By the mid-19^th century, several owners had tried to make a go of the place and, although a period of relative stability followed, Littlemill wasn’t especially highly regarded by the blenders who dominated the whisky trade of the 20^th century. Then, like many other distilleries, it succumbed to the industry-wide slump of the early 1980s: it was mothballed between 1984 and 1989 before starting up again, but it only ran for another three years and, in 1994, its American owner, Gibson International, went bust. Littlemill was sold and dismantled, before eventually being sold to developers. In September 2004, it burned down.

It’s not the cheeriest of biographies, but it’s real. Despite the romantic lustre of ‘ghost’ distilleries and hidden single malt gems, Scotch whisky is an industry, and industries are Darwinian in their treatment of those who fail to make their way in life. Port Ellen on Islay, and Karuizawa in Japan, didn’t stop making whisky by accident; they shut down because there wasn’t a market for their wares.

But there is fascination, as well as failure, in Littlemill’s long history. In 1823, licensee Jane MacGregor was one of the first women to run a distillery of any scale in Scotland; in 1931, Littlemill passed into the hands of American architect and entrepreneur Duncan Thomas, one of Scotch whisky’s great innovators. Thomas ripped out the three stills that created Littlemill’s classically Lowland/west coast, triple-distilled spirit, installing two ‘hybrid’ straight-necked pot stills with rectifying plates. This enabled Littlemill to produce a range of different spirit styles by manipulating cut points.

Now MacGregor and Robert Muir, claimed as the first Littlemill licensee in 1772, have been remembered in the first two instalments of the Vanguards Collection, a rolling range of releases taken from Littlemill’s scant remaining stocks. Two more Vanguards releases will follow in the next few years.

A bottle of either release will set you back around £12,500 – the price of rarity, for sure, and partly a consequence of the fact that – unlike Port Ellen, for instance – Littlemill isn’t about to start producing whisky again. But also, according to master blender Michael Henry, because something rather miraculous has happened to Littlemill’s last whiskies as they have matured.

Henry has only been a part of Littlemill’s story since 2007, when he joined the business now known as Loch Lomond Group, the owner of what is left of Littlemill – the brand, the stocks. At the time, the company was selling a Littlemill 12-year-old expression but, given that the distillery went silent in 1994, older whiskies were already finding their way into the bottle. By 2010, Littlemill 12-year-old included whiskies laid down as early as 1992.

‘They didn’t really appreciate what they had with [Campbeltown distillery] Glen Scotia and Littlemill,’ says Henry of Littlemill’s owners at the time. ‘The stock was just there to be used. Littlemill would have been around 15 years old when I started tasting it.’

And was Littlemill’s potential apparent back then? ‘It wasn’t as clear as it is now,’ Henry says, with a hint of understatement. ‘Initially, it had quite a soapy taste, which it didn’t lose until it was about 20 years old. It took until then to really smooth off the edges.’

But here serendipity has lent a hand. Littlemill’s previous owners didn’t like spending money on new casks, so most of its spirit was filled into refill American oak that had been used two, three or even four times previously. With less oak influence, Littlemill’s quirky spirit – the product of Duncan Thomas’ straight-necked stills – was allowed to gradually blossom, without being overwhelmed by wood-derived flavours.

This gives Henry a template that he has taken and moulded into various forms: the ‘younger’ Littlemill spirit from the early 1990s going into a rolling programme of Cask Reflections releases, the first a mizunara cask finish; the older – from the mid- to late-1970s – featuring in the Vanguards Collection, the second iteration of which has just been released.

All of these whiskies portray, in different shades and hues, the core character of mature Littlemill: what may once have been soapy now has beguiling notes of elderflower, honeysuckle, lime, kiwi and gooseberry; flavours that may have jarred in the spirit’s youth have become luminous and intense, their rough corners rounded off.

Henry has to handle this delicate spirit with care. ‘With first-fill wood, it can be a finish as short as two months,’ he says. ‘We’re not always looking for an identifiable wood finish, just elements of the character.’ This is apparent in the Cask Reflections mizunara finish, which layers aromatic spice onto Littlemill’s fragrance – but which had a finish of less than five months.

In other words, the aim is to enhance, not mask, Littlemill’s character, a character which – for all its past difficulties – has been elevated to unexpected heights with age. Taste mature Littlemill today and it remains a delicate whisky, but one that is now of great distinction – and remarkable length. ‘That’s a real characteristic of Littlemill,’ says Henry. ‘It’s delicate – not a big, slap-in-your-face whisky, but it does have this very long finish. While it is delicate, there is an intensity to its character.’

There’s not much Littlemill whisky left in the world – and there’s even less of the distillery that bore its name – but that distillery’s liquid legacy may yet help to write a fresh chapter in what would otherwise be one of Scotch whisky’s most pathos-laden tales.