Islay

I had forgotten that Scotland is a country of the sea.

I normally travel to the mountains - Fort William, the Caingorms, Glencoe. There's another world up there, come the winter, up above the five or eight hundred metre contour line, a bright, elementary world of ice and snow and rock.

But my friend Joel was visiting the isle of Islay, a friend whom I'd met over a bottle of whisky out in the desert five years before.

That whisky had been Lagavulin, and not just any Lag but the Distiller's Edition, drunk straight from the bottle, smoky salty phenolic strangeness sharpening the senses one holy night up by an abandoned gold mine.

Now Joel and his wife Tiffany wanted to come see where it was made. I was happy to join them.

Islay sits in the Southern Hebrides, an island 19 miles by 25, low-lying, warmed by the Gulf Stream. To the west there's nothing but ocean until Newfoundland.

I caught the train from London Euston, past the grassy whale-back fells of eastern Lakeland and their snow-topped siblings to the west. From Glasgow, a coach ride watching blizzards blow on the far shore of Loch Lomond. Across the wintry Arrochar Alps, down the coast of Loch Fyne. Two hours on a ferry, eating Barra-caught haddock for my tea. Down the gangplank at Port Askaig, the wrong end of the island. A taxi to sort that out.

Thirteen hours.

Islay is an old place.

Friday afternoon is beautiful and I walk until the light is gone: down to Dunyvaig Castle overlooking Lagavulin Bay - stronghold of the Lords of the Isles: glorified pirates and rulers of much of western Scotland in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries.

Up to the standing stones on the slopes behind.

Every square of the map has a ruined chapel, and where the stones have gone the names remain: the Scots Gaelic cill, now saved in place-names beginning Kil-.

Ruined Kildalton Church, and its 1300-year-old cross, one of the best preserved early Christian crosses in Britain. Four lions guard the central medallion; two peacocks eat grapes on the reverse side. This place was a crossroads, more connected than it might seem.

A ruined cottage stood by the seashore near Ardbeg, a burn now lapping at its walls.

The Clearances here in the 19th century were less militarised and violent than elsewhere in Scotland, but no less enforced. People lost their land as their smallholdings were amalgamated for sheep farming — and many left Scotland entirely, heading for Canada, never to return.

In a warehouse in Islay there is an otherwise empty, white, second-floor loft filled with seven tonnes of barley.

Walking up the stairs and into the space on a recent mid afternoon, I was first struck by the sensation of hush. It was not just the quieting of sounds from the sea outside but an enveloping cocoon of warmth and musty scent, like a field after summer rain. In front of me, a raked expense of barley six inches deep filled the loft from edge to edge, rising up to meet deep-set exterior windows.

This is the malting room at Laphroaig, one of only three whisky distilleries on Islay to malt some of their own barley. The grain is soaked three times, simulating spring rains, then laid out on the floor for four to seven days, where it starts to germinate. - and is raked and turned to arrest that process.

It reminded me of The New York Earth Room by Walter de Maria, and Kyle Chayka's writing in the Paris Review a couple of years ago: “It’s very much a Zen garden," the caretaker said. "You maintain it and nothing grows.”

From the malting floor, the barley is shoveled into the smoker, where some seeds get away — and reach towards the light.

Islay Woollen Mill is a none-more-traditional family-run business on a site that’s had a mill since the 1500s. They weave glorious tweed fabrics on restored Dobcross looms from the 1920s — one of the machines for assembling patterns dates back to 1903, and was bought for £40 from a scrapyard in Huddersfield.

Gordon Covell took over Islay Woollen Mill in 1981 — a man who’s spent his life in tweed; a weaver since he was fifteen years old

With his wife Sheila and son Marcus, he's made the tweeds used in Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and many other Hollywood films — and supplies Saville Row tailors Huntsman,

It's beautiful stuff.

Joel is a dedicated photographer (@joelchilders on Instagram) - but he limited himself to just three cameras for this trip: a Fujifilm mirrorless, an old Polaroid with some expired film - and the Yashica medium format.

Shooting this Yashica is crazy difficult: it’s a mirror viewfinder, and so on a handheld shot even just pointing it in the right direction was a mission, my brain scrambling (and failing) to flip three dimensions of tilt and framing. Up on Dunyvaig Castle, safely balanced on a tripod, the wind still threatened to rattle and blur the exposure.

But photography, like climbing, is basically something you get into to slow a hike down and make you pay more attention.

Islay is somewhere slowness is a virtue - in weaving, in whisky - it's a place where they make good things to last for a long time. So a bit of a tricky process isn’t necessarily a bad thing.