Wick

Herrings and whisky are two of my favourite things, separately and together. In mid-19th-century Wick, the combination led to social carnage and moral outrage. The Rev Charles Thomson observed: “The herring fishing has increased wealth, but also wickedness. No care is taken of the 10,000 young strangers of both sexes, crowded together with the inhabitants during the six weeks of the fishing season … There is a great consumption of spirits, there being 22 public houses in Wick and 23 in Pulteneytown.”

Wick, at the time, was the busiest herring port in Europe. As many as 1,000 vessels were moored there. It has been estimated that more than 800 gallons of whisky – or 5,000 bottles – were being consumed every week. Local men piled into the pubs, and when skippers arrived with their wages they would have a celebratory drink. Rounds were de rigueur. Some went home with just coppers left in their pockets.

What to do? The town’s temperance-minded grandees arranged a referendum. Cannily, they enfranchised the wives. Following speeches, public meetings and newspaper columns by both “wets” and “drys”, polling day arrived and a turnout of 77% was recorded: 62% voted no licence. Only bona fide travellers could henceforth legally purchase alcohol in Wick, and only as an accompaniment to a meal.

Prohibition was in force from 1922 to 1947, 12 years longer than in the US, and illicit alcohol was produced in at least two clandestine stills. Underground drinking dens, or shebeens, sprang up around the town, including one daringly sited in a respectable restaurant, where a silver teapot was used to dispense whisky to knowing customers.

The bars around Wick today still have a clandestine air. They are painted in garish or hospital hues. Windows are small and infrequent. The famous red T of Tennent’s Lager smacks of the USSR or 1984. None serves rollmops.

North-east Scotland is flatter, sunnier, drier and less touristy than the mythologised north-west, with its isles and lochs, stags and Christmas trees. Whether you take the A9 or ride on the Far North railway line, you get an ever growing sense of widening skies and horizons.

Wick is built from dark grey stone, sometimes plastered in light grey pebbledash called harling. It looks tough, like a frontier town, crowding the slopes around the harbour built by Thomas Telford in the first decade of the 19th century. He designed Pulteneytown, arguably the first housing estate purpose-built to service an industry. North of the river in Wick proper, the high street has been murdered. The herring were fished out long ago, and windfarms only employ a few people. There is no cinema. It could feel sad, but the surrounding countryside is dramatic and diverting; fulmars nest on the cliffs around the old castle; great slabs of rock double as a summer lido; and headlands open up views of distant shores. A sign informs the wanderer: London 490 miles, Bergen 350 miles. Wick is Vík. The local DNA has been tested: it is proudly Nordic.

The heritage museum, spread over several terrace houses, is an enthralling home for Wick’s storied past, and all the artefacts that made life on the edge livable. It’s a wonderfully varied collection, with reconstructions of every room in a home circa 1900, lighthouse bulbs, wedding and funeral garments, military uniforms, old bone-shaker bikes, replicas of a cooperage and smiddy (blacksmith’s), and a fishing boat. There’s a superb and vast array of photographs from the herring heyday, including crisp images of fishermen and gutter lasses, who prepared the herrings or “silver darlings”, and the dockside heaving with hundreds of thousands of barrels full of salted fish.

When the weather blows in, as it is wont to do, there is refuge in Mackays Hotel, a flatiron-type edifice on Ebenezer Place – apparently, the shortest street in the world. It’s one of those warm, welcoming, traditional hotels where a traveller can find a home from home. Its location, at a five-road crossing, is said to be mentioned in Treasure Island; Robert Louis Stevenson came here as a young man when his father was attempting to construct a breakwater. A crumbled wall-end records his failure.

The Old Pulteney distillery – opened in 1826 and shuttered during the prohibition years – is in the old new town – whose bricks it has further darkened with a yeasty fungus – and has seen all of Wick’s booms and busts. In a crowded market, it has prospered as the maritime whisky, and its promotional poetry promises a voyage “from subtle coastal chords to more defined salty notes”. The tour is a rich, tasty, revealing experience. You pass through heat and cold, mizzle and damp, and the wall-to-wall casks in the ancient warehouse inevitably evoke those old fishy barrels. Herring gulls live here year round and have been adopted by the distillers, and named. Fraser and Smokey Joe cackled as I dipped and sipped and diluted, and scented and swilled the notes of sherry, bourbon, sea and sand, wind and memory.

Things to see: John o’Groats, the Flow Country bog system, 8 Doors Distillery, Thurso