by Iain Banks
From Wick it’s a less-than-fifteen-minute hop to Kirkwall, but at least the clouds have mostly cleared. We fly over the north-east tip of Scotland, over Duncansby Head and John O’Groats and within sight of the real most northerly point of mainland Scotland at Dunnet Head. Then it’s out over the white stroked waters of the perpetually restless Pentland Firth and the island of Stroma – lying in the sea like a giant green jigsaw piece – and banking past the fabulously dramatic thousand-foot cliffs of Hoy and the island’s Old Man, a wave-washed pinnacle of layered red rock knuckled out from the cliffs like a colossal cubist tree trunk.
To the west, as the plane banks for Kirkwall airport, stretches Scapa Flow, the base for the Home Fleet during the First and Second World Wars. It’s where the German High Seas fleet was scuttled after the end of the Great War, and where my dad was based during WWII, when the service men and women far outnumbered the local inhabitants. Way in the distance, built where the rusting hulks of the earlier block ships used to lie, the Churchill Barriers make delicate pale lines across the grey-blue sea, slim causeways between the isles.
Taxi from Kirkwall airport to the Kirkwall Hotel and room overlooking the harbour. Take away the harbour and it would just be a nice view looking out to the shores and hills across the sound, but with the harbour involved it’s one of the most fascinating views you could ask for. There are ferries coming from and going to the other Orcadian islands throughout the long hours of daylight, fishing boats setting off high and returning low in the water, catches being landed, and people pottering about on power boats and yachts – many of them from Norway – all the time. On the horizon to the north, one of the big wind generators on Burgar Hill revolves serenely, like a white giant doing cartwheels. The only thing missing is one of the big cruise ships that regularly call in during the summer.
Orkney: a Handy Hint on blending in.
If you ever go to Orkney – and you should – never call Scotland ‘the mainland’. Orkney has its own Mainland; that’s the correct name for the big island that Kirkwall and the other sizable town, Stromness, are on. Scotland is called Scotland. The Orcadians don’t really think of themselves as all that Scottish at all; they’re Orcadians.
Look, these people have two distilleries, some of the best whisky made in … the British Isles and a make of beer called Skullsplitter; it’s as well to keep on the right side of them.
Ann snoozes. I take a taxi to Scapa distillery for a quick photo, then onwards the mile or so to Highland Park. Scapa is closed, shut up, deserted, and profoundly unphotogenic. Highland Park is smart without being too fussy, and looks happily busy. My taxi driver used to be a barman in the seventies here and remembers when the two Orcadian distilleries were level pegging on production and pretty much reputation too. Back then, he tells me, there was real rivalry between the Scapa and the Highland Park workers; if a Scapa man came into the bar and asked for a whisky you couldn’t serve him with Grouse because there was Highland Park in Grouse; he’d have to have a different blend, like Cutty Sark. And vice versa. We talk about how they’re going to be starting a distillery on Shetland later this year or early next year, which will mean that Highland Park will have to remove the statement, ‘The Northernmost Scotch Whisky Distillery in the World’ from its packaging. ‘Aye,’ the driver says, ‘the Shelties have been jealous of us having two distilleries and them having none for years.’
Since the seventies, Scapa and Highland Park have gone in opposite directions; Scapa obscure, almost completely unpromoted and barely known, bumping along the bottom, mostly quiet with only occasional short bursts of activity, and Highland Park going from strength to strength, celebrating its bi-centenary five years ago with a flourish and a big party that brought whisky connoisseurs and writers from all over the world, releasing various medal-winning expressions of huge repute and just generally establishing a deserved reputation as one of the very best malts made anywhere.
This is a good tour to do; while the open-plan, one-box-solution Arran tour lets you see really clearly how all the different bits of the process fit together, the Highland Park tour winds through the different stages building by building, but has more stages to see in the first place. There’s the realthing malting floors, for a start, with the barley laid out in great flat drifts, like absurdly thick piled golden carpets covering the floor. You’re encouraged to lift a few grains and sniff them, but asked not to eat them. Given that the distillery workers are wandering about in their work boots through the barley, sticking thermometers into it while you’re doing this, it’s an easy request to comply with.
The old malt shovels and hand-dragged wooden rakes still lie about the place, although most of the turning of the malt – to stop it matting or overheating – is done by a rather Heath Robinson machine with leather-wrapped paddles that looks like a cross between a rotavator, a big old-fashioned lawn mower and one of the less successful but defiantly eccentric contestants from Robot Wars.
Next there’s the kilns, proper age-of-steam-looking waist-level fires in big brick and iron ranges that look like they’ve come straight out of a twenties film set in a tramp steamer. You half expect a couple of swarthy Lascars to appear at any moment, stripped to the waist with grimy bandannas tied round their sweaty heads, to shovel more coke into the furnace. The kilns burn peat for the first sixteen or so hours of the malt-drying process, then switch to coke for the last twenty hours, until the barley only holds about five per cent moisture. The humid gases released from the drying chambers exit the distillery through the two very-much-not-decorative pagodas which rise above the complex of buildings set on a low hill just outside Kirkwall.
You can tell they make a lot of whisky here. The mash tun is huge, they have a dozen washbacks – two steel ones outside and ten inside made from Douglas fir – and the stills are big too, with flattish Lyne arms and outside condensers. When I’m looking round in late July they’ve just started production again after a six-week silent season for maintenance and general refitting. During this time the workers spent four weeks at Scapa distillery, producing a batch of malt there. The distilleries are owned by quite separate companies – HP by the Edrington Group and Scapa by Allied Distillers – but they’ve got an agreement to do this and obviously everybody feels they benefit. So at least there will be some 2003 Scapa.
Highland Park bottles at 12, 15, 18, 25, 35 and 40 years, plus the occasional special (I choose an 18-year-old at 43 per cent abv). The 12-year-old is already a phenomenal, potent dram, and the stuff just generally gets better and better as it gets older. Sweet, smoky, smooth and opulent, filled to bursting with spicy fruits and a long, hazily luxuriant and powerful finish, this is magnificent whisky.
There is a kind of wide-spectrum plushness about the 18-year-old that is as impressive for the way it’s balanced as it is for the sheer amount of flavour packed into it. In the same way that it’s much easier to do cool-looking minimalist interior design compared to cool-looking intricate, complex interior design, it takes more skill to create a flavour-jammed whisky that feels rounded and harmonious than it does a relatively bare, stripped-down expression. The 18-year-old turns this trick with seeming ease; a bravura piece of polished burr walnut beauty amongst plain sanded pines. I’ve sampled the 25-year-old version and it’s better still. Tasted in Orkney, looking out into the clear northerly light, these jostle for that Best Dram So Far title.
Highland Park may not be the Most Northerly Scotch for much longer but it’ll still be one of the very best.
Work done, we dine at the hotel with Jenny – Ann’s eldest sister – and her husband James. James is a Dewar, and distantly related to the whisky family (and even more distantly to me, I suppose, as the Dewars were part of the Menzies clan). Jenny and James moved to Orkney over a decade ago and seem happily settled here. While they were thinking about moving here the four of us spent a few weeks on the islands, staying in a house in Finstown shaped like an up-turned boat – complete with seals cavorting in the sea on the other side of
the garden wall – and later touring most of the other islands, staying in hotels and B&Bs. We’ve stayed with Jenny and James in their house just outside Stromness many times over the subsequent years, often around the time of the Orkney Folk Festival, but on this occasion it seemed sensible to keep to Kirkwall, especially as we’re only here for the one night.
It’s a good, fun evening but we call it a day fairly early as we’ve all got stuff to do in the morning. Sadly, Ann and I will miss the end of Shopping Week in Stromness tomorrow night (does anywhere else have a Shopping Week? Or only Stromness? Never mind). The point is they always have good fireworks on the last night of Shopping Week, even though it does have to be said that fireworks in Orkney in the middle of the summer will basically have to be set against a still-light sky, almost no matter how late in the evening you wait before setting them off (on Midsummer’s Day at Jenny and James’s house about ten years ago I did that thing where you read a newspaper outside with only the glow of the midnight sky for illumination).
The next day, before we leave, we meet up with Andrew Greig and Lesley Glaister; they have a house in Stromness too. Andrew and I met through Ken, when Andrew had a place in South Queensferry. We used to get together in the Ferry Tap and drink pints of Dark Island beer, brewed – appropriately enough – in Orkney. Andrew and Lesley married last year and have just returned from Borneo where Andrew’s been researching his latest novel. Lesley’s still recovering from having come back with a nasty-sounding bug, but she’s working on the production of a play and at the planning stage of a new novel too. Scribblers three and one civilian, we spend a happy couple of hours exploring an old farm track or two in their car and walking along a beach near the airport in what feels like Mediterranean weather. Ann and Andrew both go paddling.
Being Orkney, littered with the detritus of wars as well as 8000 years of occupation from the neolithic onwards, the quiet bay cupped by the beach holds not just the slim white shape of an anchored yacht but the picturesquely corroding remains of what looks like an old destroyer, mouldering away to rust and nothing under the high ubiquitous searchlight of the sun.
15: Tunnel Biking
GLENKINCHIE BY BIKE. This is trusty-steed, knight-on-a-quest stuff (it’s hard not to feel a bit heroic when you’re on a bike. On the other hand Glenkinchie is the distillery nearest to our house, so I’m not being that heroic). I’m riding a Honda VFR 800; by general agreement, one of the best bikes on the road today. If that nice Mr Gore had been allowed to assume presidency after winning the election, at this point I’d almost certainly be extolling the virtues of what I still think is the the world’s best-looking motor cycle, the Harley-Davidson V-Rod, however after the Bush putsch I started my own trade embargo.
The Honda is red in colour, which is generally a good thing in a motorbike and certainly makes this one look pretty damn splendid. The old VFR 750 I owned before this model was nothing special in the looks department, plus mine was a sort of dull green, which did it no favours, however the new one looks great. It has two double exhausts exiting right up under the seat so it almost looks like a Ducati if you sort of squint at it in subdued lighting conditions.
Ducatis are fabulous-looking and fabulous-sounding machines, but they can be uncomfortable to ride, especially if you’re over six feet tall, and the consensus amongst bike magazine journalists seems to be that they’re still not as well screwed together as Hondas. The 800 also has brilliant-in-every-sense headlights, which is an area where a lot of otherwise very good, very fast bikes fall down (falling down being something that very good, very fast bikes are in general quite good at anyway).
I’m sort of a born-again biker, though my early biking days were limited in nature. I had the use of a Suzuki 185 GT for about six months back in 1976, looking after it while its owner was abroad, and that was pretty much that.
Then a few years ago I thought it would be fun, and a challenge, to learn to ride a bike properly, so did a course locally, sat and passed my test and, as tends to happen, really started to learn how to ride a bike afterwards (all the test can really do is make sure you’re not too big a menace to others or yourself before you’re allowed out unsupervised to start the actual learning). I’ll never be as entirely comfortable on a bike as I feel in a car – it’ll never feel as second nature just because I’ve been learning how to drive cars ever since I was seventeen, whereas I’ve only been learning about bike riding since my early forties. But oh-my-goodness it’s fun. Scary fun, sometimes, but fun.
I’d better emphasise that I can only ever describe the merest foothills of what it is to be a biker, leaving the higher slopes to others; I’ve never done a wheelie or got my knee down and don’t really anticipate ever doing either, at least not deliberately. (A wheelie is when, through the application of just the right degree of Too Much Throttle you get the front wheel of the bike to lift off the ground. Getting your knee down is when you lean over so far while taking a corner that the outside of your knee – or hopefully the slider pad that you’re wearing on top of your leathers – makes contact with the road surface.) A lot of bikers wouldn’t consider me a proper biker at all because I haven’t done both of these, or fallen off yet, and I wouldn’t quibble with them. As I’ve got older I’ve decided that life is largely about having fun without frightening yourself – or others – too much, and the level at which I’ve set my bike fun just precludes such doubtless adrenalising shenanigans.
This comes back to the whole thing about not liking being frightened, and fairground rides. The few times I’ve been on an extreme ride, I’ve spent the time worrying whether it’s all been put together properly, and thinking back to my days as a non-destructive testing technician, imagining hairline cracks propagating around bolt holes and slag inclusions in the welds linking up under stress, while wondering if all this G-force is really that good for the human body. On the other hand, it has to be said extreme rides are probably so ridiculously safer than Drunken Urban Climbing, or one plastered idiot throwing himself off a high wall into the arms of another – even just the once – that the difference is barely worth measuring.
I’m a solitary biker; I love the feeling of freedom the experience gives, even if you do have to surround yourself with a whole prophylactic suite of helmet, armoured leathers and Serious Boots. Of course, you don’t have to; only the helmet is compulsory in this country. But the thought of biking in a helmet, shorts, trainers and T-shirt (as you do sometimes see people doing), so that, if something you couldn’t avoid does happen, you end up sliding along the road at 50 miles an hour or whatever, scrubbing off speed by the gradual abrasion of your wrist, ankle, knee, pelvic and spinal bones – the flesh having sloughed easily, if painfully, off in the first half-second or so – while your helmet keeps your brain undamaged, entirely conscious and in full-on pain-appreciation mode is enough to make me look upon my insect-spattered leathers with something almost bordering on affection.
Part of the reward of riding a bike is that it makes you absolutely a better driver. The most obvious effect is that you become more sensitive to the road surface. Obviously when you’re in a car you have to watch out for things on the road like ice and just lots of rain and standing water (watching out, and then ignoring the signs and taking unexpected upside-down excursions off Highland roads, in my case), but when you’re on a bike you suddenly became hypersensitive to the presence of stuff like a little gravel on the road’s centre line, a curved smear of mud extending from the entrance to a field, the rainbow hint of colour that indicates a diesel spill, metal manhole covers slicked with rain or a patch of damp autumnal leaves lying in a shady corner.
The point is that a car just sits there. You don’t get out of a car and have it fall over. (I’m told this even applies to three-wheelers.) Cars are, essentially, stable. Get off a bike and forget to put its side-stand down and the bugger will fall over with a loud and probably surprisingly expensive clunk. The same applies when you’re underway. The gyroscopic effect of the wheels means that
once you’re going at even extremely modest speeds you’re kind of dynamically balanced, but it’s still all about equilibrium, about poise.
Compared to driving a car, riding a bike feels like halfway to flying. There’s suddenly a third dimension involved. Cars basically stay flat. They’ll dive under braking, squat under acceleration and roll in a corner (being in a Citroën 2CV taking an average corner at, oh, twenty miles an hour is an extreme ride all by itself if you’re not prepared for it), but the movements are relatively mild. On a bike, with a little experience and confidence, you find yourself leaning all over the place; you, the bike, and the whole tipped world suddenly take on angles you’ll never see in a car unless you are, technically, crashing.
All of which is entirely fine, dandy and fun as long as there’s lots of nice sticky grip between your one powered wheel and the road surface, but which brings on instantaneous gut-freezing fear the nanosecond you feel that grip start to go and the wheel – and the rear of the bike, and with it your rear – start to slip. I’ve had a few moments on the three bikes I’ve owned, a couple of micro-skids which I’ve managed, probably more through good luck than inherent skill, to control, but it’s arguably those instants of fear, and the associated gut-level, bone-level appreciation of the dynamics of the balancing forces of grip, power and the relationship between the bike and the road that help make you a better, safer rider in future and to some extent a better road user in general.
