![quern stone for sale quern stone for sale](https://perstoremyr.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/tidlig_dreiekvern_am3.jpg)
Hilarious… unless you were the Royal Navy – who did eventually admit to it being theirs.
#Quern stone for sale full#
The local newspaper was called, then the nationals, and the following day the red-tops were full of pictures of the two friends astride the lethal-looking machine, carrying fishing rods, and asking: “Has anybody lost a yellow submarine?” John and Gordon then loaded the submarine onto a lorry and took it to a secret location in Port Ellen (actually fellow fisherman Harold Hastie’s back garden). Which was an odd response as the evidence to the contrary was overwhelming. “We haven’t lost a yellow submarine” said the Navy. “I have found your yellow submarine” said John. What happened next was to become the stuff of legend. Very conveniently, the yellow vessel had ‘Ministry of Defence’ and a telephone number stencilled on it, which was of course immediately called. It proved to be a very beautiful yellow submarine. Being a resourceful man, he attached a rope to said object and towed it into the pier where Gordon Currie lifted it out of the water. Things were about to get even more eccentric because, shortly afterwards, Islay fisherman John Baker was heading home to Port Ellen when he spotted something awash in the sea off the bow of his boat. At least among the Laddies, the rest of the whisky industry having long since given up on the noisily irreverent rebels. One of the stills from Inverleven was dutifully set up outside the old Victorian buildings, and became an iconic sight, with a pair of Duncan’s old wellie boots sticking out of the top to represent those weapons inspectors searching for dangerous chemicals deep in its copper bottomed interior.Ī special bottling was commissioned (of course) and dubbed the ‘Whisky of Mass Distinction’ (geddit?) and much hilarity ensued. All of which made great headline-grabbing copy in the febrile media atmosphere then prevailing around WMD. Never one to allow the opportunity for a good story to pass him by, or to get his beloved distillery in the news, Reynier embellished the tale, which soon grew to involve spies and the CIA and visits by weapons inspectors. All so Duncan had some spares to keep Bruichladdich running in the days of No Money.Īs this odd flotilla was being towed round the Mull of Kintyre and up to Islay, Laddie MD Mark Reynier received an email from the Defence Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) in the USA who had been monitoring distillery webcams on the grounds that our processes could have been ‘tweaked’ to produce the dreaded WMD. It started with our friend ‘Demolition Dave’ helping Duncan McGillivray and his gang to demolish the old Inverleven distillery – buying up all the old equipment for scrap and loading it onto barges on the Clyde. WMD – THE STORY OF THE YELLOW SUBMARINE HAS BEEN FULL OF CHARACTER AND CHARACTERS RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING.
![quern stone for sale quern stone for sale](https://st4.depositphotos.com/4665685/25076/i/600/depositphotos_250769590-stock-photo-the-ancient-quern-stone-hand.jpg)
But that is another story for another day…. There is a body of opinion which claims that the development of grain-based agriculture itself was driven by the desire to brew beer – which is of course an essential initial step in distillation. This quernstone at Coultorsay probably pre-dates distilling by many hundreds, if not some thousands of years – but who knows? The illicit distillers working on Islay would have had to grind their grain into grist by hand using stones similar to this– because they would not necessarily have had access to larger water mills. There is of course a direct connection with quernstones and distilling. It is apparent that this example is quite light – the stone disk is not thick. Guard Archaeology have people with specialist expertise in finds like this which will help give it context – as will the existence of charcoal deposits in association with the quern. Grain would have been fed into the central hole and the stone spun by hand on top of a lower stone to grind the grain into flour. This appears to be the upper stone of a pair. It is not possible to accurately date any of this material at this stage but quern stones have been in use since the Iron Age. The team are now concentrating on quite an extensive area of what is probably prehistoric occupation and are starting to find evidence of ditches, post holes, possible hearths and deposits of charcoal and bone. The archaeologists working up at our new warehouse site at Coultorsay just south of the distillery have found a quern stone.