Royal Deeside

The River Dee runs through the heart of Scotland, showcasing some of the country's most beautiful scenery, as well the royal family's beloved Scottish home.

BY KEITH AITKEN

There is a moment in the Oscar-winning movie, The Queen, when the royal hunting party is out stalking the great stag and the camera suddenly soars into the sky, high above the valley of the River Dee. Even in the Edinburgh cinema where we saw the film, a gasp of wonder went up from the audience. For those less familiar with the sublime scenery of the Scottish Highlands, I imagine that the shot must have come as a revelation.

In truth, it was a bit of a revelation for many Scots, too. Deeside -- Royal Deeside, as it tirelessly styles itself -- is an enduringly popular area with visitors, not least because of its role as Highland playground to successive generations of the Royal Family. But it is not the kind of scenery that springs to the mind of most Scots when they think of the Highlands. They tend to picture the tranquil turquoises and purples and greens of the West Coast sea lochs, the great corries of the Cairngorms and Kintail, the vast panoramas of Lochs Lomond and Tay and Ness, the brooding shadows of Glencoe and the Cuillen, or the barren grandeur of Assynt and Torridon.

Deeside, by contrast, is seen as a faintly twee oasis of picture-pretty outlooks amid the surrounding wilderness, one with the good fortune to make a dependable living by charging dippy tourists a premium for briefly licensed proximity to a century and a half of royal patronage. It is a toff's caricature of Scotland, not a Scot's Scotland: a theme-park Scotland for those who come to drive Range Rovers, dance Dashing White Sergeants in silk evening gowns, slaughter wild things and eat them, with finest wines, in the evening. Its perfect analogy is the elaborate Highland Dress that Princes Philip and Charles invariably don for their stays at Balmoral, a beautiful assemblage of cromachs and glengarries that no Scot would ever wear who was not employed at Balmoral. The intention is a most courteous desire to convey solidarity with their Scottish subjects. The effect is to make them more English than Bertie Wooster and Gussie Fink-Nottle. The whole of Royal Deeside can look like that to Scots -- so determinedly Sir Walter Scott-ish that it could scarcely be more English.

And yet. That celluloid aerial glide was a stunning reminder that Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's shrewd German consort, did not settle on Balmoral for a Scottish retreat back in 1858 by casual happenstance. It was reproachful proof that here, too, is a magnificent landscape that is for everyone to enjoy, however humble their bank balances; and that, incidentally, could be nowhere on earth but in Scotland. It was, I suspect, a prompt to many Scots to do what this article sets out to do -- to put the flummery to one side and go back to look afresh at Deeside from first principles.

The River Dee rises high in the Cairngorm Mountains and flows majestically into the North Sea 96 miles away at Aberdeen. We join its journey in the Mar Lodge Estate, from where it runs due east to the Granite City. Here, it is not much more than a lively, though beguiling, brook. The estate itself is glorious. Bought by the National Trust for Scotland in 1995, its 30,000 hectares descend from the mountainous heartland of the Cairngorms National Park to lower-lying pine forest, moorland and riverside areas, freely accessible to the public for guided walking and cycling, as well as to those who come to stalk or fish. The Lodge itself was built in 1895 for Victoria's granddaughter, Louise Countess of Fife. These days, it has been converted into five luxurious apartments for rent, plus a stable block accommodating up to 12 people.

Tucked away by the road out from the estate is an unforgettable eccentricity of nature -- the Linn of Dee. Here, the river suddenly carves itself a sinuous little gorge through limestone rock, no more than a couple of feet wide in places and deep as eternity. The scalloped twists and turns look like something from an early prog-rock album cover. It is like finding a Dali painting in a room full of Landseers. Following no obvious law of physics, the water changes from mirrored pool to frenzied torrent and back again within the space of a few yards. The pools are as clear as the mountain air and in late summer muscular salmon can be seen in perfect detail as they lie, stacked like airliners over a busy airport, awaiting their turn to ford the waterfalls on their way upstream to breed.

The full text of this article is available in the Autumn 2008 issue of Scottish Life.

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