To avoid paying tax, in the 18th and 19th century, small-scale whisky-production went underground, moving to isolated bothies hidden in remote locations across Scotland. Derek Alexander and Daniel Rhodes describe recent archaeological fieldwork by the National Trust for Scotland, in partnership with The Glenlivet, which has been hunting down these sites across the Highlands and bringing their illicit remains to light once more.
View over heathery hills, with mountainous terrain in the background, and archaeologists excavating in foreground.
Overlooking the picturesque but carefully concealed site of Calan’s Bothy, an illicit whisky still whose remains were recently excavated at Mar Lodge Estate during the Pioneering Spirit project.
Since 2020, National Trust for Scotland archaeologists and volunteers have been working with The
Glenlivet to uncover sites and stories relating to Scotch whisky production, exploring the spirit’s place in the nation’s cultural heritage. One phase of the Pioneering Spirit project investigated the remains of the original Glenlivet distillery in Speyside (see CA 416), while the other side of our research has highlighted rather smaller production sites, surveying and excavating the remains of illicit whisky bothies on land belonging to the Trust.
So far, around 40 such sites have been identified, and nine have been excavated, at Mar Lodge, Torridon Ben Lomond, and Ben Lawers. Unlicensed whisky bothies have only more recently been considered as a type of archaeological site, and their remains are not always easy to find – you have to think like an Excise Officer, and become a real landscape detective. The easiest approach is to walk up the lines of the small burns, which would have provided water sources for these sites, and look for a small, level platform or short lengths of stone footings. If you ever built a hidden ‘den’ as a child, using a lean-to roof against a steep slope or a stone cliff, and covering it with camouflaging grass, bracken, and heather, that is what an illicit whisky bothy would probably have been like.
MAR LODGE ESTATE: OUT OF SIGHT
Like the area around The Glenlivet – which was itself founded after an illicit whisky-producer obtained the region’s first licence to distil legally in 1824 – the Trust’s property at Mar Lodge Estate, in the centre of the Cairngorms, forms one of the most-remote locations in Scotland.
Black and white drawing of a whisky bothy consisting of a globular still and a wooden barrel, hidden underground.
This drawing by the National Trust for Scotland reproduces the usual arrangement of an illegal whisky bothy in the Scottish Highlands.
As such, it was ideal for clandestine whisky-production – and, indeed, in the 1990s survey work undertaken in this area by RCAHMS published some of the first drawn plans of bothy sites in archaeological literature. Seven examples were known before our project there started in 2021, but a number of others have since been discovered by Trust staff – the sort of people who know all the hidden
spots in these landscapes.
One such site is Calan’s Bothy (named after Calan, son of the Estate Ecologist, who found it), which is located on the south side of Mar Lodge Estate, on a north-facing hillside around 600m south of the famous Linn of Dee waterfall. It nestles on the west side of a burn gully, where a slight kink to the west means it is obscured from direct line of sight downslope – and it appears that this location may have helped the site to avoid detection while it was active, as none of the Mar Lodge whisky bothies have been discovered to-date in any written sources like estate papers or court records.
Now that the site has come to the rather-more-benign attention of archaeologists, though, the bothy
has been documented as a single roomed rectangular structure built of dry-stone rubble and turf. It stands on a flat area (probably an old erosion platform) whose south and west edges appear to have been cut back into the gully side, and the hill slope (perhaps augmented with turfs) also appears to have formed most of the building’s west side, which preserves little evidence of a stone wall. On the other three sides, though, dry-stone walls stand up to six rough courses high, with an entrance in the eastern wall. Beyond this is a rough flagstone floor that covers much of the interior (excluding along the length of the north wall, where natural soil was exposed), and in the south-west corner we found a rectangular stone hearth with a stone-capped drain leading away from it. Behind the hearth, a gap in the dry-stone walling suggested the position of a chimney, which may have been formed from, or concealed by, an old, hollowed-out tree stump whose charred remains were found just beyond this gap.
A still from a 3D model of the archaeological remains of a whisky bothy, with numbers labelling points of interest.
This 3D model of the remains of Calan’s Bothy can be explored – together with a number of other models produced by the National Trust for Scotland – on SketchFab at https://sketchfab.com/nts-archaeology/models.
As is common on many bothy sites, the structure yielded very few artefacts – unsurprisingly, as smugglers generally only took what was required to these hidden locations – but a small scatter of glazed ceramic was found within a layer post-dating the building’s abandonment, directly above the internal flagstone floor, which might suggest activity subsequent to the bothy’s regular use and maintenance.
TORRIDON: THE BATTLE OF THE BLACK POT
In contrast to the Mar Lodge bothies, there is quite a bit of documentary evidence for illicit whisky-making in the Torridon area, largely from the accounts of Excise raids that were published in the 1880s. Much of this material has been collated by local historian Murdo MacDonald in his publication The Battle of the Black Pot (see ‘Further reading’ on p.39), and one account, published in The Scotsman in 1884, speaks of a bothy that Excise Officers stumbled on in full production not more than 300 yards from the dwelling house of Laggiedubh. Its position was described as ‘concealed at the base of a rock in a natural hollow’ but, unusually, it was not located beside a burn. The water used for cooling the worm tub (see box below for more details of the distilling process) was instead drained off into a small pool, where it cooled before being reused.
Ten site plans as seen from above of illicit bothies in the Torridon area. Plans vary, and are in pastel colours.
Illicit whisky bothies are relatively well documented in the Torridon area. These plans show a number of surveyed sites, including a bothy and malt kiln recently excavated by the Pioneering Spirit team at Allt na Tuill Bhain.
Strikingly, a site matching this distinctive description was located during the walk-over survey of the Trust’s land at Torridon. Excavation soon followed, and this revealed a low stone-and-earth bank enclosing an oblong area, with one side formed by a small adjacent rock-face, along which a low stone bench had been built. A broken bottle, probably originally for beer but which could be reused for whisky, was found beside this, and further insights into the structure’s function came from a pair of drains that ran down the length of the building and exited through the door.
This is an extract of an article that appeared in CA 420. Read on in the magazine, or click here to read it online at The Past, where you can read all of the Current Archaeology articles in full as well as the content of our other magazines, Current World Archaeology , Ancient Egypt , and Military History Matters .