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Favoured mainly by fishermen, Hollybush Cottage has many points to commend it to the whisky-lover.
Last week, I returned to the Scotch Odyssey. It was not, I hasten to add, for the purposes of jaded, hopeless revival but a different encounter entirely. For seven days I enveloped myself in Speyside and the East, my first opportunity to look once again upon the highways and Highlands that challenged me so ruthlessly, and to reunite with the singular and extraordinary people who so readily and selflessly resuscitated my impetous.
By car and with my parents (not the same spontaneously combustible mixture as it proved on Islay), I beheld new pockets of the region in addition to treading the same roads as I had done four months previously. Dufftown to Elgin was no longer an arduous slog, although this new foreign motor-driven rapidity with which the many miles of the Morayshire were devoured did not, in practise, diminish the scale of my original undertaking. It was instead fetchingly novel not to turn up everywhere mucky and sweaty, yet I was permitted to come to terms with the truth that I had really been mucky and sweaty once upon a time. My resumption of normality post Odyssey had in fact gradually robbed me of total certainty that I had done any such cycle ride. It seems I really did go through it all.
Our holiday cottage in Carron, four miles from Aberlour, was a delight. I awoke each morning to the sight of the Spey, sluicing past not 100 metres from the front door. This was the style of nest I had craved when last here: so dense had the inventory of distilleries to visit been that my appreciation of the locality and its myriad other leisure activities had been impossible to acquire. On this occasion, however, I could and did pack everything in. I ate, I drank, I walked, I shopped, I simply lay on the lawn and greedily, euphorically, consumed this pure Highland air with the pleasure heightened by my sensitivity to all those copper stills throbbing away all about me, and hundreds of thousands of casks mimicking my own fecund immobility just over the trees amongst the mountains.
Cramming so much into seven days required no small amount of forward planning and each day had its objective. I shall devote a post to each day and the key activity which we undertook. Hopefully it will give you a more complete picture of this charming, unique area and convince you that for all whisky is its principal claim to fame, it has numerous qualities besides to commend it.
