Poking Around the Peat

Peat is an important component of Scotch whisky, giving distinct levels of smokiness to barley as it dries the grain.  Considering the vegetation that comprises peat died thousands of years ago, it’s perhaps the original recycled product.  Peat harvesting has been done for thousands of years for use as a heat source and a drying agent.

Highland Park is one of the few distilleries that harvests its own peat.  Cutting peat blocks out of a landscape that has seen human habitation for more than 5,000 years occasionally leads to more than just decayed vegetation coming out of the ground.

In 2006, a peat cutter noticed a lump of metal in one of his peat blocks.  Thinking little of it, he gave it to a co-worker to take home to clean it up that night.  The co-worker’s father asked to take a look at the object and noticed it seemed a bit unusual.  The father asked to take it to a colleague at Orkney College who was an expert in archaeology.  The next day, the archaeologist salivated over an extremely rare Bronze Age ceremonial axe head that had been ritually placed in the peat bog thousands of years earlier.  It’s currently on display at the Orkney Museum in Kirkwall.

Bronze Age axe head found in the Highland Park peat bog.

The deep past isn’t the only surprise Highland Park’s peat cutters face.  One day a few years ago, they paused their cutting when they heard the sound of metal on metal.  Distillery Manager Russell Anderson was sitting in his office when the peat team called, describing the object they found.  He laughed at their call and hung up on their practical joke.  They called back again. And again.  Finally, he started to take them seriously and rushed out to the bog for a look at their find.

No joke, they’d found a bomb.

The Orkney Islands saw German action in both World Wars, and was also a staging area for the U.K. military.  The bomb was likely from one of those eras, though a bomb squad from the mainland made sure people didn’t have too much time to inspect it.   They blew it up.

So, if you think Highland Park is a hard hitting whisky with an explosion of flavor, there is more to that assessment than meets the eye!