O'er moorland and brae: Cadavers and casks

We are following the glens carved by the rivers. It is the peat in these rivers that attracts the distillers to the waters, they boil the barley over peat rich fires.

Past the River Fiddich we drive, and past the famous distillery of Glen Fiddich, which took its name from the very waters its distillery is built on.

We stop for coffee at a most idiosyncratic little village, Dufftown, where we found an extraordinary building in a church yard there. We found it by rifling through an old charity calendar the town had for sale in the coffee shop. One of the pictures showed the building. A grave robber's watch house.

This, we then found, in the Mortlach church in the back of Dufftown, and was built to stop the 18th century grave robbers from digging up buried bodies and pilfering them to sell as cadavers to the nearest bone doctor for what passed as medical research back in the day. There used to be big business in cadaver sales at one time. We'd never seen one of these before, though we'd heard or them, so it was quite a wonderful find for us.

Dufftown is full of whisky shops, and in Scotland it is really difficult to find any shop open before 10 in the morning, but the whisky shops all were. And only one coffee shop was. Which tells its own tale. Whisky consumption, we are told, is on the rise. There is a new whisky renaissance. More is being drunk and sold than ever before, and every distillery that was once closed in Scotland is now up, rejuvenated, and functioning, trying to satisfy the extraordinary international demand.

One survey the people in Dufftown have heard about revealed that, in a year, the Japanese drink 'more Johnnie Walker Red Label' than the company ever actually produced. A little moonshining happening, mayhap.

Whisky is big business. Some collectors will pay in the vicinity of £1600 for some single bottles of Glenlivet private collection. And they won't even drink it. Just store it, look at it, and maybe show it to a few friends. A crying shame.

So, we called in at the Speyside Cooperage to see how this lovely whisky is stored. This is a wonderful museum and factory hand-building new casks, repairing old ones, and refashioning used American bourbon casks, which, by law, can only be used once, so the majority end up shipped here to Scotland, and refashioned for their whisky trade.

Cask we learn is the correct name for these containers. Barrel is correctly used for only the 40 gallon cask. Hogshead for the 56 gallon. Butt and Puncheon for the tall and the stubby 110 gallon casks.

We watch the coopers hard at work on the factory floor. Today, they are refashioning smaller American bourbon casks, adding staves to give them a bigger girth. The work on the shop floor moves like a heavily muscled, testosterone laden ballet. Lots of banging with full shoulder rotation, rolling casks across the factory floor single-handedly along the rim, hammering and shaping with tools as old as the craft itself. Here they use traditional methods. Very little is mechanised.

And it is seriously hard labour. One man told us he has been on the factory floor for 42 years, he is now 62. He looks fabulously fit. One woman, not long ago, tried her hand on the factory floor; she came confident, from the roustabout ranks of the oil platforms off Aberdeen; but she lasted barely a week. It was too hard for her. Other workers have done their apprenticeship here, left to try something new, but returned: always returned.

Which is not surprising. Some of these men complete between 20 to 25 of these casks a day, and regularly earn upwards of £70,000 per year. Lovely money. In a factory that prides itself on recycling, renewing and conserving so it really cannot be hard for them to come to work. And it was just as remarkable to visit.