🥃 Muckletoon's Lost Distilleries - Glen Tarras Distillery
- Jun 20
- 3 min read
Part 2: Glen Tarras Distillery
A previous email was aptly named Lost Langholm Distilleries Part 1 - because it was about Langholm Distillery, located in the town of the same name.
But there was, in fact, another distillery in Langholm: Glen Tarras.
Or Glen-Tarras.
Or Glentarras.
The above may seem like minor variations. But, when searching through digitised archive catalogues, I can tell you from experience that it can make all the difference between finding something useful. Or nothing at all.
Glen Tarras Distillery was on the list of visits for our fave whisky writer, Alfred Barnard, back in the 1880s. If you have the book, go take a look.
The distillery itself was located a mile and a half or so along the road from Langholm Distillery - if driving south along the A7 today, take a left turn, just before Skippers Bridge, and the site is along the B6318, next to the Tarras Water.
As mentioned in the previous email, the new owner of Langholm Distillery in 1832 was James Connell. He had initially partnered with two others, one of whom was James Kennedy. Kennedy left the partnership to move on to establish - you guessed it - Glen Tarras Distillery in 1835.
But just two years later, according to this advertisement, Kennedy had apparently made the decision to retire and, therefore, put the distillery up for sale. He would have been just forty-six years old. So, either he had made his money and could retire early. Or he wasn’t actually retiring at all. We’ll probably never know.
Let’s assume that a man called Joseph Waller bought it because it was back on the market again in 1872 under his name.
A breakthrough came in 1875 when The Glentarras Distillery Company, of which the Twentyman family were large stakeholders, bought the site.
In the 1881 census, the fifty-one year old, married Joseph Twentyman - living at Glentarras House - gives his occupation as Manager, Whisky Distillery with his seventeen year old son, William, as apprentice distiller.
Glen Tarras had its own maltings and as adverts requesting large quantities show, peat was used in the malting process. Although today, we tend not to consider Lowland whisky as peated, this probably wasn’t that unusual at the time.
The distillery also advertised its whiskies aged from one to five years old. Of course, maturation laws as we know them today, weren’t in place back then.
Joseph Twentyman died in August 1902 and by the following year, Glen Tarras Distillery had been acquired by Seager Evans & Co - the London spirits firm which went on to establish Strathclyde Distillery, in the 1920s, and which later became known as Long John International in the early 1970s (named after one of its flagship brands: Long John).
Distilling at Glen Tarras had ceased by 1905. I don’t know why exactly but this wasn’t the best time for the Scotch whisky industry post-Pattisons and so, I guess like many other distilleries, it struggled. And then, the distillery formally closed in 1914.
During the First World War, its warehouses housed munitions workers from Gretna, where a cordite munitions factory employed over 15,000 people producing ammunition for the British Army.
The First World War heavily impacted the town’s drinking habits. In 1916, the Liquor Control Board was introduced in Langholm and other towns to curb alcohol consumption, fearing its effects on the war effort.
They had David Lloyd George, then Chancellor and a temperance advocate, to thank for that.
Most of the Glen Tarras Distillery buildings had been demolished by 1930 although you can still see some of the vestiges today. The land is private, however, so you can’t just walk up the access path and take photos. Hence these examples - taken from a fair distance, may I add, in case it wasn’t obvious ;-)
In its day, Glen Tarras had an impressive set-up. Water was sourced from the Gaulsike Burn - for process water - and the River Tarras - for cooling and power. The distillery was powered by two water wheels. Its six bonded warehouses could house around 3600 casks. And with its four pot stills, the distillery’s annual output was around 750,000 gallons - therefore, significantly more than Langholm Distillery just up the road.
Of course, other than Barnard’s notes, the bible for lost distillery geeks remains Brian Townsend’s Scotch Missed. In the section on Glen Tarras, he mentions a collection of distilling notebooks from 1876–1898, available to view at the Dumfries & Galloway Archives. So, I took myself off to Dumfries to take a look. If you’re interested to know what I found, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. Hey, what can I say other than I still have a mortgage to pay?
Slà inte!
Justine