Some Things to Know About the Long and Winding Road
(in Scotland, that is)
There are many long and winding roads in Scotland. But only one of them has been immortalized in a song by Paul McCartney, who purchased a rather large piece of land on the Kintyre peninsula many years ago, a place called High Park Farm, where he and his wife Linda and their children spent a fair amount of time back in those days. When I was lucky enough to travel along that very road a little over a week ago, although I wasn’t going to get to visit the McCartney place, or even catch a glimpse of it from the aptly-named road, I did get to visit one of their neighbors, and I can assure you that the long and winding journey was more than worth the trouble.
No trouble at all, in fact. Just beauty, plenty of it, on both sides of the road known as A83, with views out across the water, through the loveliest of trees, past fields thick with bright yellow gorse and shaded by enormous oaks, past vivid meadows dotted with wooly sheep and their newborn lambs, past stone cottages and sun-drenched vistas. Yes, the weather was bright and fair! It was the middle of May, and we were so very extra lucky, as everyone told us over and over.
And what a trip! After passing a rock-strewn beach, we turned in at the entrance to our destination, Lephincorrach Farm, home of the family-run Kintyre gin distillery on the Torrisdale Castle Estate. Up a curving driveway flanked by huge trees, past a meadow elegantly demarcated by an ancient stone wall, past more grazing sheep and lambs, past a vast archway that we would later walk through to view the castle. But first, we were greeted by our hostess, Emma Macalister Hall, who at one point jokingly referred to herself as Queen Emma (sans crown, sans title, but she admitted that sometimes while out shopping for groceries, when the daughter of some friends called her Queen Emma, she didn’t ever want to correct her). Emma welcomed us with the warmest of smiles and told us we were invited to ask her as many questions as we wished. She was an open book, she said, laughing, a woman with a tendency to over-share, and totally lacking in filters, and what did we want to know? But wait, don’t we have to begin with some tea?
Because here was the charming café, serving exactly all the teas and coffees you could imagine, including a special tea made from mint and nettles (which I meant to try but didn’t), and also Argyll Coffee. Meanwhile, this café was also serving pastries just coming out of the oven, and promising sandwiches and salads and frittata for lunch (which would be served to us on a terrace shaded by a lovely open-beamed A-frame and looking out over the most picturesque of views). But not yet! After our teas and coffees, Emma took us on a walking tour of the property. She told us (in answer to many unfiltered questions) about how she met – on Match.com! -- her husband, Niall, who had inherited the castle, and she told us about their two daughters who were at school today, and how unfortunately we couldn’t go inside the castle because of the renovations underway. Sure enough, after crossing a small bridge over a brook, after making note of the clever sculpture of an enormous stone-layered apple, after passing beneath the stunning archway with the family crest (including three storks), past the groundskeeper’s cottage, to our right loomed the gorgeous Torrisdale Castle. Originally built in 1815 and then impressively expanded in 1915 to include two wings. It boasts nine bedrooms (they only use five of them), but was currently covered with scaffolding upon which a dozen (or more?) workers were doing all manner of repairs. And although the two delightful dogs, Crumble and Magnus, greeted us and although Niall (the castle’s current laird, son and grandson and so on of the castle’s more recent owners) was supervising the renovations, he briskly called to one of the dogs and jumped into his car and drove off without having time to say hello. It was a workday, after all.
We left the castle behind and wondered at the views of the sea (private beach!) and tried to visualize the 2000 acres as we admired the abundance of flowers growing almost everywhere --- wild as well as cultivated. We passed a cemetery in which the ancestors were buried and yet also very possibly continued to haunt the castle and its grounds. We heard about the fierce winter storms that had blown down a tragic number of large trees (dozens? one hundred?), leaving behind wreckage that took vast expensive labor to remove. We waved to mother-in-law who was cutting flowers in her small garden attached to her apartment at one side of the castle. We heard about the daughters who don’t particularly adhere to their roles as well-behaved princesses but instead enjoy being rather wild and free. We heard about the exorbitant costliness of maintaining a two-hundred-year-old castle and the necessary installation of a boiler for central heating. We walked around the edges of a vast vegetable garden undergoing a complicated restoration process, and we passed an irresistibly charming Guest Cottage (with its own hot tub!) temporarily occupied. (We promised ourselves to rent it someday.) We passed a magnificently glorious beech tree so full of shapely leaves and multicolored sunlight that I fell a little bit (more than a little bit) in love with it. We walked back beneath the archway and back along the stone-framed meadow and followed Emma up to our tables for lunch.
That was just the beginning! Because after a beautifully nourishing and elegant lunch we were invited to take our seats in the classroom whose door was marked Gin School. It was time to learn about the making of a signature gin, and our instructor was also named Emma but she pronounced it like Eeeema, with an elongated e-sound that revealed her origins as a New Zealander. Another meet-cute story: this Emma had also met a boy, who happened to be a sheep farmer (her family in New Zealand were also sheep farmers), and this boy happens to be the sheep-farming tenant on the castle grounds. And fresh-faced young Emma, our instructor at the Gin School, explained that in order to help cover their costs and in order to carefully avoid stepping on the toes of any of the local families who have been making whiskey for generations and also in recognition that gin can be distilled and sold right away (not aged like whiskey), the establishment of the gin distillery made perfect sense for the laird and his wife. Thus was born Beinn an Tuirc Sustainable Distillers, 2016. (Translation: Hill of the Wild Boar, whose insignia fittingly features a wild boar standing on a hillside, which also happens to be the highest point in Kintyre).
Admittedly, we got a wee bit tipsy in class at Gin School. How could we not? Good thing none of us was going to be driving on long and winding roads anytime soon. Talk about spirits! In order to make our very own bespoke gin, we needed to sample from among more than thirty flavorings. We followed elaborate yet palatable tasting instructions from New Zealand Emma, who encouraged us to consider the possibility that we were now designing the next exotic offering from the distillery itself; we sipped and took notes and Emma kept careful track of our choices. We even named our gins! (Mine would be Ealisaid, pronounced not at all the way it appears, the Gaelic translation of Elizabeth, the only vocabulary word from our previous day’s Gaelic lesson I had been able to remember.) Last but not least, we were led on a brief tour of the distillery and introduced us to the distiller named Rose who was wearing a pink t-shirt featuring the mascot wild boar. Naturally, Rose was supervising the bottling and crating of pink-hued bottles of gin (spoiler alert: flavored with raspberry!).
Have I mentioned their renewable energy, powered by a hydro-electric scheme, sourced from the hill referred to above? Have I mentioned that I don’t even really like gin? Here’s the thing. I so thoroughly enjoyed this day with all of its human and animal and vegetable and mineral encounters that I fully intend to return someday soon. I will rent that Garden Cottage! And because probably the sun will not be shining quite as brightly next time, I won’t even mind because I’ll have a hot tub! And if the cottage is occupied, I might try one of the wee bothies situated on the property, with wee terraces of their own, and views stretching in many directions, uphill and down. I do not need a castle! I do not need to be a queen or a princess! All I need is an occasional visitor --- if not Sir Paul McCartney or one of the ancestral ghosts, I will happily and gratefully welcome my new best friend Queen Emma*, along with a dog or two, and perhaps a nice sandwich, and a pot of tea.
*When you go to the distillery’s website and sign up for their newsletter, an acknowledgement pops up saying “I think we just became best friends!” which is exactly how it feels when you meet Emma, except the real-life version is so much more real.