Kirkwall

And when you watch one of them, you'll quickly understand why.

He's joining me today from Kirkwall, Scotland.

And so once again, Julian Treasure, welcome back to the show.

Thank you, Henry.

He also, the night of the Royal Oak disaster, Mum remembered a soldier beating on their door in their house in Graham Place to take her father to his shop to commandeer all the blankets they could spare, and they wouldn't say why.

And they, Stromness, could see this red glow in the east, and they thought Kirkwall had been bombed, so only the next day sort of they discovered what had happened.

More and more, I'm thinking of realizing that they didn't know at the start of the war what was going to happen, that we were going to get off relatively lightly, so the preparations they were making, you know.

And the, um, of course, the bombing at the Brig O' Wee, they thought that was the first of many.

Clearly a need for a garrison theater.

So one was dispatched.

Not for the first or last time, Kirkwall and Lerwick were confused [laughs] and Shetland got a hut.

Mum's still muttering about it occasionally.

When the Earl's men arrested Alison, they didn't just take her.

They arrested her entire family and brought them to the toll booth in Kirkwall.

The whole family?

Yes.

At the execution.

Yes.

On December 16th, 1594, she was taken to Gallowha in Kirkwall to be executed.

Right before the end, standing in front of the crowd, she publicly retracted her confession.

On the 6th the Orkneys were in sight.

Argyll very unwisely anchored off Kirkwall, and allowed two of his followers to go on shore there.

The bishop ordered them to be arrested.

The refugees proceeded to hold a long and animated debate on this misadventure.

For from the beginning to the end of their expedition, however languid and irresolute their conduct might be, they never in debate wanted spirit or perseverance.

Some were for an attack on Kirkwall.

Some were for proceeding without delay to Argyllshire.

At last the earl seized some gentlemen who lived near the coast of the island, and proposed to the bishop an exchange of prisoners.

Norse also simplified certain grammatical features, such as reducing inflectional endings that English later shed entirely.

The Norse-Gaelic contact produced hybrid place names like Kirkwall and Thurso, echoing the cultural mingling in the islands.

Those early contacts left a linguistic signature that survives in modern Scots dialects, especially in the Northern Isles.

Then came the Norman conquest of England, which introduced a flood of French vocabulary into English.

...

if we're doing a big shop, we go over to, um, Kirkwall is the main town.

It's actually officially a city because it's got a cathedral, and then there's another lovely town called Stromness.

So they've got really nice food shops.

And to connect them, we had pipes running across the road, on top of the road.

And one day, a lorry came from Kirkwall, the capital of Orkney, on the way to St. Margaret's Hope South, passed through the road at the distillery.

And he's been doing that for 20 years.

But that day, he forgot to take down the crane.

We are the second biggest cruise ship harbor in Great Britain.

So this year we had around 280 different cruise ships in, up to 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people on board.

And, you know, when they stop in Orkney and you have, you know, if you take Kirkwall, our capital there, there's 7,000 people.

And if there's two cruise ships in the same day with 3,500 people, you know, it's double capacity.

That's Highland Park Senior Brand Ambassador Martin Mark-Bardsen.

We'll find out how his pilot solved that dilemma on a flight from Kirkwall to Stockholm later on WhiskeyCast in-depth.

Martin is celebrating his 20th anniversary with Highland Park this fall, and he'll share some more tales of the road with us, too.

That's just ahead, along with the week's tasting notes, the calendar of events, behind the label, and much more.

yeah.

So that makes a good thing as well, yeah.

Tell me about this tasting you did on a flight from Stockholm to Kirkwall.

Yeah, well, we wanted to do something called the Return of the Vikings some years back.