How Campbeltown has responded to the boom in Scottish whisky

IN THE 19th century Campbeltown, on the south-eastern shore of the Kintyre peninsula on Scotland’s west coast, was dubbed the “whisky capital of the world”. Its grand sandstone villas attest to a prosperous past, when more than 30 distilleries thickened the air with peat smoke. But then came more than a century of decline—caused by war, the Depression, Prohibition in America and rail-borne competition from places farther north like Speyside (see map). By the dawn of this century, the town had only two distilleries left.