Pitlochry is is a lovely little town, right in the middle of Scotland: north of Perth, on the edge of the Cairngorm National Park, nestling at the foot of Ben Vrackie. It is a town of elegant Victorian buildings - booming in the wake of Queen Victoria's visits to the Highlands - and it's main street is a mix of high end tourist shops (whisky, cashmere, Harris tweed...) and foodie places, many of them specialising in locally produced delicacies.
It also has a fabulous repertory theatre situated near the Loch Faskally Dam with stunning views across the valley. It has a steady stream of tourists passing through and so it has a very high proportion of locally run restaurants and coffee shops - no chains at all. It's been a family favourite since before I was born (my first visit there was in the womb!) although we haven't been back there since 1999.
It's strange, really, to consider a dam a tourist attraction and really it is quite a modest structure, but it is somewhere I've always really been drawn. I can remember visiting as a teenager and thinking it would be the perfect place to set a story: there's a hum in the air there which is genuinely 'electric'! When I was first planning Scotch on the Rocks it was a given that Hamish's glen needed to have its own hydro electric dam and that it would be based on Pitlochry.
I'd written the Hydro Electric Dam scenes from memory and to be honest, I'd taken a lot of liberties with the facts! Being on site allowed me to photograph all sorts of angles for reference: I felt like Elizabeth George as I tried to make sure I had all the details I'd be likely to need. The re-written scenes do it much more justice than my originals as a result.
