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suddenly you just feel lighter as if the island s magic spreads its diaphanous wings over you when we arrived in portree david dropped us off at our hotel a horrid little place called tongadale not even down on the harbor the room was bare like a dorm before you decorate it and the bathroom was tiny too it was fabulously expensive pricewise for what i got meanwhile outside my window the pigeons congregated and i heard their cooing all night long for dinner i went to the co op to get a few provisions crisps egg mayo sandwich egg salad and a coke zero i had wanted to go to a chippy that i had been to before but it was closed although according to the hours on their sign it should have been open i could have walked down to the harbor to take pictures but the rain started up again and i didn t want to be caught in a deluge in the hotel i ate my paltry dinner and read a book crofting houses at the museum of island life i m not sure what we were meant to do on saturday morning but david decided that we should go to the museum of island life since it was raining this was a series of croft houses with antiques inside to show people what island life was like 100 years ago one of the crofts contained a huge loom others held beds one was a kitchen another was full of tools inside the crofts were very dark and with the rain outside there was hardly enough light to see anything i didn t take pictures inside although i should have taken one of the loom because it was very interesting the gift shop was also interesting and full of wool things this was important because i had left my beanie in my suitcase and had no access to it so i bought a blue wool hat to wear hand knitted and only 16 and it kept my head toasty there were lots of other items i thought about buying wool socks and scarves for instance but i restrained myself of course i underestimated how fierce the winds on skye are i really regretted not buying a scarf especially when i went to hang out with some sheep on the moors waiting for the other tour members and nearly froze a sheep on the moor afterwards we stopped at the old man of storr which honestly is just a big wedge of rock that absolutely looks nothing like a person and then we went through to the quiraing on the east side of skye it s also basically just a bunch of rocks but it s very high up and you can walk through the quiraing on a path i only walked some of it too worried that i d get blown off the mountain the gale force winds found any hole in the stitches of my clothes and froze me yet it was exhilarating to be up there to be able to see everything the lochs the mountains to be so close to the sky you could actually walk in the clouds but just the same i was glad when we gathered back at the bus i was thoroughly soaked and ready for lunch we drove back into portree and i stopped at the cuchullin restaurant hoping for fresh seafood they sat me at a table very close to two women in the corner and we had a lovely blether as i waited for lunch this is how the conversation went are you canadian we re canadian alas i am american american sadly oh my dear well we ll pretend you re canadian so we can talk to you there was more to the chat but it mainly had to do with the maniac in the white house their words how we all were enjoying skye as well as the fact that when the server brought my lunch i had a giant bowl of mussels in front of me and i was completely mystified by it what am i looking at i asked no one in particular my unexpected lunch unfortunately when i ordered the so called small plate of mussels i was thinking scallops bad luck strikes again or so i thought i have a fear of mussels i think it s because they look like weird small ears i was also afraid they d be hard to get out of the shell but apparently with seafood fresh from the sea that morning they came out no problem they were dripping in a sauce of butter wine and maybe cream and they were delicious so now i am over my mussels phobia at least on the isle of skye i m not afraid talisker distillery wall that afternoon the sun peeped out a bit and we drove to talisker distillery on the minginish peninsula i was really looking forward to this because as you well know i am becoming a whisky connoisseur i couldn t wait to try a flight of talisker and so imagine my surprise when a flight of 3 drams was 43 for twice that i could have bought a full bottle other distilleries that i ve visited have offered whisky flights for about 23 and that was my price point i noticed that none of the other people on the tour had ordered a flight either and the bar was sparsely populated although the gift shop reception area was crowded with folks maybe i should have splurged and tried a single wee dram but even those were expensive anyway booze free i meandered outside to watch the water of loch harport where a few sailboats were bobbing from there we drove to the faerie pools basically pools filled by waterfalls which were nestled between some tall mountains another person on the tour had somehow injured his foot so the two of us stayed on the bus and went down into another glen full of campgrounds while the hale and hearty of us took the path to the pools i might have risked the walk except that the rain was persistent and i was afraid of slipping on the stony path but david promised we d go see the faerie bridge so we didn t feel cheated the campgrounds looked nice while i m not much a fan of camping it s always too cold or too hot and the ground makes my back ache i had the thought that camping in scotland might be a fun thing to do to be out in the fresh damp air with the wind blowing through the glens although it would be chilly at night and probably wet scotland has a right to roam law enacted in 2003 which allows people to walk or camp on land freely as long as the land is respected this doesn t mean that you can camp in someone s front yard private property does exist but it does mean that you can climb mountains and camp in tents or bothies or ride horses or bike pretty much where you like especially on public lands but some private lands too for recreational or educational purposes you could probably camp on farmland too but really with all the sheep droppings it would be pretty messy anyway camping would be a new way to experience the highlands maybe some day i will try it the stream that runs under the faery bridge on our last day on skye we drove to the faerie bridge that david promised and the clear water ran quickly over the stones in the stream apparently an old wives tale suggests that if you stick your head in the faerie pools or in the water under the bridge it will make you feel ten years younger and your face look ten years younger one of the men on the tour a guy from vancouver sure enough bent down and put his whole head in the stream despite the fact that it was cold and rainy i imagine the water was invigorating if not cold as hell he impressed everyone and he might have worn a few fewer wrinkles on his face after his plunge loch from high up back on the mainland we passed by eilean donan again and drove up high to a viewpoint that looked down on the whole glen where the lochs looked lovely and a pair of horses chewed grass in a paddock one of the horses the white one comes with some lovely folklore surrounding it in scotland white horses are magical they are either unicorns shielding their horns in invisibility when humans are around unless the human be a virginal girl or they are kelpies if they are near water kelpies are demons that lure people to a watery death if you see one they usually walk by the shore appearing tame and sweet but as soon as you reach out your hand to pet them your hand gets stuck fast and they drag you down to the bottom of the loch or ocean till you drown and then they eat you bones and all this white horse in the paddock was appropriately distant from the loch so i will guess it was a unicorn in disguise but you do see many white horses in scotland this is not surprising since the unicorn is scotland s national animal but do be aware if the white horse appears near the water they are just waiting to eat you unicorn or kelpie our final stop before arriving back in edinburgh had us visiting taste perthshire i guess you could say it s like scotland s version of a buckee s a large gas station with a huge giftshop and restaurant attached it s nothing like buckee s in the sense of marketing there s no beaver decorating anything but you can find all sorts of scottish paraphernalia clothing decorations woolen goods etc and there is a lovely counter full of pies and pasties and a cheese refrigerator i bought a cheese and onion pasty and a mushroom and cream filled yorkshire pudding for my dinner but the main reason we stopped was to see the heilan coos which are always a big hit with people on a tour and they were indeed very cute unlike previous times where we saw the coos and they lazed out in the pasture these coos hung out under a small stable making taking pictures of them easier they didn t seem to mind the company but they didn t seem to want to be petted either i m not sure what it is about scotland s islands that i love so much perhaps it s their novelty in comparison to the urban nature of edinburgh or the fact that i respond to some bit of romanticism that surrounds them but their remoteness attracts me in the case of skye the skye bridge ensures that those who live on the island can t be cut off from the mainland a much different scenario from some of the outer hebrides which are only accessible by ferry like mull or rum while i do like the looks of mull a bit more than skye if i had to live on the islands i d choose skye the trip may have started with several instances of bad luck but in the end i think i lucked out skye is magical and the faeries have kept part of my soul yet again loch from high up this cow ain t moooovin i tried to get him to come to me but he wasn t interested a buttercup do you see the bug on it close to the center i would not stick my head in this the faerie stream with azaleas the quiraing more sheep an extreme zoom of a sheep far off in the moor a barbed wire fence is the blur in the front a croft house at the museum of island life a disco statue across from the museum of island life a moody loch a moody moor eilean donan castle me wearing my wool knit beanie with a sheep design on it share this email a link to a friend opens in new window email share on facebook opens in new window facebook share on linkedin opens in new window linkedin share on x opens in new window x share on pinterest opens in new window pinterest like loading posted in writing in general tagged eilean donan castle isle of skye mussels faerie pools faerie bridge heilan coos taste perthshire kelpies unicorns 2 replies dispatch from edinburgh 3 port of leith distillery posted on july 3 2026 by jc reilly reply today i took the edinburgh tram into leith so that i could go on a tour of the port of leith distillery across from the royal yacht britannia at the ocean terminal i d been wanting to go to leith because i wanted to see the water so i just did a quick search of things to do in leith and found the distillery it is the second only vertical distillery in the world the other is in sweden i believe what is a vertical distillery you may ask it s a 9 story hi rise with the various parts of the distillery spread out over multiple floors the grist mill being at the top and the stills at the bottom the port of leith distillery was founded by two friends ian and paddy who had been bffs since grade school and became fans of whisky as they grew up they even started making early attempts at whisky with a copper pot still when they lived in london but they had big dreams the distillery wasn t meant to be vertically inclined however they wanted to build a regular kind of distillery but the land sale they had planned on fell through but when the corner of leith at 11 whisky quay opened up they reconfigured the distillery and decided to go up rather than out since whisky production takes a while and they needed 14 000 000 to open the distillery they decided to open a gin distillery while they waited unlike whisky gin can be mass produced quickly it can be distilled on monday and on the shelves by friday whereas whisky needs to be aged in barrels at least three years and one day before the spirit can be called whisky at all ian and paddy and their investors have yet to see a profit from the port of leith distillery but they are hoping to release their first bottles next year in the meantime they also sell sherry port and table whisky which is still whisky just not particularly as fine as cask aged whisky everything in the distillery is new new mash tuns new wash containers new gristmill etc and because it s only been open a few years everything is shiny and new with the exception of the stills they seemed kind of dull our tour guide coll was interesting and answered many questions and he really knew the whisky making process from start to finish fermentation on the middle right side of the photo i ve been to a number of different distilleries so the actual parts were known to me but it was interesting to hear about the various kinds of yeast they use a combination of three the aquifer they drilled the warehouse situation the whisky is stored off site etc every distillery is basically the same so it s the differences that contribute to the mix of water barley and yeast that help make a unique whisky the thing that i was most excited about was the fermentation there was a washback that was bubbling like crazy unfortunately the window into the washback had collected a lot of steam so you can t really see the bubbles in the photo i m including but believe me it looked really cool some of the bubbles were big as fists washbacks from below after we looked at fermentation we went down to the still room apparently it can be highly explosive so we were required to stand on the concrete platform overlooking the copper stills and told not to touch any metal after i d seen the beautiful polished copper stills a cardhu these dusty dull looking stills did not impress me but i enjoyed looking at the spirit safe basically a glass box with analyzing equipment which is connected to the spirit still this is where the low wines alcohol spirit from the first distillation at the wash still gets analyzed to check for quality and redistilled in the spirit still if necessary the alcohol level increases up to 65 which comes out in three types the heads the tails and the heart the heads and tails spirit taste bad and are less desirable they tend to smell sulphuric and nobody wants to drink that the best part of the distilled spirit is the heart and that s what gets siphoned off to be barreled and developed into whisky there is only so much heart in a distilling process the rest gets removed still after our tour we had a tasting of 5 drams of liquor ...
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