The Most Remote Scottish Whisky Distilleries You Can Visit

Distilleries don’t come much further flung than Highland Park, straddling the Arctic Circle in the heart of the Orkney Islands. This remoteness is key to the way whiskies have been produced here since the 1700s – where windswept, treeless moors produce heather-rich peat that’s used to smoke the malting barley. The result is a velvet-smooth single-grain scotch whisky, with plenty of fire to keep you warm in that wild Orkney weather.

With its jagged mountain peaks, heather-blanketed moors and postcard-pretty beaches, Arran is Scotland in miniature. Lying off the west coast of Ayrshire, in the Firth of Clyde, it’s only accessible via an hour-long ferry journey from Ardrossan. It’s a journey – furnished with watery views of fog-shrouded hills and islands – that makes the destination even more memorable. Not that this sparkling new distillery, with its gleaming copper stills, needs any more selling.

Just a mile (1.6km) from Balmoral Castle, Royal Lochnagar isn’t the most remote distillery on this list – but it is in the heart of one of Scotland’s wildest, most arresting landscapes: Cairngorms National Park. And it’s the water that springs from the park’s snow-capped peaks, tumbling down waterfalls and through rocky gorges straight into Lochnagar’s mash tuns, that give the whisky its distinctive clarity. Sipping a dram of the golden liquor while looking out across the Highlands’ forested hills is the quintessential Scotch whisky experience.

Visit Bunnahabhain in the summer, and you’ll get a private beach day as well as a whisky tasting experience. At the end of a single-track road at the northern tip of Islay, this historic distillery overlooks empty golden sands and a sheltered, shimmering sea. In contrast to most whiskies produced on the island, their signature single malt Scotch is unpeated – produced with pure local spring water and blonde concerto barley. Its brackish notes are deliciously in keeping with the remote coastal location.

In a country so steeped in whisky-producing heritage, it’s remarkable that 2017 was the first year that the Isle of Raasay produced its first legal spirits. Up until that point, the island had a history as a hotbed of illicit stills, remote enough to be beyond the reach of the law. Raasay Distillery, reachable only by ferry from Skye – which is hard enough to reach in itself – specialises in producing an older Hebridean style of whisky: lightly peated, with rich, dark fruit notes.

Want to sip one of Scotland’s youngest whiskies? Make the journey to the south end of the Isle of Skye, where sheep-grazed hillsides overlook empty, seaweed-strewn beaches. Here, Torabhaig Distillery, housed in the reconstructed bones of an old castle, only bottled its first run of single malt Scotch whisky in 2021. This is lightly peated, with a golden tint the colour of Skye’s evening light.

It says a lot about Scotland’s love of whisky that, even on an island with one road, one pub and 200 residents, you’ll find a whisky distillery. And a fine one, at that. Jura’s been on the island since the early 1800s, when distilling was illegal, but was revitalised in the 50s and 60s and has been making a broad range of superb single malts ever since in their signature broad-shouldered bottles – specifically designed to survive the rough sea crossing it takes to get here.