The son of this Gregor , by name Laurence or Laurin, who was witness to a deed by the Bishop of Moray in 1258, obtained huge tracts of land by marrying the heiress of Gilbert Comyn. Laurin's son Ian was noted for trying to convince Wallace to forget the English and join him in a scheme to sell Whisky to the bloody vikings.
Were it not for Robert Burns' Address to a Haggis written in the winter of 1786, Haggis might never have made it into the 19th, let alone the 20th century. Based on a traditional Greek recipe, Haggis, like the bagpipes, was introduced by the invading Romans, and could be found throughout the rest of Europe. Thanks to Burns, the ancient method of stuffing sheep offal into sheep stomachs remains more or less intact, and became irrevocably associated with Scotland. But few people are aware that Burns didn't actually like Haggis, and originally intended to call his work the Dissertation on a Roast Pig. It seems that Robert Burns had previously had a run of bad luck, and was forced to borrow money from an obscure character named Robert MacRogue. Burns was having trouble meeting his payments, when MacRogue suggested that they could make a lot of money fronting for the Haggis industry, which was failing miserably at the time. After brief but obscure negotiations, Burns wrote his now famous work. Unfortunately, for Burns and MacRogue, the Scottish people were already familiar with Haggis, and sales of the dish continued to plummet. Things looked bad for Burns and MacRogue until one morning when MacRogue heard the local washerwoman humming There are none so Scot as the Scots abroad. MacRogue convinced the Haggis makers that while the Scots in Scotland might be too smart to eat the stuff, it would be readily snapped up by the Scots abroad. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Second Floor Gallery is temporarily closed to the public during restoration.
The idea of " watering down " good single malt with grain alcohol is officially attributed to Andrew Usher, who made the first commercially blended whisky in 1853. Unfortunately, the history books have all but forgotten the role played by Andrew MacRogue in the development of the product. At the time MacRogue was making his living buying up cheap, low quality whisky, mixing it with water, and smuggling it into Norway. The market, however, was greater than MacRogue's simple operation could handle. Since the distillers of malt whisky were less than happy with the practice of producing and marketing a low quality drink, even for export, MacRogue knew he would have an extremely difficult time expanding his operation to meet the Norwegian market demand. Undaunted, MacRogue convinced Usher that they could realize substantial economic advantage by mixing cheaper grain alcohol with the more expensive single malt. " Besides, " MacRogue liked to point out to anyone who would listen, " the bloody vikings (as he insisted on call the Norwegians), liked their drink strong and couldn't tell the difference anyway. "