyne hill at the western end of the Campsie Hills. Part of the Blairquhosh Cunninghame estate and known as Burnfoot Farm, the distillery had been operated by George Connell since its inception in the early 1800s.
Burnfoot had built a useful reputation as a supplier of quality spirit: according to Guthrie Smith its whisky was “peculiarly grateful to the Strathblane palate”. Connell also secured a 99-year lease on a triangular two-acre slice of land in the glen from John Buchanan of Carbeth (who later sold the land to the Edmonstones of Duntreath) for the princely sum of £8 a year, including the right to take water from the burn.
Thus was born the distillery that is today Glengoyne, one of the most successful Scottish malt whisky brands. With an annual production of a million litres and 70 full-and part-time staff, it is by some margin the largest business in the Blane Valley and the largest provider of local employment.
Connell was clearly good at his business as the distillery grew rapidly from this time. He invested in a larger stillhouse, together with malt barns, granary, kiln, mash house and tun-room. A substantial manager’s house was also built, which remains today as the distillery offices. As the illustration below shows, these buildings still form the core of the Glengoyne operation today.
Glenguin
George Connell continued to build his business steadily under the company name Burnfoot Distillery, but he adopted the brand name Glenguin, taken from the Gaelic for ‘Glen of the Wild Geese’. However, by 1867 he had sold the distillery to a John McLellan, who by January 1876 had died and passed the company on to his son Archibald McLellan.
The next transaction set the scene for a sustained expansion of the distillery and its products. Before a year was out Archibald had sold the business on to the three Lang brothers – Gavin, Alexander and William. And Lang Brothers Ltd, a well-known name in the Glasgow pub industry with a reputation for blending a wide range of whiskies, invested further in modernising the distillery, including building four bonded spirit warehouses on a three-acre site across the road, leased from the same John Buchanan of Carbeth for the reasonable sum of £8.10s a year.
By 1887 when the writer Alfred Barnard, author of the book Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, visited Glenguin (as it was still called), he found a neat, well-presented distillery complex capable of producing 45,000 gallons of pure malt spirit a year. It was powered by a 12-horsepower steam engine and boiler. The warehousing complex could store 2,000 barrels. A total of nine people were in fulltime employment including the resident Exciseman.
However, the following year brought a temporary disaster to the business when a wild storm brought a torrent of water down the glen, washing away an entire store building. The Glasgow Herald report of the incident told how “barrels of whisky were floated a considerable distance into the valley, the ends in many cases being stove in.” The photo below shows some of the damage.
One notable resident of the distillery was young Arthur William Tedder, born in July 1890. His dad, also called Arthur, was the-then resident Excise Officer from 1899-1893, with the family living in the Customs House. Young Tedder went on to be Marshall of the Royal Air Force and deputy commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force which invaded France on D-Day 1944. He was elevated to the peerage in 1946 as 1st Baron Tedder of Glenguin. His father didn’t do too badly either. He became Chief Inspector of Excise, during which time he chaired a Royal Commission of Enquiry into Whisky which laid down the legal definition of Scotch which pertains today. Arthur senior went on to become Commissioner of the Board of Customs during which time he devised the UK’s old age pension scheme.
In 1899 a tragedy occurred at the distillery, involving the manager, one Cochrane Cartwright, who had been running the distillery since 1881. The 42-year-old drowned in the distillery dam on October 28 – reputedly after over-indulging in his own product. Cartwright, who was reputed to be the illegitimate son of one of the Lang brothers who now owned the business, still leaves his mark on the place, according to the tourist guides who take visitors around the distillery. His ghost is said to haunt the premises at night. (The family’s misfortunes did not end there. Two of Cochrane’s sons died in the First World War. They are the only pair of brothers on Strathblane’s war memorial.)
Glengoyne
Around this time the name Glenguin was changed to its modern name: Glengoyne. It first appears in the Stirling Valuation Rolls under that name in 1915.
Anyone who has ever fantasised about gaining access to one of the warehouses and siphoning off a few free drams should think better of it. When three Lanarkshire miners did just that on Hogmanay 1945, they landed in jail.
Lang Brothers, which had grown from their origins as a Glasgow pub owner into a whisky blender and merchant before acquiring the business, enjoyed a healthy growth phase throughout the first half of the 1900s, launching a wider range of Langs branded whiskies led by its core Langs Supreme brand – all based on a foundation of Glengoyne spirit. But such success often brings its own outcomes, and in 1965 the company was acquired for £1.3 million by the major whisky blenders and producers Robertson and Baxter, owners of the Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark, The Macallan and Highland Park brands.
Shrewdly, R&B kept the Langs brand names and products going, but initiated another major investment programme at the distillery during 1966-67 which boosted its production further, including the installation of a third still, to the point where its output reached 800,000 litres a year. This time the Glengoyne brand was to the fore, and a wider age range of products were soon being marketed globally by the R&B distribution network.
Finally, in 2003 R&B (by now renamed Edrington Group) and still privately owned, sold Glengoyne, including its Langs brands, to the family-owned Broxburn-based blender and bottler Ian Macleod Distillers (IMD). At the time IMD managing director Leonard Russell, said the acquisition of their first distillery would enable the company to grow more rapidly, and so it has proved.
The distillery long ago passed the point where the burn from Dumgoyne could furnish its needs. These days it sources its water from the Carron reservoir.
Today Glengoyne produces a million litres of spirit a year. Its expanding range of whiskies, from 10- to 50-year-old, are to be found across Europe, in the US and in rapidly-growing markets such as India. The distillery attracts many thousands of visitors a year to sample its product and the tour. See www.glengoyne.com/visit
Glengoyne is special in a number of ways. It has been called ‘the most beautiful Scotch whisky distillery’. As it sits astride the formal demaracation line between Highland and Lowland Scotch, its whiskies can be said to be distilled in the Highlands and matured in the Lowlands. And as the boundary line between Killearn and Strathblane parishes passes down the burn that runs through the middle of the distillery, it has a foot in each.
What George Connell would make of today’s highly-productive distillery complex can only be imagined. But one thing is for sure: he would recognise it immediately as having undergone remarkably little change since he left it over 150 years ago.
NOTE: to sample Glengoyne’s remarkable history, contact the distillery’s Whisky Experiential Ambassador Gordon Dallas, who runs regular history tours: gordon.dallas@ianmacleod.com
Alastair Balfour, May 2024. With thanks to Gordon Dallas for his help in preparing this piece.
Glengoyne Distillery. Photo by Chris Bell Photography