Isla Distillery — Highland Single Malt Whisky

Isla Distillery was a Scotch whisky distillery located in Bridgend, on the eastern edge of Perth, Highland, Scotland. It was founded in 1851 and was permanently closed in 1926, after which the buildings were demolished. Run for most of its life by three generations of the Forbes family, it made a mild, fast-maturing Highland malt that was often sold as an unblended "self" whisky in the years before the First World War.

History

The site at the corner of what is now Isla Road and Strathmore Street had a working history before it ever made whisky: it operated as an oat mill in the early 1790s and later as a brewery. Alexander Forbes established a distilling operation there in 1851, then known as Clockserrie (also spelled Clockserie) Distillery. In 1854, John Forbes bought the property from William Muir and converted it permanently into a Highland malt whisky distillery, giving it the name by which it became known: Isla, after the nearby road and the River Isla.

Under John Forbes the distillery grew from a modest operation malting only a few hogsheads of grain a week with horse power to a steam-driven works handling around four hundred bushels of barley weekly, equipped with the usual maltings, mash house, four washbacks, a horizontal refrigerator and three stills. Ownership passed to John Forbes and Son around 1900. Like many Scottish distilleries, Isla fell silent during the First World War, from 1914 until December 1919, while its owner, Major Forbes, was on active service. Production resumed after the war, but the Forbes family's long association with the site ended in 1920, when it was sold to the Tay Distillery Company. The business was reconstituted again in 1923 as The Isla Distillery, Ltd., though the revival was short-lived: the distillery closed for good in 1926.

Quick Facts

• Region: Highland (Perthshire)
• Founded: 1851 (converted to a permanent malt distillery in 1854)
• Owner: The Isla Distillery, Ltd. (closed 1926); previously the Forbes family and the Tay Distillery Company
• Status: Closed
• Stills: 3 pot stills

Closure & Legacy

Isla Distillery closed permanently in 1926 amid the wider contraction of the Scotch whisky industry in the 1920s, and its buildings were subsequently demolished. The cleared site in Bridgend later found a very different use: in 1952 it was redeveloped as a children's play park and green space, today remembered as Camilla Bell Park, at the corner of Isla Road and Strathmore Street in Perth. No original Isla bottlings are known to circulate on the collectors' market or at auction today; its output predates modern single-malt collecting by decades, and it remains one of Scotland's genuinely obscure "lost" distilleries, known mainly through historical trade records rather than surviving bottles.