A Fort William family that have run a high street butcher’s shop for 90 years have decided to hang up their cleavers and boning knives from today.
Ian Wynne and Son, established in 1924, has been run by three generations of the Wynne family and is the longest-serving business on the town’s High Street.
As well as providing meat for local hotels, restaurants, guest houses and B&Bs, it has also supplied the catering units for films made in the Highlands, such as Braveheart, Rob Roy, Highlander, Local Hero and Harry Potter.
Stewart Duncan, who is a partner in the business known as Wynne the Butcher, denied they were closing their shop at 5 High Street due to falling trade as a result of competition from local supermarkets.
He said: “The business has been up for sale for a couple of months and we’ve had a bit of lukewarm interest, but no one wanting to take on the shop so we decided to close.
“It’s got nothing to do with our trade. The books are healthy. We’re quite lucky that the supermarkets haven’t affected us.
“However, the lease is coming to an end, Thomas is retiring and neither of us have any family that want to carry on the business so it’s a good time to close.”
Mr Duncan added that they would continue to use the back room until the lease ran out as they would carry on running the catering business for a few more weeks.
Their Ben Nevis range of black pudding, haggis, sausages, white and fruit pudding are made from family recipes dating back to 1924.
And, in 2006, one of their traditional recipes landed a German engineer in hot water with Dutch airport officials who confiscated a batch of white puddings in the belief they contained explosives or drugs.
Mathias Kinkel had been sent from Germany to Fort William to calibrate a new multipurpose sausage machine for the butchers.
As a parting gift, Mr Wynne and his staff gave Mr Kinkel a bag of haggis, mealy pudding, fruit pudding, black pudding and white pudding.
But, when he tried to return home via Schipol airport in the Netherlands, they were seized and the white puddings were split open and examined for dynamite or drugs.
At the time, Mr Wynne said they all had a good laugh about it.