Glen Mhor site 1880's

Recently, I wrote an article for a website on the joys and frustrations of researching a distillery from scratch.

It was a fun write-up and took me back to the early days of this project and all the things I've tried and haven't yet due to the pandemic, money and time. Part of it is looking out with the usual channels, such as libraries. 

Take this photograph for instance, which comes from Ebay and with postage would cost around £100. It's an image I've seen before on period postcards but never with the clarity and detail of this vintage photograph.

For our purposes, it's an interesting snapshot as it shows the view looking north towards Ross-shire and the Muirtown basin. You can see how busy the docks and Caledonian canal were during this period, which I've put as being the 1880's. We do have a photograph from this period already in our photograph section dated 1884. I'd expect this to be from the same batch of photographs, taken on the same day and slightly before the image we already have. 

What it does provide other than improved resolution and detail, is a greater appreciation of the vacant Glen Mhor site as the angle is more towards the right than the opposite direction we already have on that prior photo:

This really takes us back, beyond the housing that we associate with Telford Street and canal-side buildings that still remain to this day. There's a real rural aspect to this area of Muirtown with Glen Albyn in the background (of the original image), which confirms this is post-1846 and referring to our Map section, this survey is from 1843:

It's become a running theme that every distillery in Inverness, when it comes to maps, is at the top or bottom of a page; so not an ideal perspective. However, we can see the open land on the map and also the tail end of the buildings along Telford Street, which replicate what we have in the photograph.

A great pre-Glen Mhor find and 1880s. Now, just to find more images of the distillery...