It’s time to protect whisky’s history

It’s the day when the weather finally broke. The grass is soaked by a continual drizzle, the sky one cloud which blurs the horizon, colour reduced to a palette of greys. Dreich and drubly indeed, and here we are, heading to the beach to see if we can find an abandoned pier. A curlew’s haunted cry seems magnified across the desolate flats.

The tides have slathered down a thick seam of textured, rippled mud along the channel which once carried the whisky. On the opposite side, the walls of the old distillery peek out from the trees and weeds, looking more like an abandoned prison. At the top of the channel are the warehouse buildings, cracked and teetering, slowly being sucked into the Forth.

Disappearing distillery: Kennetpans' legacy is literally sinking in the mud

Kennetpans was, for a period, the largest distillery in Scotland, one of the links in a chain across Clackmannanshire and Fife which made the Stein family and their Haig cousins the most powerful distillers of their time. Now it is reverting back to nature, slumping into total disrepair.

It was founded, some believe, in the early 18th century by Andrew Stein whose son, John, expanded it to its full size. One of his sons, also John, would eventually take over. Another, James, built an even larger plant nearby at Kilbagie, which was to outstrip Kennetpans in terms of size, and where, in 1826, his son Robert installed the first of his own design of column still.

For a time the Steins seemed to be able to turn the country to their needs: farmers grew grain to their requirements, James Watt supplied Kennetpans with the first of his steam engines, Scotland’s first railway linked the two distilleries, and the spirit from the two sites flooded out to the domestic market, and also across the border to England where it was rectified into gin. By the 1780s, the duty paid by the two distilleries was greater than all land tax collected annually in Scotland.

Then came a change in law setting a higher rate of tax for Scottish spirit and a banning of exports to England. Sequestration and bankruptcy followed, the effects of which rippled out across the Scottish economy. Although there would be a revival of the family’s fortunes, the Stein’s Scottish empire was on shifting ground. 

John Jr. closed Kennetpans in 1825. By then, he had his sights on the growing potential of Irish whiskey and had invested in Dublin’s Marrowbone Lane distillery. There was a further connection between the two industries. John Stein’s daughter, Isabella, was married to a certain John Jameson, who had been trained at Kennetpans before being sent over to Dublin to manage and distil at his father’s Bow Street plant.

Kilbagie closed in 1860, and was turned into a manure factory. The world moved on. The Haigs grew in importance, the Steins slipped away, their distilleries taken over, closed, demolished. The fractured walls of Kennetpans are their memorial.

It’s a salutary lesson of the fragility of the industry, the nature of boom and bust, over-stretching, and the fickleness of the market. We wander around the site, reflecting on how easily things seem to collapse and be forgotten, the lessons not learned. Time does not wait, things disappear, names are forgotten.

That morning, at Lindores Abbey, I’d looked into what could have been a still pit uncovered during the excavations for the new distillery’s suds pond. Two teams of archaeologists have visited, one unsure about the pit’s use, the other more convinced that this could be a site of medieval distillation.

Historic find?: One of the potential still pits uncovered at Lindores Abbey

It’s not a smoking gun but could be a hugely important step, taking our understanding of whisky’s roots further back than ever before. The site is in a fragile state and needs to be made secure and watertight now, before there is irreparable loss of potentially vital evidence.

Lindores needs to be properly excavated to find out quite what is under the surface. It is too important for it to disappear into the mud. Equally, Kennetpans should be preserved in some way (Historic Scotland is currently trying to stabilise the remaining buildings) to show the origins of the modern industry and a forgotten part of whisky’s convoluted tale.

The curlew calls again over the echo and high whine of traffic on the bridge. Is this place just a palpable example of impermanence, is it hubris, are it and the Lindores’ pit examples of how casually we treat the past? Maybe all are true in some way. They are certainly reminders of how fragile it all is and how easy it is to be lost in the weeds, sucked into the estuary mud and downriver, lost forever.

Responsibility passes down the generations. We have little time.