Road trip: the Bourbon Trail, Kentucky, takes in the movers and Shakers of whiskey country
A road trip along the Bourbon Trail gives Cecilie Gamst Berg an education in Kentucky's movers and Shakers and a welcome taste of one of the American state's greatest exports.
As darkness falls and sideways rain lashes the Land Rover harder and harder, I am struck by a horrible thought.
"Do you think the Shakers were allowed alcohol?" I ask Steve, who's been driving since the morning and is exhausted.
"I don't know, but seeing that one of their central tenets was celibacy, it doesn't seem likely," he answers, trying but failing to keep the worry out of his voice.
Steve and I are on a road trip through America's southern states. We have come to Kentucky to follow the Bourbon Trail from Louisville to Lexington - see the rolling hills of Kentucky and their frolicking horses through the splendour of a glass of the amber stuff, that kind of thing - and thought we would take a small detour to spend a night at the fabled Shaker Village, in Pleasant Hill; a working farm where some of the houses that once served as platonic communes have been turned into upmarket hotel accommodation.
The Shakers are a religious sect that was founded in England, in the mid-1700s, as a spin-off of the Quakers, who were seen as too frivolous. The Shakers (also known as the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing) or the Shaking Quakers, were so called because they went into a state of ecstasy during worship, shaking more than the Quakers, who merely quaked. Illiterate Manchester cotton factory worker Ann Lee, depressed after the death of all four of her children in infancy, brought herself and the sect to America in 1774. This being during the American revolution, and before Thomas Jefferson, freedom of religion and all that, the Shakers were persecuted and members frequently imprisoned.
Still, through hard work, simple living in communes and trying in every way to emulate Jesus, they prospered through the decades, relying on recruitment rather than procreation to increase their numbers. The Shakers invented the circular saw, the flat broom, the revolving oven and brimstone matches.