Pioneering spirit: Exploring the archaeology and history of The Glenlivet whisky

This article is from Current Archaeology issue 416

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George Smith was a gentleman farmer who had undertaken a wide range of agricultural improvements on his farmland in Speyside: improving drainage, clearing ground, and enclosing fields. Like many other local farmers, though, he had a sideline in making illicit whisky. Indeed, the whole Glenlivet area was famous for the quality of the spirit it produced – so much so that, when George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822, he asked specifically for a bottle of Glenlivet, probably on the recommendation of Sir Walter Scott.

In 1824, Smith turned from poacher to gamekeeper after gaining his licence to distil whisky legally, and the first-edition Ordnance Survey map for Glenlivet, surveyed in 1864, clearly marks the site of his ‘old distillery’ at Upper Drumin farm. Until a few years ago, however, the only thing marking the location was a memorial cairn with a commemorative plaque to its founder. The courtyard buildings and farmhouse belonging to George Smith had all been demolished, and only the remains of two water reservoirs (marked as ‘old mill dams’ on the map) survived to confirm this as the location of a major distillery that had functioned from 1824 to 1859.

Whisky business

The reservoirs were a key feature, as water was not only used to power production, but is more importantly a key ingredient in whisky-making, used first in soaking the barley for malting, and then in the mash to make the wort that is fermented into a weak beer (or wash), but also funnelled around the copper worm to cool the evaporated alcohol from the stills, condensing it down from steam to liquid. The more water you could draw on, the more whisky you could make – and so, in the late 1850s, in order to increase his production, George Smith constructed a new purpose-built distillery further down the hill at Minmore where he could tap into more streams and springs. This site has continued in production to the present day, and Smith’s relocation proved to be a smart move: it is recorded that the initial productive capacity of the Upper Drumin distillery in 1824 was 50 gallons (227 litres) per week, but this quickly grew to 100 gallons per week by 1826, and then expanded to 200 gallons per week by 1839. When production was moved, even the initial output in 1859 was 600 gallons per week – so, over the space of 35 years, production had increased to 12 times the original amount.

During the construction of the new site, part of the old distillery was dismantled in order to remove and recycle equipment such as the stills and the grain-drying kiln. When this was done, the original Upper Drumin complex reverted to being a farm, and slowly over time its buildings disappeared. An archaeological survey of the site had been undertaken by one of the authors back in 1994, but it was only in recent years that the opportunity arose to carry out an excavation. This fieldwork formed part of the Pioneering Spirit project, a partnership between the National Trust for Scotland and The Glenlivet (part of the Chivas Group, owned by Pernod Ricard) that is working to uncover the hidden history of whisky-making in the Scottish landscape, from its illicit beginnings to the rise of industrial distilleries. Previously, most of our archaeological investigations have been on land belonging to the Trust, examining the remains of illicit whisky bothies at Mar Lodge, Torridon, Ben Lomond, and Ben Lawers, but Upper Drumin belongs to the Crown Estate Scotland, meaning that we were working closely with their Countryside Ranger for this strand of the research. Over the last three years, a team of Trust archaeological volunteers and locals have undertaken around a month’s worth of excavation on the site, with illuminating results.

Still Room for discoveries

While many of George Smith’s buildings have long since vanished from view, there are clues to be gleaned from surviving documentary evidence. We know from late 18th- and early 19th-century estate plans that his farm at Upper Drumin took the form of a three-sided courtyard with ranges of buildings to the west, south, and east. An early description of the replacement distillery at Minmore indicates that it had a similar design, and as this account includes details of how each element of the whisky production process was carried out on the new site, it seemed likely that these stages may have been similarly arranged at its predecessor. We opened a series of trial trenches to test this theory, examining parts of all three ranges at Upper Drumin, as well as an area of the paved and cobbled courtyard between them.

The western range, on the uphill side of the site, is likely to have been where the barley was steeped and left to sprout on the malting floors. The eastern wing is probably where the wash backs or tuns were located, where the wort was fermented into beer in large vats, before it was pumped to the stills for distilling. Most of our work, however, has focused on the south range, which is where most of the technical distilling work was done – including in the ‘Still Room’. This, happily, was also the best-preserved area of the site.

From the excavated evidence, we can see that the ‘Still Room’ was entered through a wide door in the south-east corner of the courtyard. A heavily worn flagstone floor covered most of this area, and a range of three furnaces was located against the southern wall. The archaeological remains only survived to a height of three to four courses, but they clearly formed the lower part of a stone-built platform that would have supported (from west to east) the water boiler, the wash still, and the spirit still. The ash-pits under the fires suggest that coal was being used, and iron hinges, an iron furnace door, and numerous very heavy and burnt iron fire-grate bars were recovered. The stills would have sat both into the upper levels of the stonework and probably on a second layer of iron bars.

Set into the floor in front of the stills were the remains of an oak vat that has been interpreted as the ‘underback’: a wooden container into which the liquid from the mash tun would have been drained and allowed to cool, before it was pumped into the wash-backs where yeast was added and it was allowed to ferment into beer. There were other telling traces immediately to the east of the spirit still: two circular features, one stone-lined and the other outlined by an iron barrel hoop, but both of them with two levels of timbers forming a raised support for vats. These are thought to mark the positions of the two ‘receivers’, where the distilled alcohol was tapped off from the stills having passed through the copper-spiral worm, cooled down with running water.

As, by this stage, the process involved distilled alcohol, it had to be checked and controlled by the on-site Excise Officer to ensure that none of the product was being illegally diverted. This is why the vats in this area were elevated off the ground, so that that they could be inspected underneath, and they would have also been kept under lock and key – so the discovery of a brass slider from a padlock in this corner of the complex seems to support our interpretations. It bears the word ‘Gottlieb Patent’, marking it out as a type of padlock that was patented in 1829 for use by the Excise Office.

Full measure

In addition to piecing the production layout back together (typified by the plan of the spirit room that we can now reconstruct), our project recovered a wide range of artefacts from the site that provide interesting insights into the day-to-day functioning of the distillery. While the copper pot stills had clearly been dismantled and moved downhill in 1859, there were still quantities of copper piping and off-cuts present, probably from repair works, while a small copper cup looks like a dram measure from which the distillery staff would have been given an allocated daily ‘nip’ of whisky.

The sunken-floored features such as the underback vat and receiver positions were particularly good locations for accumulated material. Some of their upper fills were clearly related to the final dismantling of the site, including structural remains such as perforated bricks from the malt-drying kiln, arched bricks from the furnace entrance, and lots of large iron fire-grate bars. The lower deposits, however, may have been more closely linked with production: they included quite a few smashed glasses (mostly of the stemmed wine-drinking variety) as well as numerous broken clay tobacco pipes. Whisky-making is a drawn-out process (it takes about a week), and in between bouts of activity there must have been a fair amount of tending fires and waiting on processes: smoking and a degree of drinking certainly seem to have occurred. Other personal items came from the south-east portion of the site, between the spirit still and the corner of the building, which appears to have been a dumping ground for material including some clothing, woollen gloves, and leather boots.

There were echoes of the industrial process itself, too. The movement of liquids around the distillery would have been a complicated business, and while some of the water could be moved by gravity (the western dam is at a higher level than the eastern one), the extensive use of pumps would have been required to move liquids between the different stages. This is probably reflected by the discovery of a couple of iron frames and a possible washer from a pump plunger. Once the final distillation was collected in the spirit receiver, it was then pumped into casks and possibly stored in the east range before being transported to market. These casks would have been sealed using bungs, and more than ten examples of such objects, made from cork oak, have been found across the site.

While no samples of whisky have been located, we did find a single window glass sherd possibly inscribed with a word starting with the letter G (perhaps for ‘George’ or ‘Glenlivet’), as well as a single silver coin of George III (1816-1820). As this monarch’s reign pre-dates George Smith going legal in 1824, is it possible that this represents money for the illicit whisky that he had previously made on the farm? Excavation of The Glenlivet’s original distillery has certainly proved rewarding – the very fact that it was upgraded in 1859 and moved to a new site has meant that the plan and layout of the Upper Drumin complex has survived, something that rarely happens with later industrial-scale distilleries, where rapid expansion in production often leads to the destruction of their earlier phases.

Further reading:
• G D Hay and G P Stell (1986) Monuments of Industry: an illustrated record (The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland).
• G D Smith (2002) The Secret Still: Scotland’s Clandestine Whisky Makers (Birlinn).

Source:
Derek Alexander is Head of Archaeology at the National Trust for Scotland, and Dr Daniel Rhodes is the Trust’s Senior Archaeologist.

All images: National Trust for Scotland