Go nuts for Brazil
FLIGHTS to Sao Paulo, Virgin Atlantic’s new route, are now on sale with return fares starting from £578pp. Package holidays are available across Brazil thanks to a new codeshare with Brazilian airline GOL. Offers include five nights’ room only at Novotel Jaragua São Paulo Conventions from £785pp, based on two adults sharing and flights departing May 13. PULL on your walking boots because the fabulous tree foliage, surging salmon rivers and mirror-calm lochs of Scotland’s Perthshire are amazing. Some two miles upriver from Pitlochry is the Faskally wood d where the annual Enchanted Forest event starts on
October 3. There are more spectacular woods but clever lighting, music, the serenity of small boardwalk-lined Loch
Dunmore and broad allweather paths, attracted
80,000 people last year.
£20, see enchantedforest.org.uk. g.uk.
Select shopping Dunkeld
This small town, with its beautiful 1809 Thomas Telford bridge over the Tay and eerie, semiruined 14th century cathedral, is more refined than Pitlochry.
The riverside church shows how important this place was as a foothold of Christianity and many of the original town houses have been restored by the Scottish National Trust.
The town’s select shops are particularly strong on food, with the Aran Bakery opposite the Scottish Deli – that serves tapas in the evening – and one of the best chippies in the region, the Dunkeld Fish Bar.
Among the shops worth a wander is the uninspiringly-named Jeffreys Interiors, a design emporium in a former church, stuffed with chandeliers, stag’s heads and velvet sofas, with a logfire burning throughout the year.
See dunkelandbirnam.org.uk.
Tree zoo
Birnam and the Hermitage
Some 200 years ago the Dukes of Atholl, who owned most of the land between Perth and Inverness, planted 25 million trees.
These included larch, douglas fir, maple, western hemlock and redwood, which earned the region the tag Big Tree Country and why its autumn colours are so rich.
Dunkeld was the Atholls’ summer residence and the riverbank arboretum walk is a “tree zoo” of exotics.
Alternatively, cross the river and walk downstream along the far bank and you’ll reach h the remnants of Birnam Wood, as mentioned in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It has a wizened, hollow centuries-old giant oak with a sevenThe Th Birks of Aberfeldy is a song by Scotland’s favourite fa poet, Robbie Burns, as well as a woodland walk from the homely town of Aberfeldy, a half-hour drive west of the A9.
The town is acknowledged as being at the ce centre of Scotland. The birks refers to birch tr trees but most here are regal beeches and they lin line the path up the steeply rising wooded glen of the Moness stream, up to a waterfall.
The circuit takes over an hour, including a se selfie with the bronze statue of Burns himself