On 26 April 1941, four men sat in the dock of this small Gothic Revival courthouse, accused of unloading whisky from a shipwreck. The cargo ship SS Politician had run aground off Eriskay carrying 22,000 cases of scotch, and the islanders had done what islanders do when 22,000 cases of scotch arrive uninvited on the rocks. The four men were convicted and fined. Compton Mackenzie heard the story, wrote it as a novel in 1947, and the building behind this counter-top of justice quietly became the courthouse where Whisky Galore actually happened.
Lochmaddy got its first courthouse in 1827. By 1845 the building had been adapted by James Ross to add four vaulted prison cells, with a symmetrical northeast frontage featuring a sash window flanked by lancet windows on the ground floor and three sash windows above. Porches on either side led to the courtroom on one side and the cells on the other - architecture that put crime and punishment within stone-throwing distance of each other. By the early 1870s the village had outgrown that compact arrangement, and court officials commissioned something purpose-built and more imposing for the prosecution of island life.
James Matthews and William Lawrie designed the new courthouse in Gothic Revival style, finished in 1875 in rubble masonry with an asymmetric three-bay frontage. The central porch features an arched doorway capped with a hood mould and a small stone mansard roof topped with brattishing - the decorative crenellation that gives the front of the building a quietly theatrical edge. Pairs of arched windows on the ground floor, three more arched windows above with dormers and finials, a long sheriff's bench inside, a dock for the accused, and pew-style seating for whoever wanted to watch. For a village of a few hundred people, it was a lot of building.
The SS Politician had been bound for Jamaica when she hit the rocks off Eriskay in heavy weather on 4 February 1941. Her holds carried whisky destined for export, and on a wartime island where rationing made spirits scarce, the news travelled faster than the customs officers. Boats went out from every settlement in the Uists. Bottles came back, were hidden in peat stacks and behind walls, were drunk and traded and saved. The trials at Lochmaddy were a formality of the law catching up with what everyone already knew had happened. Compton Mackenzie's novel turned the affair into farce; Alexander Mackendrick's 1949 Ealing film fixed it forever in British memory. The actual sheriff who heard the case probably did not anticipate his courthouse becoming a small piece of cinema history.
The exterior was rendered in cement during 1990s refurbishments - a practical decision that softened the original stonework's character. The court still hears cases today, though staffing problems with the prisoner escort service forced jury trials to move to the mainland in July 2023. For minor matters the building continues to do what it has done for 150 years: settle disputes among a small population scattered across a remote archipelago, in a Category C listed building with brattishing on the porch and the long ghost of whisky on its docket.
Located at 57.60N, 7.16W in the centre of Lochmaddy village on North Uist's east coast. From the air the courthouse appears as a darker, more substantial structure than the surrounding houses, near the head of Loch nam Madadh and close to the ferry terminal. Nearest airport is Benbecula (EGPL) about 18 nautical miles south. The east coast of North Uist is a notoriously rocky, complex shoreline; low-level navigation requires care, and the village itself sits at the head of a fjord-like sea loch that channels wind unpredictably.