When hunting for distilleries in Scotland there are often clear signs that one is close by. It could be a pagoda on a roof, a redbrick chimney poking over the brow of a hill, the blackened wall of a warehouse, or the sweet aroma of hot mash in the air, but there is almost always a signal. They rarely sneak up on you.
Holyrood Distillery is different. Located in Edinburgh’s Southside, quite literally in the shadow of Auld Reekie’s impressive Salisbury Crags, it blends so well into the urban environment you could easily miss it. This is partly because, unlike many of the new distilleries cropping up in Scotland, it isn’t based in a purpose-built structure. Instead, the innovative distillery is housed in a Category B listed building that at one point was part of St Leonard’s Station, the terminus of the Innocent Railway, Edinburgh’s first passenger rail line. It might be fairer to say that the flats and offices that have grown up around the building have been made to blend in with it, as per Edinburgh’s stringent planning rules.
“It’s a really interesting building,” distillery co-founder Rob Carpenter says. Affectionately known asbuilding was much more likely to have been used to store hay for the hardworking horses.
