Rothes

Looking North Along New Street

Rothes lies some ten miles south of Elgin on the A941. Given its location on the west side of the valley floor of the River Spey, it is no surprise to find that Rothes is home to a number of distilleries and associated industries.

High Street Library and Post Office Victoria Bar Town Hall, Now a Community Centre

The origins of the village long predate distilling. A minor road on the west side of Rothes High Street leads past the entrance of Glen Spey Distillery and around a hill to the golf club. The observant will notice that the summit of the hill is home to a short stretch of high stone wall.

Glen Grant Distillery

Rothes Castle

Animal Feed Factory

This is pretty much all that remains of Rothes Castle, originally built here by Peter de Pollok in about 1200 to command traffic up and down this stretch of the Spey Valley. On 29 July 1296 Edward I of England, the Hammer of the Scots, stayed at Rothes Castle (see our Historical Timeline). In the 1390s the castle and lands passed to the Leslie family, who later became Earls of Rothes.

By the time the Earls of Rothes sold their Moray estates to the Seafield family in about 1700, Rothes had grown beyond the immediate area of the now long ruined castle, and into a village aligned east-west along the line of the burn running into the Spey. After selling up, the Earls of Rothes moved to estates in Fife, including land which, much later, was to become the site of the new town of Glenrothes.

In 1766 the Seafields laid out a planned crofting township aligned north-south along the valley. This forms the basis of most of the road patterns in Rothes today, and the way the new planned village forms a cross as it overlays its old unplanned predecessor can still be seen on the ground. Many of Rothes' many imposing stone buildings were built in the years that followed. These include the Town Hall on New Street, built in 1898 and now used as a community centre, and Rothes Kirk, built at the northern end of the High Street in 1781. The steeple that dominates this end of High Street was added to the kirk in 1870 to accommodate Nairn's old town clock, which had been gifted to Rothes.

It was the quality of the water from the nearby hills that first led to the development of distilling in Rothes. The first distillery to be established was Glen Grant which started production in 1840. It was followed by Glen Rothes in 1878; Glen Spey in 1885; Speyburn in 1897; and Caperdonich in 1898. All five remain in production.

The best known of Rothes' distilleries is Glen Grant, in part because it is the only one with a visitor centre. This is open from April to October, Mon-Sat 10.00am to 4.00pm and Sun 12.30pm to 4.00pm. In 1872 Glen Grant was inherited by Major James Grant, who established some 22 acres of woodland gardens around it. The gardens remain an attraction to visitors today.

One of the ironies of a visit to Rothes is that, with the exception of Glen Grant, its distilleries remain very unobtrusive. As you approach from the north you descend into the village and most visitors will spot the white smoke from the modern-looking premises at the north end of Rothes, and many will assume it is a distillery. This turns out not to be the case, rather it is a factory which converts the by-products of the distillation process at many of Speyside's distilleries into animal feed.