At least four separate individual distilleries manufactured Ferintosh whisky under a unique historical exemption from payment of excise duty in the early eighteenth century.

[4] Production was concentrated on the north-west slopes of the Black Isle within the parish of Urquhart and Logie Wester, the lands of Ferintosh having been purchased by John Forbes, 2nd of Culloden, in 1669.

On top of this substrate, a freely draining podzol developed which is suitable for cultivation: soil surveyors noted a high concentration of small crofting units in the area.

While John’s son Duncan Forbes, 3rd of Culloden, was absent on government business in Holland in 1689, his house and crops were sacked by the Jacobites, and all the whisky stills destroyed.

[12] Forbes was compensated for his loss by an Act of Parliament affording him the right to distil whisky free from excise duty in perpetuity, on payment of an annual fee of four hundred Merks Scots, then worth about £20 a year.

With the ending of the Ferintosh privilege, ‘the whole population, abnormally swollen by the whisky monopoly … hundreds of men and women, thoroughly instructed in the art of distillation, emigrated with all their technical knowledge to other parts’, notably Campbeltown.

[12] Although Campbeltown provided whisky for the export market to America for more than a century, production in that town didn’t hit an all-time high until after Prohibition began in the United States.

A well-known loophole in the Volstead Act allowed the sale of whisky as ‘medicinal alcohol’, and pharmacies grew in both size and number.