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in Glasgow, I was sent to work in Aberdeen for three months. I opted not to stay in Granite City (no offence) in the hope I could sample some craic in its rural hinterland instead. The only rentable house between Aberdeen and Inverness with an all-important landline in those pre-mobile days was Coldstriffen, located in Glen Buchat, 45 minutes west of Aberdeen. The owners of the nearby Kildrummy Castle Hotel had renovated the house, lived there for a while, but apparently got snowed in one bad winter and concluded that living six miles from their business wasn’t wise. So, it was available to rent. The house itself was fine, the drive into Aberdeen scenic but Glen Buchat was the real discovery. Unusually fertile, with lime deposits supporting fields up to 1,200 feet, the glen once supported dozens of farms and hundreds of people, till decline and depopulation kicked in. The eastern entry to the glen is still a single-track road, passing just above Glenbuchat Castle, built in 1590 for a member of the Gordon clan to mark his wedding, but now a ruin. I generally approached from neighbouring Strathdon to the south, branching off the main road at the intriguingly named Castle of Newe (given that extra ‘e’ by its owner Sir Charles Forbes in the 1820s to stop post going to Newcastle-upon-Tyne). Another singletrack road twisted up through dense, dark forests stashed with
fig 1.4 Glenbuchat and the bothy, 1990s.
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