Britain’s Last Frontier

by Alistair Moffat

  At first, George Smith found it difficult to establish the new licensed still but, when he ran out of cash, the Duke of Gordon came to the rescue with a loan of £600. George’s unlicensed neighbours were none too pleased either and, for years, he never left Glenlivet without a pair of pistols. Elsewhere illicit distillers had burned down licensed premises, seeing them as deadly rivals in what was, as Thomas Guthrie attests, a well-established trade in the early 19th century. A solution more drastic than a posse of damp and beleaguered excisemen was required and, in 1827, a troop of cavalry soldiers garrisoned Corgarff Castle. Lying in the shadow of the highest of the Cairngorms, above Glenlivet, and commanding the glens of west Aberdeenshire, the castle was well placed to scour the more remote uplands. In three years, the troopers suppressed hundreds of illicit stills and, by 1834, George Smith was the only distiller in Scotland’s most famous whisky glen. It was a monopoly that could not last.

  The logistics of the Smiths’ business were pleasingly simple. All the ingredients to make superb malt whisky were at hand and, even in the age of horse-drawn transport, could readily be brought together in quantity. Once whisky had been made and aged, the barrels were trundled 35 miles down through the glens and on across the Laigh of Moray to Burghead. Anchored in the new harbour carved out of the ancient Pictish fortress, ships waited to load their precious cargo and deliver it to thirsty customers in Edinburgh, London and elsewhere. This happy combination of circumstances was obvious to others – and so was the prestige of the name of Glenlivet. Dozens of new licensed distilleries were set up (almost certainly by those who had learned their craft illicitly) and they printed the name of their labels. After all, Glenlivet was a place-name, it did not belong to anyone.

  George Smith’s son and heir, Col. J. G. Smith, thought otherwise. In 1880, he petitioned the Court of Session and asserted that his local rivals were passing themselves off to unsuspecting customers as somehow connected to the original Glenlivet distillery. The ruling represented a partial success. Others could continue to use the name but only if it was hyphenated with the distillery that made the whisky behind the label – Glenlossie-Glenlivet, Glenfarclas-Glenlivet and so on. Only one, however, that belonging to George & J. G. Smith, was entitled to call itself ‘The Glenlivet’.

  In Islington, no one was sure about the identity of any sort of whisky. After the initial ruling against blended Scotch whisky, the Distillers Company and others encouraged the landlords to appeal. Eventually a Royal Commission was set up to deliberate on what might be labelled as whisky and what might not. A programme of intensive research was launched. Government officials walked through the doors of 39 pubs in England and 23 in Scotland, ordered a dram and then, to the amazement of the landlords, did not drink it. Instead it was poured into a bottle and sent away for analysis.

  Finally reporting in July 1909 (and spelling whisky with an ‘e’), the Royal Commission came to momentous conclusions. First, it stated the obvious – at least what would have been obvious to anyone who enjoyed whisky: ‘On reference to the analyses, it will be seen that there is a very wide variation between whiskies from different distilleries; and that there is a very wide variation between different whiskies from the same distilleries in different years.’

  And then their findings moved quickly to the point – the issue of malt whisky made in a pot still and grain whisky from a patent still: ‘[W]e have received no evidence to show that the form of the still has any necessary relation to the wholesomeness of the spirit produced . . . we are unable to recommend that the use of the word ‘‘whiskey’’ should be restricted to spirit manufactured by the pot-still process.’

  The Commission added a final paragraph that defined whisky even more closely and made it forever Scotch: ‘Our general conclusion, therefore, on this part of our enquiry is that ‘‘whiskey’’ is a spirit obtained by distillation from a mash of cereal grains saccharified [turned into sugar] by a diastase [an enzyme] of malt; that ‘‘Scotch whiskey’’ is whiskey, as above defined, distilled in Scotland; and that ‘‘Irish whiskey’’ is whiskey, as above defined, distilled in Ireland.’

  Brand protection has been a continuous process. In May 2011, the Scotch Whisky Association secured a binding legal agreement that echoed J. G. Smith’s efforts on behalf of Glenlivet. Manufacturers who used the phrase ‘Scottish spirits’ on their labels while promoting ‘whisky’ on their websites were forced to desist because the courts believed that consumers might be misled into thinking that they were buying Scotch whisky.

  The Ferintosh Exemption

  As much as artillery, whisky won the battle of Culloden. Such is the considered opinion of an eminent Scottish scholar and it is not an extravagant claim. In 1688, when the Stuarts were replaced by William of Orange, loyal Jacobites burned the distilleries of Mr Forbes of Culloden at Ferintosh in Ross-shire. He was a supporter of the new king. In compensation the Scottish government granted him exemption from excise payments in return for a modest annual fee. In 1715, during the Jacobite Rising, Forbes of Culloden raised troops to support the government and the Hanoverian succession. Thirty years later, Duncan Forbes of Culloden was Lord President of the Court of Session and again he demonstrated his family’s loyalty by persuading several clan chiefs to stay at home. By 1786, the exemption was rescinded for a generous payment of £21,000. In the meantime, Ferintosh whisky had acquired a tremendous reputation, relished for its peaty flavour. Duncan Forbes’s heirs were happy with the settlement but a young Robert Burns was not:

  Thee, Ferintosh! O sadly lost!

  Scotland lament frae coast to coast!

  Now colic grips, an’ barkin hoast

  May kill us a’

  For loyal Forbes’ chartered boast

  Is taen awa!

  In the United States, there was a strange period in its modern history when consumers were banned entirely from buying alcohol of any description. Despite a veto from President Woodrow Wilson, the Volstead Act began the notorious era of Prohibition in late 1919. For 14 years, organised crime grew and thrived on the illegal import of alcohol, a good deal of which came from Scotland by sea. The reputation of one smuggler, Capt. McCoy, was such that his name entered the language as a synonym for authenticity, ‘the real McCoy’. Evidently, his supply of whisky and other drinks was not adulterated or of low quality. Paradoxically, the effect of Prohibition was to establish a taste for Scotch whisky in the USA, a market that has expanded steadily. All over the world, in the fast-developing economies of India, China and Brazil, this unique product is now enjoyed, even treated with reverence – as it should be. In his excellent Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present, David Daiches wrote a characteristically elegant conclusion: ‘The proper drinking of Scotch whisky is more than indulgence: it is a toast to civilisation, a manifesto of man’s determination to use the resources of nature to refresh mind and body and enjoy to the full the senses with which he has been endowed.’

  5

  The Battle of the Graupian Mountain

  IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAINS, standards were planted around the stone circle, their pennants fluttering in the breeze, their totem animals watching over the great muster. To the Prayer Field below Bennachie, a mighty host was marching. In the summer of 83, the kings of the Caledonian kindreds had ridden to the sacred places at the edges of their realms, made sacrifices to sanctify their alliances and talked of the great battle that would surely come. Perhaps they sealed their pact in blood. The ancient ceremony endured long enough to be recorded in the self-consciously Celtic atmosphere of 13th-century Galloway when one of its leading magnates made a bond with a mercenary captain called Gilleruth: ‘They made an unheard of covenant, inventing a kind of sorcery, in accord with certain abominable customs of their ancient forefathers. For all those barbarians and their leaders . . . shed blood from the pre-cordial vein into a large vessel . . . and they stirred and mixed the blood after it was drawn: and afterwards they offered it mixed to one another in turn and drank it as a sign that they were henceforw
ard bound in an indissoluble, and as it were, consanguineal covenant, united in good fortune and ill, even to the sacrifice of their lives.’

  All of the Caledonian kings knew that a huge Roman army was marching north. A year before, under the command of their general Agricola, large detachments from three legions, several regiments of auxiliaries and squadrons of cavalry had crossed the River Forth and invaded the north. It seemed that Rome had decided to conquer the whole island for their empire but the campaign began with a near-disaster. Acting on intelligence, Agricola changed his strategy. The campaign is very well recorded in Tacitus’s biography of his father-in-law:

  To avoid encirclement by superior forces familiar with the country, he himself divided his army into three divisions and advanced.

  When the enemy discovered this, with a rapid change of plan they massed for a night attack on the Ninth Legion, as being by far the weakest in numbers. They cut down the sentries and burst into the sleeping camp, creating panic. Fighting was already going on inside the camp itself when Agricola, who had learned of the enemy’s route from his scouts and was following close on their tracks, ordered the most mobile of his cavalry and infantry to charge the combatants from the rear and then the whole army was to raise the battle-cry. At first light the standards gleamed.

  In order to mask what looks very like the basic military blunder of dividing his forces, Tacitus makes Agricola seem more alert to the danger than he was in reality. Much more likely is that somehow, in the melee of fighting inside the camp, the commander of the IX Legion got gallopers away to summon help. When they found Agricola’s division, presumably asleep in their own camp, they roused them and they buckled on their armour, rushed to the rescue and prevented what would have been annihilation. After this close-run rescue, the Romans retreated southwards to overwinter and to plan a great campaign in the north, the last push needed to bring all of the island of Britannia into the Empire.

  Having left garrisons in the forts of southern Scotland, Agricola almost certainly set up his headquarters at the legionary fortress at Carlisle. As the winter winds whistled off the Solway Firth and sentries shivered on the ramparts, staff officers gathered in the Principia, sited somewhere inside the walls of the medieval castle. Stiff vellum maps were rolled out and preparations made. Messengers were sent south to the Prefect of the Classis Britannica, the British Fleet. Based at Boulogne, with depots at Dover and Chester, the fleet had originally been built to ferry the legions across the English Channel in AD 43 when the Emperor Claudius ordered an invasion. It both serviced the needs of the army in Britain and kept the Channel clear of pirates and other hostile ships.

  By the close of the 1st century AD, the British Fleet had 7,000 sailors and marines under the command of its trierarchs, the sea captains, and around 40 ships were in active service. Aside from the more bulky and functional transports that plied regularly between Boulogne, Dover and the other Channel ports, the fleet was mostly made up of biremes. Called liburnae after Liburnia, an area of the north-east Adriatic whose pirates first built and developed them, they were fast and sleek with a single square sail and two banks of oarsmen. The prow of each was formed into a ramming beak with a large eye painted on either side and, running before the wind, with the oarsmen pulling hard, the liburnae of the Classis Britannica could slice quickly through the waves. To those watching from the shore, the Roman fleet looked like a school of giant sharks.

  Agricola’s mandata, his orders to the Prefect of the fleet, were to set sail for the north. A rendezvous with the land army may have been arranged in the Firth of Forth but other duties were specified by the general. Tacitus takes up the narrative:

  Accordingly, he sent the fleet ahead to plunder at various points in order to spread panic and uncertainty. The army was marching light, reinforced by the bravest of the Britons and those whose loyalty had been tested in a long period of peace. So he came to the Graupian Mountain. It had already been occupied by the enemy.

  The Britons were, in fact, in no way broken by the outcome of the previous battle: they were awaiting either revenge or enslavement. They had at last learned the lesson that a common danger could only be warded off by a united front. By means of embassies and alliances they had rallied the forces of all their states. Already more than 30,000 armed men could be observed and still all the young men and famous warriors, whose ‘old age was still fresh and green’, each man wearing the decorations he had won, were flowing in.

  So that each king and his war band knew where to muster, the signal mountain ridge of Bennachie was probably chosen and, close by, there lay a famous and sacred place. The stone circle at East Aquhorthies stands in the shadow of what Tacitus called the Graupian Mountain. The name translates as ‘the Prayer Field’ and it may be that a blood brotherhood of Caledonian kings gathered there in the late summer of 83.

  An army of 30,000, even allowing for Roman exaggeration, meant an alliance of many kindreds in the north and they must have come from the names and territories discovered by the fleet on their circumnavigation. These were later plotted on Ptolemy’s map. Perhaps the Raven King of the Lugi crossed the Moray Firth with his war band, and the blood-smeared warriors of the Smertae rode east from the Beauly and Dornoch Firths. For strength in numbers, they may have made a rendezvous with their neighbours, the Decantae, ‘the Noble Kindred’. Beyond them, on the Atlantic coast of the west, the Carnonacae, ‘the People of the Cairns’, might have crossed the mountain passes to join the muster. From the south the war bands of the kings of the Venicones, ‘the Kindred Hounds’, surely came to the Prayer Field below the Graupian Mountain.

  As elsewhere in Europe, the Celtic culture of the north of Britain was geared to war and eminence was measured by military prowess. A century before the great muster at Bennachie, Julius Caesar recorded what he saw amongst the leaders of the kindreds of Gaul during his wars of conquest: ‘Whenever war breaks out and their services are required . . . they all take the field, surrounded by their retainers and dependants of whom each noble has a greater or smaller number according to his birth and fortune. The possession of such a following is the only criterion of influence and power they recognise.’

  While retainers, clients and farmers could afford only the most basic weaponry – a spear, a small round shield and perhaps a long knife – kings and aristocrats wore and carried beautifully made war gear. Bronze and iron helmets have been uncovered by archaeologists and occasionally their animal crests have survived. These tiny metal sculptures of boars, horses, stags, ravens and bulls were both powerful totems and badges of identity.

  Although probably first used as a form of protection for the neck and collarbone, torcs may also have been indicators of rank. Found in gold, silver and bronze, some were thick and heavy, perhaps chafing in the urgent movement of battle. Celtic smiths could also make chain mail but only the wealthiest could afford it. Made up from hundreds of small iron rings linked and forged together, a mail shirt takes a modern blacksmith more than 800 hours to complete. But they were much prized because of the freedom of movement they allowed.

  Swords were carried only by aristocrats, their tempered steel edges razor sharp and their scabbards gorgeously decorated. These were long slashing swords, like cavalry sabres, and much less suited for stabbing and thrusting in close-quarter conflict. This was to prove a decisive factor in the Battle of the Graupian Mountain.

  To protect all of that finery and metalwork, warriors carried shields and again they were sometimes decorated with animal totems. Very beautiful and elaborate shields probably not intended for war (but nevertheless closely resembling practical shields) have been pulled out of watery places. From the deep, anaerobic silt of the River Thames came the famous Battersea Shield and a shield carrying a representation of a boar made from leather was lifted out of the River Witham in Lincolnshire.

  Warpaint in the form of tattoos was much cheaper and therefore enjoyed far more widespread use amongst the mass of the huge army mustering at Mons Graupius. Even tho
ugh no miraculous example of preservation exists, it is likely that the marks made by the tattooist meant something. Other cultures used them as a means of affirming membership of kindreds or military brotherhoods. Historians record such warrior bands in classical Greece and elsewhere in the Mediterranean but the closest parallels are to be found in Ireland. These were the Fianna, brotherhoods of young warriors who often terrorised the countryside like bandits or hired themselves out as mercenaries. Later commentators called them ‘the sons of death’ who bound themselves with evil and pagan oaths and could be identified by diabolo instinctu, the tattooed marks of the Devil. Similar devilish marks were almost certainly seen everywhere in the Caledonian army at Bennachie.

  Roman Crowns

  Only two officers who fought at the Battle of the Graupian Mountain are known by name. Aulus Julius Atticus was killed when, as Tacitus states, ‘his youthful eagerness and his spirited horse carried him into the enemy’s ranks’. Like Agricola, he was probably fighting far from his native place, the Roman province simply called Province, now Provence. The other officer, Gaius Julius Karus, was probably also a Provencal and an inscription notes that he was decorated for bravery ‘in bello Britannico’, the British war. Roman military decorations were formal, awarded at a ceremony and not worn on daily duties. Karus received a Mural Crown, a gold circlet cast to resemble a battlement, and it was given to the first soldier who climbed the wall of a besieged city and planted the standard of the attacking force on it. In his British war, Agricola’s army besieged no cities or towns. The only time Tacitus wrote of the Romans attacking a battlement, it was their own in the relief of the camp of the IX Legion. Perhaps Karus led a cohort that retook the rampart held by the insurgent Caledonians. The greatest award a soldier could receive was a Grass Crown and it was reserved for commanders who broke through a blockade to rescue a surrounded Roman army. Made from oak leaves, the Civic Crown was one rung down and it was appropriated by emperors. Its humble motif found its way into the nomenclature of modern military decorations. Interestingly, the intrinsic value of a crown increased as the achievement it rewarded decreased in scale. Gold crowns were given for minor acts of bravery, grass and oak leaves for major acts of heroism.