This was our first visit to the Silent Pool Distillery near Dorking. We parked in the public car park and walked up the private road to the visitor centre. We passed a restaurant that sold prepared Indian food , other units until we reached the distillery.
On our last visit the visitor ‘shop’ was a tent at the side of a barn. Now there is a shop and we were invited into the barn to wait for the tour to start.
This is the original still from Germany. The instructions for assembly were on YouTube! Now this still is used for small batch speciality gins etc.
The Silent Pool
We went down the steps at the side of the visitor centre to the fenced of bank of the Silent Pool.
Sometime in the past someone had probably dumped a goldfish in the pond along with the greenery in the bowl. It turns out that this is an invasive specie and overtime grows aggressively filling the pond. Now twice a year this ‘weed’ is dredged from the pool filling a large farm trailer. The pool is on the of Duke of Northumberland’s Albury Estate and his estate staff keep the pool as clear as possible. We were lucky as the pool had been dredged recently.
There are legends about the pool and it is reputed to be the most haunted water in the county. Our guide told us the legend about the knight, rumoured to have been King John, who caused a local maiden to drown when she escaped from his advances into the deep water.
A more recent legend is that on Saturday, December 4th 1926, Agatha Christie’s car was found abandoned nearby. She was missing for 11 days until she was spotted in a hotel in Harrogate.
Look on the graphics on each bottle that celebrate the legends, the Duke of Northumberland and the gin’s botanicals.
The pool is fed from a spring. Our guide noted that the distillery did not take water from the pool!
On our way back the steps we passed old trees that had inspired some of the distillery markings on bottles.
The serious part of the tour
Back in the visitor centre we were told the history of the distillery started, the experiments to get the distinctive taste, the original marketing and we could smell the botanicals along with juniper that go into the gin. We sampled different gins and had really fascinating talks on each one.
The history of gin in England was equally fascinating . You’ll have to go and visit to get all the stories!
Next door to the barn was the distillery’s first steam generator. Nicknamed the ‘Major’ this Industrial Revolution piece of equipment still worked but was rather temperamental.
The ‘new’ still
The next building up held the much much larger still, pallets of bottles, and a much larger bank of botanicals and a bottling machine.
There is space next to the still for the second large still yet to arrive.
If the bottling machine had been running we wouldn’t have been in the space as it generates ear shattering noises! It was a rather temperamental we were told.
The view from outside the second building.
The last part of the tour
After a quick summary back in the visitor centre the excellent tour was over.
Into the shop!
Each visitor can receive a £5 discount on purchases over a certain amount and we took full advantage of this offer. Plus I picked samples of the gin including a spray to add to the flavour. I added a couple of gin glasses to our collection.
Views from the gardens of Madiras Kitchen
The lower pool
The Compasses
We decided to tray and find somewhere local for lunch. Along the A25 we drove through Shere until we came to the Compasses alongside the River Tillingbourne.
We sat in the gardens of the Compasses and had an excellent to round of our visit to this part of Surrey.