Sorry, it’s the Mull of Kintyre Post and I have ruined your day: now you’ll be humming the worst song ever recorded. Worse even than Day Trip to Bangor. But we’re round it, and still alive. In fact, we rounded it quite a few days ago but have been having so much fun since that I haven’t got around to recording the epic moment for posterity.
The odd thing is that I have been looking at it off and on for about a week, ever since Sarah and I motored up to Glenarm. I knew that it was no real distance across the North Channel – from Fair Head off Ballycastle to the Mull of Kintyre is just 11 miles – but it was still rather peculiar standing on the cliffs in Northern Ireland and all the land you could see around you was Scotland.
For Andrew this is of course a home-coming and he had been licking his lips ever since Derry, and not just at the prospect of our last Maud’s ice cream in Portrush. What a change since Friday night: since this is 2023 no sensible restaurant opens on a Tuesday ‘as we just can’t get the staff’ they all moan. It was like a ghost town: half term over, beach empty, but strangely the harbour packed with visiting yachts including some adventurous Italians who we moored outside of. Even more impressively voyaged than the Norwegians who we met last week. But Tuesday night meant two signifcant upgrades: first, we were allowed into the members upstairs sun trap balcony bar at the Yacht Club where the talk was still about Saturday’s shark attack. Apparently it was ‘just’ a Tope (which looked pretty shark-like to us on Google) and it had bitten the person who’d caught it and was trying to get the hook out, which is not the kind of story that would have excited Spielberg. Second, behind the completely horrid-looking Harbour Pub was – instead of Friday night’s nightclub – a half-decent bistro absolutely rammed with golfers. Apparently all golfers eat is steak and burgers, with lots of chips, and they wear those technicolour shirts all evening as well as on the telly. The good news was that my final morsel of Irish food won the Best Pudding Of The Trip So Far award instantly.
And so farewell to Northern Ireland, which I have enjoyed immensely, and look forward to seeing again in September, but hopefully not at 0530 which is when I slipped the lines trying to wake neither Penman nor the Italians, worried that we were still going to be too late through Raithlin Sound and would find a washing machine waiting for us, and regretting that pudding ( a deconstructed St Honore, since you ask).
We did survive Raithlin although we were in the scary ‘Not Defined’ bit of the tide atlas and were rather unnervingly doing 11 knots over the ground, so it was a bit lumpy, but things calmed down and then it was a motorsail past the shipping lanes and a sail sail past the Mull of McCartney. Andrew informed me at this point that he was brought up to understand that Penmans never ever sail round the Mull of Kintyre as it is unseamanlike, they always go through the Crinan Canal. At £140 each way that is not going to happen more than once on this trip, so we took a deep breath and crossed our fingers.
Nothing scarier than the odd bit of wind over tide snarling waves. We snuck inside Sanda, which sounds like a CBeebies presenter but is actually a small island off the bottom of Kintyre, bore away up the side of it and were tied up on the pontoons at Campbeltown by 1430.
This was dangerously early, as Andrew had had the internet out most of the way across and had established that far from being the backwoods tiny town on the peninsula that is famously further from anywhere than anywhere else, Campbeltown is actually the Aldeburgh of Western Scotland and home to a range of interesting places including a leading seafood restaurant and the Springbank Distillery, and had booked both.
More Margate than Aldeburgh, Campbeltown’s new Artisan Cafe and Deli frontage was less than one street deep, but the distillery tour was fascinating, not so much because of the distillery (both of us have seen enough of these) but of their interesting marketing strategy. The guide was very proud of the fact that you can’t actually buy any Springbank whisky unless you pay a broker about five times what it’s worth, as they simply can’t make enough to get it to the normal shops. The only way for an ordinary drinker to get a bottle is to buy it in the distillery shop, which sells out precisely five minutes after opening at 1000 each day. To get a bottle people queued for an hour every morning.
The tour script (we can’t blame the guide, it was her first day on her summer job) clearly thought this a great thing and sets Springbank apart from the nasty multinationals I have spent my life helping bring lovely premium single malt whisky to the masses at a reasonable price, thereby boosting the Scottish economy no end (that’s enough – Ed). We laughed at the quaint anti-commercial hand-crafted lack of success story: what sad idiot would spend an hour queuing for a bottle of whisky?
Then we got to the tasting bit at the end. I had had a bottle of Springbank once and remembered it as an absolute favourite. This was better than I had remembered: it was full of complex slghtly peaty flavour but somehow clean and fresh. Neither of us had tasted anything close, and we’ve both tried a few. And we weren’t planning to leave particularly early the next morning…
So it is that the boat now has three of the scarcest bottles of malt wrapped in piles of dirty laundry waiting to be exported to England at the earliest opportunity, and I can’t believe I am confessing to the world that I queued for an hour outside a distillery shop as if it was Primark.
Blue Moon's trip around the UK 
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