Qualla: Islay https://qualla.com/islay en-us © 2026 Bendyline Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:40:13 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Islay https://qualla.com/islay Islay: Introduction https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit Fakirbakir, Public domain. There are about three thousand people living on Islay and there are nine working distilleries. Do the math and that comes out to one distillery for every 330 residents - the highest density in the world, by some margin - and even that ratio understates the case, because a tenth distillery is currently in development and the existing nine produced something like thirty million litres of pure alcohol last year. Whisky is what Islay sells. It is also a thing most visitors do not realise until they have driven the seven miles from the airport to Bowmore: it is not what Islay is. The whisky is a recent layer. Under it lies a thousand years of Hebridean history.

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Image: Fakirbakir | Public domain

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Islay: The Lordship https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit W. L. Tarbert, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a small island in Loch Finlaggan, in the northeast of Islay, you can still see the foundations of the buildings where the Lords of the Isles held court between roughly 1336 and 1493. From here, the MacDonalds ran a semi-independent maritime realm that ran from Lewis to Kintyre...

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Image: W. L. Tarbert | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-the-lordship.mp3 0:06 2 full Islay: Distillery Coast https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit Ayack, CC BY-SA 3.0. Modern Islay's most famous export emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when farmers, who had always distilled small batches of whisky for personal use, were taxed and regulated into commercial production. The peat that smokes the malted barley grows in the bogs of t...

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Image: Ayack | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-distillery-coast.mp3 0:06 3 full Islay: The Gaelic Question https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Islay was a Gaelic-speaking island for fourteen hundred years. As late as 1881 around 80 percent of islanders spoke Gaelic as their first language. By the 2011 census the figure had fallen to about 17 percent, with most fluent speakers over sixty. The decline mirrors that of ever...

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]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-the-gaelic-question.mp3 0:06 4 full Islay: Geese https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit Camster, CC BY-SA 2.5. Every October roughly 35,000 barnacle geese and a smaller number of Greenland white-fronted geese fly from breeding grounds in Greenland and Spitsbergen and land on Islay. The whole world population of one of these subspecies - the Greenland barnacle goose - winters in Scotland a...

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]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-geese.mp3 0:06 5 full Islay: Living Here https://qualla.com/islay/ Photo credit Rob Farrow, CC BY-SA 2.0. Islay's permanent population is around 3,000 today, down from a peak of about 15,000 before the Highland Clearances of the nineteenth century, when landowners cleared tenant farmers to make way for sheep and many were forced to emigrate to the United States and Canada. Today the ...

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Image: Rob Farrow | CC BY-SA 2.0

]]> Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/g/c/g/t/islay-wp/gcgt-islay-living-here.mp3 0:06 6 full