Fire dance with me

Speyside Cooperage reverberates to the sights and sounds of a surreal ritual that’s centuries old Photography by Christina Kernohan

Christina Kernohan is a Glasgow based photographer working throughout the UK and Europe shooting people and telling their stories

When you come upon it, driving the sinewy road into Craigellachie, the Speyside cooperage rears up like Scotch whisky’s answer to the Egyptian pyramids, thousands of barrels assembled along the moody horizon in great looming heaps. It’s some sight.

‘Totally surreal, a tetris-like graveyard’, laughs photographer Christina Kernohan, who took these mesmerising shots for A Sense of Place, the book she collaborated on with Dave Broom. The noise inside was no less overwhelming. ‘The din of the hammering, hoops being attached, echoes of wood and steel being rolled, steam and smoke in the air, it really is quite intoxicating’, she says. ‘An total assault on the senses.’

‘The smell of oil and wood took me back to visiting my grandfather’s workshop when I was child. On the floor the men are all whirling around in what looks like a frantic manner, one of perpetual motion, but really it’s a choreographed dance they do with the barrels. To get some of these shots I had to dive in and join the dance myself.’

The cooperage is 75 years old and employs over 100 people, the coopers performing an ancient and remarkable craft of producing a liquid-tight container for whisky out of oak, without glue or nails. ‘The men are paid per cask made’, says Kernohan, ‘they’re often from the same family, skills passed down through the generations, and they stamp each barrel with their own mark, one of pride and skill.’ 

Kernohan managed to leave with more than just her photographs and indelible memories of these ‘beautiful vessels, hoops rusting, coloured peeling off the tops.’

‘I had a boot crammed full of halved barrels too far gone for repair - destined for my garden. The car smelt amazing.’

Photographs retouched by Simon Williams

A Sense Of Place: A journey around Scotland’s whisky, is published by Mitchell Beazley

‘This cooper was the fastest one in the warehouse. I managed to stop him for a few seconds to take this portrait, one of my favourites in the book. Dave joked that I was partial to a man in a dirty apron.’

Casks being recharred: Barrels have their ends removed, the old charcoal flailed off, and are set alight over a gas burner. The heat toasts the fresh oak, transforming the lignins and tannins into complex flavour compounds; the new char helps to remove sulphur and aggression from the new spirit.

The surreal ‘tetris-like graveyard’ outside the Speyside cooperage, these barrels will be rejuvenated or pilfered for parts

Croze, plucker, chiv, flincher, driver, punch, brace, adze, plane…tools unchanged for hundreds of years

A cooper prepares to insert a reed to seal the cask

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