What's in a name?

Many visitors to the Distillery ask me where the name "Laphroaig" comes from. Is it manufactured, as I suppose most whiskies are? Not so, Laphroaig is taken from the name of the bay upon which the distillery is spread around, and was the name of the farm which started it all. There's a great debate about the literal translation from Gaelic into English. The word literally means "the hollow where the cave is". But as there are no caves near the distillery, historians of the time went back to the Norse or Viking translation. No doubt they had journalistic license even then, because they simply called it "the beautiful hollow by the broad bay". Hardly surprising, since the Islands off Scotland's west coast were governed on and off by Norsemen from 870 A.D. It wasn't until 1266 A.D. that Islay finally became part of Argyll.

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