Choose a part of Scotland to see its distilleries, or scroll on for them all.
From the mash tun to the cask, and a dram at the end of it.
The story is in the Life of Columba, written by the monk Adomnan about a hundred years after the saint's time on Iona. It tells how Columba came across local Picts burying a man whom a water beast had attacked while he swam in the river. Columba sent one of his own monks to swim across, the beast rushed at him, and the saint made the sign of the cross and ordered it back. Adomnan's Latin calls it a water beast, and his text says plainly that it was in the river. The tale often called the first Nessie sighting, dated by tradition to around AD 565, never mentions the loch at all.
A walk round Aberdour in Fife, half an hour by train from Edinburgh, starting at the castle beside the station in the village the Victorians called the Jewel of the Fife Riviera.
The ironwork has been repaired, thousands of panes of glass replaced and the sandstone conserved. Inside, under the glass domes, are rare tree ferns, and around 1,000 ladybirds have been let loose to keep pests off the plants.
The church is one of the finest examples of Norman architecture in Scotland. It was enlarged in the 15th century with a side aisle, and in the 17th with a small transeptal aisle. It fell into disrepair in the 18th century and was restored in 1926. In 2023 it marked its 900th anniversary, and it is probably the oldest church in Scotland.
It looks medieval and it is not. The white part of the building went up around 1790, and in 1815 the architect James Gillespie Graham extended it into a castle for the Macdonalds of Sleat, with arcaded public halls and a great marble staircase. Fire took the central section in 1855. The family moved to a smaller house in 1925 and left the rest to the wind and rain, and by the time the Clan Donald Lands Trust bought it in 1972 the west end was derelict. In 1981 the decision was taken to demolish it, saving what remnants could be saved. The archway and the ivy are what was kept.
6° and clear across Scotland. Cold enough for the tour that ends by the stills.
Real tennis is the forerunner of lawn tennis, a quirky game played inside walls with long-handled rackets. The palace, in the village of Falkland, was once the favourite country retreat of the Stuarts, and its court is billed as the oldest tennis court in the world still in use. The mansion still has a strong Renaissance feel, and the court is one of many reasons to visit. Falkland sits on the edge of the Lomond Hills, and on its outskirts Maspie Den has a woodland path that takes you right behind a waterfall.
Over three years Talisker is putting £600,000 into native oyster and seagrass projects in two west-coast lochs, Loch Harport on Skye and Loch Craignish in Argyll, run by the community charity Seawilding. The need is plain: since industrialisation began, the UK has lost 92 per cent of its seagrass.
HARVEST: Contemporary Craft Fair from 9 October, The Royal National Mòd 2026 from 9 October, South of Scotland Dark Sky Festival from 9 October.
The croft café that started in two shipping containers in 2021 has taken a unit at Broadford Business Park for a commercial bakery, with new bakes for wholesale and retail to follow. Four bakery jobs come with it.
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