Scotch Missed: a review

This fourth edition of Scotch Missed: The Original Guide to the Lost Distilleries of Scotland has an encouraging start, in that even the introduction is a good read. So many books are killed off by a dull intro. But the intro makes it clear that this is not just the history of whisky distilleries, but industrial, economic, and social histories too.

Townsend states plainly that he won’t describe the whisky making process in detail; but he does show how it was written about in Victorian times, quoting the florid prose of a 19 ^th century commentator. Indeed, there isn’t much...