When the Highlands decide you might just be worth keeping in their story

Dogs, drones, and drams

In the Highlands, you measure success in small mercies: the cameras stayed dry enough, the dogs came back when called, and the Whisky Wagon drone made it home from its maiden flight over water, instead of to the bottom of Kilbrannan Sound.

Scotland doesn’t do half-measures. One moment, it was all blue calm, the next a wall of rain and wind that slapped at the old Land Rover and soaked us through. We were there for four days — four days of hauling gear out, wiping rain off lenses with a sleeve already sodden, waiting for the light to change its mind.

Cottage industry

The Whisky Wagon dogs didn’t care. They tore across wet grass and rocks, barreled into the surf, shook themselves dry across the stone floors of the Landmark Trust cottage that was our temporary HQ. The property sat perched on the Kintyre Peninsula, looking across to Arran, that great hulk of an island that can look sharp as a blade in one moment and blurred into myth the next.

Inside, we debated segments, sketched out formats, laughed at the failures, and filled notebooks with plans that ranged from good sense to crackpot. Outside, we shot reels, chased light, and prayed the batteries would last as long as the weather breaks. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I kept circling back to the thought that this was what whisky should feel like. Not reverent whispers, but wind, sea, and a dram that tastes of where you’re standing.

Ideas on the rocks

And always, on the rocks out front, stood a Gormley statue — rusted and eternal, a man of iron staring out at the shifting water. He seemed like a centurion posted to guard us, unbothered by weather or time, willing on the test shoots with a patience I’ll never have.

Antony Gormley once said of his sculpture: “There is an excitement about making a sculpture that can live out here amongst the waves and the wind, the rain and snow, in night and day. The sculpture is like a standing stone, a marker in space and time, linking with a specific place and its history but also looking out towards the horizon, having a conversation with a future that hasn’t yet happened.”

Iron will

That line about “a conversation with a future that hasn’t yet happened” stayed with me. Because isn’t that what we’re trying to do with Whisky Wagon? To plant something in this land of stone and storm that acknowledges its past but points to something ahead — whisky as something more open, more human, more alive in the telling.

I’ve carried a notebook through five continents, but here the land does half the writing for you. The walls, the peat, the waves at night — they speak slower than any human voice, but they speak true. Maybe that’s why whisky belongs here. It demands you wait, it forces you to listen, it teaches you to let the story come in its own good time.

Neat finish

Four days, and I came back with cameras full, a notebook scrawled ragged, dogs that smelled like brine, and the certainty that the road is pointed the right way. The Wagon is rolling. The stories are out there, waiting at the side of the road, and we’re going to stop for every one.

Come along. The tickets are still free, the dreams are still waiting, and the ride is just beginning.