Ian MacDonald’s Smuggling in the Highlands is a seminal volume of whisky history and is the second in the Classic Expressions series of facsimile editions initiated by two of the best known contemporary Scotch whisky authors, Ian Buxton and Neil Wilson. However, they have turned to a third celebrated writer in this field - Gavin Smith - to provide an introduction. The author was a highly-regarded and long-serving excise officer, who spent much of his career in the Scottish Highlands where he came to know the people and their whisky-related ‘ploys’ very well. MacDonald had a keen eye for a good story, and many of the enthralling anecdotes recounted in the chapter entitled ‘Smuggling Stories and Detections’ have never subsequently been published. Despite his ability to tell a good smuggling story, however, there is no doubt that MacDonald had little sympathy with the law breakers whose activities he chronicled. Indeed, it is typical of the man, and his era, that an entire, and wholly fascinating, chapter is devoted to ‘Moral Aspects of Smuggling.’ Much of the material in Smuggling in the Highlands was first read before the Gaelic Society of Inverness during the late 1880s, at a time when whisky smuggling was resurgent in the north of Scotland. It was subsequently printed in the Transactions of the Society and was published as a series of articles in The Highlander and Celtic Magazine. The only version in book form appeared in 1914, and this facsimile edition is an essential and long-overdue version for anyone truly interested in the heritage of Scotch whisky and Scottish social life a century and more ago. “There can be no doubt that ‘good, pious men’ engaged in smuggling, and there is less doubt that equally good, pious men - ministers and priests - were grateful recipients of a large share of the smugglers’ produce. Some of the old lairds not only winked at the practice, but actively encouraged it.” Smuggling in the Highlands was published in 1914. A good, clean copy of the illustrated edition, which our facsimile faithfully reproduces, would cost at least £150. This Classic Expressions version of only 300 numbered copies will no doubt itself increase in value over time.
