Mi Mujer and I spent five days on Islay and those days were indeed well spent. We had planned for a short holiday somewhere new where we could just get lost and spend the time together. We settled upon Islay, and by a happy coincidence we found that our trip coincided with the annual whisky and music festival, Feis Ile.

I learned a great deal about Islay and whisky while I was there and a fair bit about the Scots, or at least the Ileach as the islanders are known.

The island is small, roughly 240 square miles and sparsely populated with 3,000 residents. There are only a few towns, and they are small enough to walk from one end to the other with a cup of coffee. In between the towns are vast expanses of open land quite often overrun by the true residents of Islay: sheep, cows and birds.

Upon our arrival at the airport we asked for directions to Bowmore where we would be staying. We were told “turn left.” The island is quite easy to navigate because it mainly consists of one lane roads with very few intersections and not a traffic light that we saw. Maps all seem to be of the hand-drawn variety and directions consist of a single road. While the roads can be a bit stressing while cresting a hill and rounding a blind corner in a road scarcely wider than our car, we encountered little traffic and few difficulties.

The island itself is almost entirely made on peat. Pure water can be tinged a brownish/black simply from filtering through the peat. The roads buckle, bend and break as peat is apparently not a great surface to pave. We saw peat cutters working in a field outside the airport, which we later learned was for Laphroaig, and they had cut troughs easily 12 feet deep. The peat was then stacked in piles looking like chocolate bricks.

While peat wreaks havoc with roadworks, it makes Islay particularly well suited to make whisky. It is as if God had decided to create an island solely for whisky making. The locals are respectful of that decision and are currently running at least 8 different distilleries. It is easy to see that distilling is the backbone of the Islay economy.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Life in GMT, travel, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.