Edradour sits at the foot of the Moulin Moor, where two small burns gather their water from peat and granite before joining the Edradour Burn. The site was chosen in 1825, the year the Excise Act made it cheaper to make whisky legally than to risk the gaugers. A consortium of local farmers - Duncan Forbes among them - pooled their barley and their patience, and started a distillery that did one thing the great houses could not: it stayed tiny. The stills are the smallest the law permits. The mash tun holds barely more than a bath. Every cask is filled by hand. For more than 150 years, the production workforce numbered three, and the output was measured in casks per week rather than per hour.

By the twentieth century Edradour had drifted through several hands - the Mackintosh family until 1933, then William Whiteley, then Campbell Distillers under Pernod Ricard. Each owner kept it small because they could see no profitable way to make it larger. Then in 2002, Andrew Symington of Signatory Vintage bought the distillery, returning it to Scottish ownership. Signatory had been founded in 1988 as an independent bottler, selecting and bottling cask-strength whiskies from other distilleries. At Edradour they finally had a source of their own. The house rules are strict and proudly old-fashioned. No artificial colouring. No chill-filtration, which strips the natural oils and esters that give whisky its weight on the tongue. What you pour from a bottle of Edradour is what came out of the cask, cloudiness and all.

Two days a week, the distillery makes a different spirit entirely. Ballechin is Edradour's heavily peated whisky, named after a defunct distillery that once stood nearby. The peat smoke that infuses the malted barley gives Ballechin a smoky, maritime character more usually associated with Islay than the central Highlands. Some of the unpeated 12-year-old goes into blends - the House of Lords and Clan Campbell labels - but the single malts have built a devoted following among drinkers who prize traditional methods. Visitors who make the short trip up the lane from Pitlochry find a distillery that still feels like a working farm, with white walls, a red waterwheel, and the smell of fermenting wash drifting on the Perthshire air.

Edradour matters not because it is large or famous, but because it is a working museum of a Scotland that has largely disappeared. When Highland whisky-making was still a cottage industry, hundreds of distilleries like this one dotted the glens, each producing a few casks a year for local taverns and far-flung blenders. Almost all of them were consolidated, mechanised, or shut. Edradour survived by being too small to bother with - and then, when the rest of the industry rediscovered the virtues of craft and provenance, by being exactly what it had always been. The two burns still run cold off the moor. The casks still come out at a steady, unhurried pace.