Guts, Glory - and Haggis

During my five-week stay in Scotland, I would seek it out wherever I went - trying it both in its traditional form, as "haggis, neeps and tatties" (haggis, parsnips and potatoes), but also tucked within dumplings and presented in other modern forms on menus. (Sadly, I was unable to find a bar snack of haggis nachos a friend had told me about.) In one of Edinburgh's best traditional Scottish restaurants, though, I noticed that Cockburn's haggis was often on offer. The butchery may be tiny, but it ships to restaurants and grocers all over Britain. Then I heard that Cockburn was the first champion haggis maker in the country. I knew I had to visit.

Curious, I dialed the owner with an unusual request: Could I come and help you make haggis? Though the company doesn't offer haggis-making tours to the public, my experience is instructive because there are plenty of places to learn. However, getting to those may not offer the idyllic train trip I took through Northern Scotland, past Inverness and the scenic Moray Firth, to Dingwall.

Like many small towns in Scotland, Dingwall has a train station, a hotel, a few Chinese takeouts, more than a few pubs and a local business that gives the place name recognition, in this case, Cockburn haggis. The morning I navigated its empty streets, I arrived at the small shop at just the right time - the meat truck had pulled up, and Fraser MacGregor, a clean-cut, muscular man in a sharp blue-and-white pinstriped doctor's-style coat, blue dress shirt, neatly knotted tie and sleek white fedora, was hard at work hoisting boxes of suet and lamb, each weighing many kilograms, into his spacious, pristine kitchen.