Farmers walking their fields one morning in the 1940s noticed the cows behaving strangely. Wobbling, lying down at odd angles, generally indifferent to the world. The mystery did not take long to solve. The Banff distillery had suffered yet another fire, casks had burst, and burning whisky had run downhill into the local water supply. Cattle had been drinking from the burn. The story became local legend, and it is one of the more cheerful chapters in a distillery history that spans 159 years of fires, explosions, wartime requisition, and very good single malt.
James McKilligan and Company built the first Banff distillery in 1824 at Inverboyndie on Banff Bay. It changed hands twice before 1863, when James Simpson Junior moved the whole operation to a new site nearby. The new location had advantages the old one lacked. The Great North of Scotland Railway came right past the door, ready to haul casks south. The springs on Fiskaidly farm provided clean water in steady supply. And the surrounding fields grew the barley the stills needed. Simpson built for the long term, and the long term, against considerable odds, is what he got.
In 1941 the distillery suffered the fire that intoxicated the cattle. Casks burned, stock vanished, the production line stopped. Repair began that winter, but in 1943 the RAF took over the site entirely. No. 248 Squadron flew Beaufighters and later Mosquitos against German shipping in the North Sea, and they needed every spare yard of coastal Scotland. The distillery buildings, partly rebuilt, became squadron facilities until the war ended. When the squadron moved out, the Banff team came back in and started over.
On 3 October 1959 a coppersmith was repairing one of the copper pot stills. Vapours inside the still ignited. The explosion destroyed the still and damaged part of the distillery. The parent company was fined fifteen pounds for safety violations, which seems modest for an explosion but reflects the era. The distillery rebuilt, again, and this time it stayed running. The stills were fed by hand with coal until 1963, when machinery finally took over. In 1970 the stills converted to oil burners. Cooling water came from the Burn of Boydine. None of it sounds romantic, but the whisky was excellent, and bottles labelled Banff are now sought after by collectors who know what the last bottlings cost their owner.
Banff was mothballed in 1983. The whisky industry was in one of its periodic contractions, demand had slumped, and Scotland had more distilleries than the market would support. The Diageo predecessor that owned Banff made a list, and Banff was on it. By the late 1980s most of the buildings had been dismantled or demolished. On 11 April 1991 the last warehouse caught fire and was destroyed, which felt like a final punctuation mark to a place that had burned more times than most. The site today shows almost nothing of what was there. The springs at Fiskaidly farm still flow. The Burn of Boydine still runs. The whisky that bears the name Banff exists only in increasingly rare bottles, a Highland single malt that survived two world wars and an exploding still but not the accounting of a corporate boardroom.
The Banff distillery site sits at Inverboyndie just west of Banff at 57.67 degrees N, 2.56 degrees W. From the air, look for the small coastal village a mile west of Banff Bay; the distillery grounds are now largely cleared. The North Sea is to the north, the River Deveron just to the east. Cruise altitude four to eight thousand feet gives a good sense of the coastal whisky country, with the Speyside region opening up to the southwest. Nearest airports are Aberdeen (EGPD) about forty nautical miles southeast and Inverness (EGPE) about fifty nautical miles west.