The Distilleries of Campbeltown : The Rise and Fall of the Whisky Capital of the World

Starting with the early origins of Campbeltown, David Stirk relates in The Distilleries of Campbeltown how the town grew from a small settlement into a Royal Burgh that depended on the herring fishery before whisky became the main trade in the town and its associated villages of Dalaruan and Dalintober. He shows how certain families such as the Colvilles, Armours and Mitchells were to be central to this trade for over a century. Ultimately the town's prosperity waned with the rise of the blending trade from the 1860s and the resultant preference for Speyside and Islay whiskies over their Campbeltown counterparts, the depression, prohibition in the USA and the post-WWI rationalisation orchestrated by the Distillers Company that took many distilleries out of production for ever. This decline is recorded by way of newspaper reports and correspondence between interested parties and is perhaps most poignantly represented by the suicide on 23 December 1930 of Duncan MacCallum, aged 83, once a leading distiller in the town, when he drowned himself in Crosshill Loch. Yet out of that dark past, something of a resurgence has gradually been made as Springbank and Glen Scotia have managed to keep going and now Glengyle is producing again. The result is that Campbeltown can now boast more working distilleries than exist in the entire Lowland producing area. This is the first proper in-depth look at the whisky industry in Campbeltown and it is accompanied with period colour OS maps showing the distillery locations in the mid-1860s along with numerous previously unpublished turn-of-the-century archive photographs of the town from the MacGrory collection. Campbeltown was once the whisky capital of the world with 29 distilleries operating simultaneously in 1835. How had this remote fishing port and royal burgh become the epicentre of Scotland's greatest export? David Stirk reveals all in this engaging and well illustrated insight into the people who were the movers and shakers behind this huge industry. The origins lie in illicit distilling which was prevalent all over Kintyre in the late 18th century. Many women were involved in this business which made many ordinary folk very wealthy and out of these origins, the legal trade was established in 1817 with Campbeltown Distillery being the first of many. Over the course of the next two decades every street and corner in the burgh had a distillery or brewery built on it. The names were redolent of Kintyre history and Kinloch, Caledonian, Dalaruan, Lochhead, Longrow, Meadowburn, Burnside, Kintyre, Rieclachan, Union, Argyll, Glenramskill, Highland, Springbank and Albyn, to name only some. It is no idle boast that Campbeltown was the Victorian whisky capital of the world and just as great schemes rise, so do they fall. Ultimately the town's prosperity waned with the Great War, the depression, prohibition in the USA and the failure of local coal seams. Now only Springbank, Glen Scotia and Glen Gyle remain in production, solitary reminders of the once great whisky days of this Royal Burgh. The first comprehensive insight into the rise and fall of Campbeltown's whisky industry. Fully illustrated in colour and black and white.