58°59'N · 3°18'W
Scotland's most northerly distillery · Kirkwall, Orkney
Established 1798 · Licensed 1826
Orkney is an island archipelago at the edge of the known world. To stand on a headland here is to understand — viscerally — how far north you are. The whisky tastes of this.
Highland Park was founded in 1798 by Magnus Eunson — a church officer by day who is said to have hidden his illicit still beneath the pulpit. Whether the story is precisely true matters less than what it illuminates: Orkney's deep tradition of home distilling, and the creative relationship between the island's people and their whisky.
The distillery sits on the edge of Kirkwall, the island's small capital, in a position where the North Sea and the Atlantic collide. The air is salt-laden and relentless. The peat cut from Hobbister Moor — the source of Highland Park's famous heathery smoke — is unique to Orkney, containing more heather and less boggy phenol than mainland peat. The result is a smoke that is aromatic and floral rather than medicinal.
Highland Park is unusual among major Scottish distilleries in still malting a proportion of its own barley on traditional malting floors. The rest is bought in, but the house character — that sweet, maritime, gently smoky complexity — runs through everything the distillery makes.
We select single casks from Highland Park for the Gauger's Share because the distillery's character is unusually legible even in individual barrels. The sea salt, the heather, the hint of honey and dried orange peel: you can taste exactly where these casks spent their years.
1798
Founded
One of Scotland's oldest continuously operating distilleries
59°N
Latitude
Scotland's most northerly whisky distillery
20%
Own Malt
Proportion still malted on-site, on traditional floor maltings
40ppm
Phenols
Orkney heather peat — aromatic and floral, not medicinal
The Ring of Brodgar, four kilometres from the distillery. Stone circles older than the Pyramids.
58°59'N · 3°19'W · Stenness, Orkney
The Sea
The North Atlantic is inseparable from Highland Park's character. Sea salt — genuine, briny, clean — runs through every expression. Not just a metaphor: the salt-laden air permeates the warehouses where the casks mature.
The Moor
Orkney peat is shallow, heathery, and cut from moorland alive with flowering heather. The smoke it produces is aromatic — floral, even — rather than the medicinal phenol of Islay. Heather honey is the flavour that emerges on the palate.
The Cask
Sherry oak maturation adds dried orange peel, sultana, and a warmth that softens the maritime edges. The balance between the sea, the smoke, and the sweetness is what makes Highland Park whisky so complete.
The Highland Passage · Bottle III · North
Sea salt, heather smoke, and dried orange peel on the nose. On the palate: salt and sweet in perfect tension, heather honey, dried fruit, a thread of wood smoke. A finish that doesn't end so much as slowly dissolve into the horizon.