Hello Whisky friends,
I wanted to write about Jura, a special place in the Hebrides, and a trip I took there recently - and one I took before that to walk in the footsteps of George Orwell. This post is for paid subscribers, sign up for the price of a dram to get the full Whisky Rocks experience. Thank you for supporting my writing and for reading.
Visiting Islay in late May for Fèis Ìle, my friend Tom and I made a brief trip across to Jura for the distillery open Day. Fèis is the great week-long celebration of whisky and people that envelopes Islay in a happy fog of drink, music and general conviviality, although frankly every time I’ve been to the island - winter, spring, summer - it seems to exist in a similar state of reverie. It’s that kind of place.
We’d arrived at the ferry town of Port Askaig on Friday afternoon after a day travelling, just in time to get the small boat across the Sound to make our appointment with the Jura whisky team.
It was Tom’s first time on Islay and Jura and I was excited for him. I was excited too as stepping foot on Jura always takes me back to a memorable trip I made a few years ago with another friend to visit the cottage where George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. I had told Tom about this place and the extraordinary Corryvecken whirlpool that lies beyond it.
Pulling into the small village of Craighouse on Jura that bright, sunny afternoon a few weeks ago, Tom and I were headed straight onto the water. Our hosts had kindly arranged a trip out on the bay in a rib, where we ‘caught’ crab and drank a dram (in truth the crabs had already been sneakily placed in the creels, so all we had to do was haul them onto the boat - a jolly ruse we were more than happy to go along with - before releasing them back into the water).
Closing the car door I looked wistfully down the road to the vast expanse of Jura that lay behind us - the road to Orwell’s cottage. Another time.
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