“Juniper berries have long been the traditional base for flavouring gin, as you are no doubt already aware. But the connection with whisky… Patience. Let me talk about the plants first.” As the Northern Hemisphere summer draws to a close, Mike mulls over the juniper – a plant with strong associations with log fires and the dram…
He was trying to calm himself for his last drive. Not that it really mattered, but he needed a four at the eighteenth to keep his…
“Twelve years ago, I found a Jack Russell, late on a summer Sunday evening, quite unconcernedly chasing a paper bag along the middle of a public road, close by the car park of a popular local forest walk. Fortunately, there was little in the way of traffic. So little, in fact, that the car park was empty. Totally devoid of any potential owners. And the dog was collarless and completely anonymous.” How Mike met his four-legged friend Bisto.
“Droves of cattle once made the strength-sapping journey from the Highlands of Scotland over the Eastern Cairngorms to the markets of Crieff and Falkirk. The Highland weather was just too severe for over-wintering cattle.” Mike takes a hike along the old drovers’ paths around Loch Muick in the Eastern Cairngorms.
Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, died in September 1969. Eighteen months earlier his house, which he called Camusfearna and had been home to the writer and his otters for so long, was destroyed by fire. Now, more than three decades later, Mike Clark tells how the Bright Water landscape has dramatically altered.
“One of Aberdeenshire’s finest, Drum Castle was bequeathed to the National Trust for Scotland in 1975, by Henry Irvine, 24th Laird of Drum. That’s a whole lotta Lairds.” Mike looks back at the long and proud history of one of Aberdeenshire’s finest castles.