Julian Worker – Travel Newsletter 4 – Portugal and Scotland

Welcome to the fourth newsletter of this travel blog. 

My writing this month has been about Portugal and Scotland. 

I’ve published a book about Portugal in the Travels through History series (similar to the ones for Northern Spain, The Balkans, Southern France, 9 Greek Islands, North-East England, Poland and The Baltics). These books are travelogues and not travel guides. 

This is a chapter from the book, available here, relating to Porto Santo. 

Porto Santo is the other inhabited island in the Madeiran archipelago, about twenty five miles north-east of Madeira in the Atlantic Ocean. Planes fly from Lisbon and Madeira on a daily basis with occasional direct flights from London Gatwick and Manchester. Porto Santo has a small airport in the middle of the island with a massive runway that doesn’t appear susceptible to side- and tail-winds as is the case with Madeira’s airport. I gained the impression the military uses this runway too as I saw a large unmarked Hercules aircraft parked down a side runway almost out of view. Visitors can also catch a ferry that sails between Funchal (the capital of Madeira) and Vila Baleira (the main town on Porto Santo) on a daily basis, however I’ve heard that the ferry doesn’t run when the weather is bad. The ferry docks at the north end of the main beach and it’s probably about two miles from there to the centre of Vila Baleira. 

Vila Baleira is a compact place with shops, bars, restaurants, hotels, and a modern pharmacy that sells a whole range of products I’ve not seen anywhere else, such as silica plasters that fit the heel of your foot if you’ve worn a hole in it from shoes that don’t fit properly. All the pharmacists spoke wonderful English and the place was spotless. This was on a Sunday afternoon.

The main attraction in the town is the Porto Santo beach which runs the whole length of the south-eastern coast of Porto Santo from Ponta da Calheta to the ferry dock, a distance of between five and six miles, depending on who’s measuring it. There seem to be other names for certain parts of the beach (Praia in Portuguese) such as Praia do Penedo, Praia da Fontinha, Praia Cabeco da Ponta, and Praia das Pedras Pretas. The beach is very sandy although there’s not a great deal of shade. The water is very clear all around the island which makes it a great place for diving.    

Porto Santo was discovered in 1418 by Portuguese explorers João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, who later discovered Madeira. Vila Baleira prospered under the island’s first governor, Bartolomeu Perestrelo, who authorised the marriage of his daughter, Filipa Moniz, to Christopher Columbus and their house is now an excellent museum and the most popular tourist attraction on Porto Santo. 

The collection includes charts, navigational instruments, models of his vessels Santa Maria, Nina, and Pinta as well as objects collected from the wreck of the Slotter Hooge, a Dutch East Indiaman that went down off Porto Santo in 1724.

Located in Vila Baleira’s main square, the Largo do Pelourinho, the town hall is one of Porto Santo’s oldest and most impressive buildings, dating from the 16th century. 

Vila Baleira’s parish church is called Our Lady of Mercy and is one of the town’s most important sights. It’s worth visiting for its paintings by the renowned 17th-century artist, Martim Conrado. Walking out of Vila Baleira in a south-westerly direction, I found the 17th Century chapel of Espírito Santo. 

If I’d continued in this direction towards the headland Ponte da Calheta and taken a trail to the right just after the Porto Santo hotel I’d have come to the basalt rock formation looking like organ pipes on the slope to Pico de Ana Ferreira. Further on are Pico das Flores and then Ponta da Canaveira with a lighthouse and views of the island and coast.  

I’ve started another book in the Travels through History series called Seven Scottish Islands. 

I’ve already been to Lewis and Harris, Islay, and Jura. The next four islands I’ll visit in April / May 2025 are Barra, Mull, Iona, and Arran. 

This is my first draft for Islay. 

If you’re a lover of malt whisky or birdwatching then you will undoubtedly know about this island, the southernmost of the Inner Hebrides. 

The economics of the whisky industry on Islay are quite staggering. Islay contributes around £100 million a year to the UK government in excise duty and value-added tax. This is roughly £30,000 for each person living on the island. The nine distilleries on Islay plus the Jura distillery produce over twenty million litres of alcohol per year. Each of these distilleries offer at least one tour of their establishment per day and sometimes more than one, with the variety coming in terms of the buildings you visit and the number of whiskies you can sample. For this latter reason, careful planning is required, as it’s best to try and use the bus service on the island to visit the distilleries of Ardbeg, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Bowmore, and Bruichladdich. Don’t drive a car after visiting a distillery as they all offer driver samples which can be enjoyed later at your accommodation. There are plenty of taxis too, but these do get booked up well in advance. You will need a taxi to visit Kilchoman, Caol Ila, Bunnahabhain, and the newest distillery called Ardnahoe. These four are more difficult to get to on public transport.

Islay has over one hundred species of bird present all year round in the island’s diverse habitats – wild open moorland, unspoilt beaches, cliffs, mixed woodland and mudflats. The RSPB has two nature reserves at The Oa and Loch Gruinart. From October to April, Islay hosts migrating barnacle and white-fronted geese that have flown down from Greenland. It’s not just geese that travel large distances to Islay, others come from Africa, however the arctic tern beats them all. These birds go right round the world visiting Islay to breed before heading back to the Southern Ocean for the winter.

Port Ellen is the largest town on the island and might be the best place to stay. Islay coaches run regular buses through the town, the airport is a few miles north-west of the town, and there are regular ferries from Port Ellen to Kennacraig, a hamlet on West Loch Tarbert, five miles southwest of Tarbert on the Kintyre peninsula on the Scottish Mainland. Port Ellen is a pleasant place on a bay with a white sandy beach and a marina. It’s my understanding that Diageo is renovating / rebuilding the Port Ellen distillery in the town. 

Three of the most famous distilleries are close by and there is a footpath from Port Ellen to Ardbeg via Laphroaig and Lagavulin. I passed by a site where another new distillery is being built along with homes for the distillery workers to live in. Affordable accommodation is in short supply on the island, so any advantage that an employer can add for potential employees will be beneficial to that employer. 

Laphroaig means ‘The beautiful hollow by the broad bay’. The white buildings are right by the water with the giant letters of the distillery appearing on the side of a vast warehouse. Lagavulin is next, the name an anglicized version of the Scots Gaelic phrase Lag a’ Mhuilinn, which translates to “the hollow of the mill”. Again there are lovely views of the whole of the distillery from the seashore. The name Ardbeg is an anglicisation of the Scottish Gaelic An Àird Bheag, meaning ‘the small promontory’. The car park has a shiny still in the middle of it. There’s an amusing signpost outside on the road with the distance to the nearest supernova provided for any intergalactic travellers passing through. Even an arctic tern would consider it a long way. The Kildalton Cross is five miles further along the road towards Ardtalla. This eighth-century cross is one of Scotland’s most important early-Christian monuments. I didn’t see this cross myself as I was told that walkers had to use the narrow road in places to get there. I decided against seeing it as I had plans to catch the bus to Bowmore from outside the Ardbeg distillery.

As the bus heads through Port Ellen northwards towards the airport and Bowmore, to the left is the rounded peninsula called The Oa. Minor roads head to the RSPB reserve and towards the American Memorial that commemorates the sinking of two ships off the coast. Near the end of WWI, two troop ships foundered off Islay within a few months of each other. The SS Tuscania,  a converted British liner carrying American troops to France, was torpedoed on 5th February 1918 with the loss of over 160 lives. On 6th October 1918 HMS Otranto was involved in a collision with HMS Kashmir in heavy seas. Otranto lost steering. Answering her SOS the destroyer HMS Mounsey came alongside and rescued over 350 men, but Otranto was wrecked on the shore with a total loss of 431 lives. Like Tuscania, Otranto was carrying American troops to France. 

The civilian airport at Glenegedale started out as an RAF airfield during WWII and is close to the Machrie golf course and hotel. Bowmore is Islay’s administrative capital and is the second largest village on the island, founded in 1768 by the local land owner. The main road heads from the round church – designed so that there were no corners for evil spirits to hide in – straight down the hill to the pier. The distillery is on the left and is the oldest on the island, dating from 1779. Bowmore has a malting floor where the barley is dried out. The cereal is 3-4 inches deep and it is someone’s responsibility to rake the entire malting floor and turn over the cereal on an hourly basis. Visitors are encouraged to have a go and it’s a lot more difficult than it looks, chiefly because the rake is rather heavy and you have to drag it behind you, so you’re using muscles you don’t normally use. Some tastings at Bowmore take place in what I would term caves that might just be under the sea or under the beach at least. 

Skirting around the head of Loch Indaal via Bridgend, the bus goes through the village of Bruichladdich and the small town of Port Charlotte in the direction of Portnahaven. Port Charlotte is a lovely small place that is the home of the Museum of Islay Life. The museum opened in 1977 with the principal aim of conserving and displaying items representative of life in Islay over the past 12,000 years. It is housed in the former Kilchoman Free Church and has built up a collection of nearly 3000 objects and several thousand photographs. It’s the sort of place where you will find many items of interest regardless of your hobbies, pastimes, and knowledge. 

There is a footpath from Port Charlotte to Bruichladdich with views over Loch Indaal. I walked past the war memorial and a photogenic church to the village where I admired the distinct aquamarine blueness of the distillery’s design that makes its branding so distinctive. This is the place that also distills the wonderful ‘The Botanist’ gin and visitors can see the Ugly Betty still modified by an engineer to capture the delicate essence of the twenty two hand-foraged Islay botanicals listed on the bottle. When I visited, the ladder that extends towards the top of the still had the nickname ‘Bruichladder’. 

From here it’s a taxi ride to the Kilchoman distillery set in lovely farming country near the west coast of the island. Kilchoman oversees the total production of their range of whiskies, from growing their own barley to bottling the whisky. The malting process is split into three key stages – steeping, germination, and kilning.

Steeping the barley for 2 days with a soaking cycle allows all the natural starches and enzymes to form. These are the two essential ingredients required to create sugar later. Temperature, moisture content, and growth are monitored over this period. After steeping, the barley is spread out on the unheated malting floor and will stay there for 4-5 days, where it will be turned every 2-4 hours while also having its moisture content and temperature checked. At this stage, the aim is to keep the barley germinating, mimicking the ideal growing conditions it would experience in the field. Outside climatic conditions can change quickly, testing the production team’s knowledge to make the necessary changes inside to keep the germination going. Once the team are happy with how the grains have germinated, the barley is moved to the kiln for the final stage of the process. There is no substitute for experience on the malting floor where it’s a true art, rather than a science, to judge when the internal conditions need to change or the germination is completed. 

Back in Port Charlotte, I caught the bus to Port Askaig, another ferry terminal where you can catch a ferry to Kennacraig or, in my case, the ferry over to the Isle of Jura known as the Feolin ferry. First though I had to visit another distillery which I could walk to, Caol Ila. 

This is part of the Johnny Walker group and I have to say the tour I went on was rather swish, meaning smart and fashionable. A lot of money has been thrown at this distillery and it is rather impressive from beginning to end. There’s no malting floor but the rest of the process is described – as it was at every tour I went on – from the mashing where the dried malt is ground into a coarse flour or grist, which is mixed with hot water in a large container called a mash tun. This tun produces a liquid called wort with which the fermentation process begins followed by the pot stills and the distillation process. 

A pot or wash still is filled about two-thirds full of a fermented liquid called wash with an alcohol content of about 7–12%. The still is then heated so that the liquid boils. The liquid being distilled is a mixture of mainly water and alcohol or ethanol. At sea level, alcohol has a boiling point of 78.4 degrees Centigrade whereas water boils at 100 degrees Centigrade. Therefore, the alcohol evaporates at a higher rate than water. This means the concentration of alcohol in the vapour above the liquid in the still is higher than in the liquid itself. This vapour travels up the swan neck at the top of the pot still and down the lyne arm, after which it travels through the condenser (also known as the worm), where it is cooled to yield a distillate with a higher concentration of alcohol than the original liquid. After one such stage of distillation, the resulting liquid, called “low wines”, has a concentration of about 25–35% alcohol by volume. In a single malt whisky these low wines are distilled again in another pot still and yield a distillate with a higher concentration of alcohol.

The tasting area at Caol Ila has the finest view of any, looking out over the Sound of Islay towards the Paps of Jura. This is the water across which the Feolin ferry heads from Jura on a regular basis to Port Askaig. With its higher elevation, the tasting room allows visitors to appreciate the tides and the currents that are flowing in both directions at the same time. 

The next thing for me to do was to catch the ferry over the Sound Of Islay to Jura. I could see the bus had already arrived and was waiting for the passengers to come. Everything is so well organised. 

In my most recent travels, I had three weeks in Greece and travelled to Athens via Heathrow. British Airways did their best to disrupt my holiday by cancelling my flight, scheduled for 20:35, at 12:50am the following day, when all the airport hotels were full and the tube was closed. Hence, I spent the night in T5. 

I claimed compensation, but it took three months for the money to appear in my account. To be fair, BA paid my compensation claim in full and I was able to ‘chat’ with a human really quickly.  

Just in case you weren’t aware, BA changed their Avios points in mid-October 2024. For my flight from Heathrow to Vancouver I was awarded 878 Avios points. I could boost these points by up to three times, but why would I do that? Also, I can ‘buy’ 20,000 Avios for just over 250 pounds and yet I’d have to expend 60,000 Avios points in order to get 250 pounds off my roundtrip from Vancouver to London. Literally, this does not add up.