There is a folk song about Campbeltown Loch, and the singer wishes the water were whisky. The wish is not arbitrary. At one point in the late nineteenth century, this small town near the foot of the Kintyre Peninsula had more than 30 working distilleries and called itself, without much modesty, the whisky capital of the world. Then American Prohibition arrived. Then the Great Depression. The Campbeltown distilleries — which had pushed quantity over quality during the boom years — collapsed almost completely. Three remain today: Springbank, Glen Scotia, and Glengyle. They keep Campbeltown alive as one of only five officially recognised Scotch whisky regions in Scotland, and they make some of the most prized single malts in the world.
The town was originally called Kinlochkilkerran — an anglicisation of the Gaelic for 'head of the loch by the kirk of Ciarán'. Ciarán was the Irish saint Ciarán of Clonmacnoise, who lived in this area before there was a town here. A cave on the shore is named for him, and pilgrims can still visit it at low tide. The current name dates from the 17th century, when Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll, was granted the site in 1667 and the place became, simply, Campbell's Town. The town hall went up in 1760. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution opened its station here in 1861 — that lifeboat is still active, with the present boathouse dating from 1996. Campbeltown became a royal burgh in the mid-eighteenth century. Today it has about 4,600 people, less than half its boom-era population, and it carries its history like a worn but well-kept overcoat.
Of the 30-odd distilleries that once made this 'the whisky capital of the world', the three that remain are Glen Scotia, Glengyle, and Springbank. Springbank is the most celebrated — a family-owned distillery that still does every stage of production on site, from malting the barley to bottling the spirit, a vertical integration that almost no other Scotch distillery can claim. Campbeltown is a 'protected locality' for Scotch whisky distilling under the UK's Scotch Whisky Regulations 2009. That legal status means a label can say 'Campbeltown single malt' only if the spirit was actually made here, in this small town at the end of a long peninsula. The town's surviving distilleries supply a global market of enthusiasts willing to drive eight or nine hours from Glasgow just to visit them.
Paul McCartney has owned High Park Farm near Campbeltown since 1966, when he was still a Beatle. After the Beatles ended he wrote 'Mull of Kintyre' with his bandmate Denny Laine, performed it with Wings, and released it in 1977. The song was Wings' biggest UK hit, reached Christmas number one, and became the first single in British history to sell more than two million copies in the United Kingdom. It is, in essence, a love letter to a windswept peninsula in Argyll. The Mull of Kintyre is the southern headland of the peninsula, about five and a half miles by road from Campbeltown. The song's success made the area famous in a way that surprised the locals, most of whom went on with their fishing and farming and distilling much as before.
Campbeltown has produced more than whisky and song. The 19th-century landscape painter William McTaggart was born here, his work celebrated in the town museum. Sir William Mackinnon, the Scottish shipping magnate, came from Campbeltown. The Wisconsin politician George Wylie did too. Lawrence Tynes, the NFL placekicker who won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants, grew up in Campbeltown when his father was stationed with the US Navy at nearby RAF Machrihanish. Hugh Henry Brackenridge — American writer, lawyer, and justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — was born in the town in 1748. The Wee Picture House on the waterfront, dating from 1913 and built in the Glasgow School Art Nouveau style, is believed to be the oldest surviving purpose-built cinema in Scotland. It still shows films.
Campbeltown is, by some measures, the westernmost town on the island of Great Britain. The qualification matters: if you count the port of Mallaig as a town, it pips Campbeltown by some miles. But Campbeltown lays its claim on the basis of its port, its central grid of streets, and the way it functions as a real urban centre for the long, thin peninsula behind it. Getting here by road is a project — the A83 winds up Loch Fyne to Tarbet, where the A82 carries on to Glasgow. The drive is over 130 miles. Campbeltown Airport, on the site of the former RAF Machrihanish three miles west of town, has weekday flights to Glasgow. Ferries run to Ballycastle in Northern Ireland and, in summer, across the Firth of Clyde to Ardrossan via Brodick on Arran. The town is one of the few places in the Scottish Highlands where Scots, rather than Scottish Gaelic, has long been the dominant language — a small enclave of Lowland speech in Highland country.
Campbeltown sits at 55.42 degrees north, 5.61 degrees west, on the east side of the Kintyre Peninsula by Campbeltown Loch. Visual landmarks include the loch itself, Davaar Island guarding its mouth, the long sweep of Machrihanish Bay on the Atlantic side, and Springbank distillery's chimneys among the town buildings. Campbeltown Airport / RAF Machrihanish (EGEC) lies 3 nautical miles west of the town and offers a long ex-military runway. Glasgow Prestwick (EGPK) is roughly 35 nautical miles east across the Firth of Clyde. Weather here is mild oceanic — cool summers, mild wet winters — with frequent low cloud and Atlantic squalls, and occasionally remarkably clear visibility allowing direct sight of Ireland to the south.