Region & History

The road to Campbeltown is a long one: the town sits at the end of the narrow Kintyre peninsula, almost like an island, reachable only by a long overland journey or by sea. That very remoteness made the place a magnet for smugglers back in the 16th century. The first written record of whisky from the town dates to 1591, decades before anyone thought about taxing it.

After the Excise Act of 1823 allowed legal distilling in return for a fixed duty, a whole string of small, licensed distilleries sprang up in Campbeltown during the 1820s. Coal arrived cheaply by ship from Ayrshire, barley grew in the surrounding fields, and the harbour carried the finished casks straight to customers in Glasgow and overseas. The town grew into the largest whisky town in the world.

Around 1885, the writer Alfred Barnard counted 21 distilleries in Campbeltown on his tour of Scotland; over the years, the town had seen more than thirty in total. People called it the 'Whisky City'. But its reputation suffered: many operations chased volume over quality, and connoisseurs spoke disparagingly of 'stinking fish'.

The First World War brought raw material shortages, American Prohibition took away the town's most important export market, and during the economic crisis of the late 1920s, banks pulled their credit. One distillery after another closed, until by the 1930s only Springbank and Glen Scotia were left. Campbeltown fell from the world capital of whisky to a mere footnote.

It wasn't until 2004 that a third distillery returned: Hedley Wright, owner of Springbank, bought the mothballed Glengyle Distillery and brought it back into production; its whisky is called Kilkerran. With that, Campbeltown once again had three working distilleries and kept its status as a distinct region. Today the town is Scotland's smallest official whisky region, but by no means one with less history.