The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Tranquility of Braemar Brings the Royal Family to its rich plateaus and graceful rivers each year
TO aim for the highest point is not the only way to climb a mountain,” wrote Nan Shepherd in her 20th Century nature masterpiece, The Living Mountain. The Aberdeen-born poet and writer, whose face now adorns the Scottish £5 note, made it her life’s quest to find the “essential nature” of the Cairngorms. In the process of exploring the graceful, gleaming rivers and high plateaus “as delectable as honey”, she discovered a lot about herself too.
Twice the size of the Lake District, east Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park is a vast area of crisp, clear lochs, ancient forests and glens bristling with vibrant purple heather. Promising calm, stillness and the freedom of space, it seemed an obvious choice for a post-lockdown adventure with my mum, Gabriella.
Aged over 70 and recovering from heart surgery, my mum had been shielding since March. I’m not a fan of Zoom or FaceTime so, when we met at Heathrow airport to catch our flight to Aberdeen, it was the first time I’d seen her in four months.
In a world where every move seems to be dominated by Covid-19, the decision to travel isn’t an easy one to make at any age. But, as days disappear and months march on, there’s an urgency to get moving. I’ve never really understood why time accelerates with age. The harder we grip, the more it slips away. Maybe it’s the realisation that everything is finite, including us.
Then there was the risk of being indefinitely confined by anxiety.
“If I don’t go out soon, I’ll never have the confidence again,” my mum confessed.
So, armed with face masks, sanitiser and a sensible degree of caution, we refused to be beaten by fear.
Nan chose to camp her way around the Cairngorms. But we’ve opted for a greater degree of comfort at the Fife Arms, a regal Victorian property in the town of Braemar on the banks of the River Clunie, matched in magnificence to its surrounding mountain landscape.
After having our temperatures checked, we’re ushered inside by the hotel’s welcoming ghillies who apologise profusely for the impersonality of Perspex panels on reception, visors and the absence of Fife’s bespoke tartan blankets in rooms.
Scotland only recently emerged from lockdown, on July 15, and the hotel is quickly adapting to a new and unfamiliar way of working. Rooms are deep cleaned between guests, breakfast buffets have been ditched in favour of timed sittings, and a one-way system is in place throughout the property. Otherwise, everything feels refreshingly normal. Owned by art dealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth (owners of the Hauser & Wirth gallery), who breathed new life into its rundown shell and re-opened in 2018, the Fife is filled with 16,000 artworks, antiques and collectables.
When you’ve been indoors for so long, everything has a new and shiny appeal.
But here in this Disneyland of culture and creativity, my mum has the wide-eyed wonder of a child embracing infinity and beyond.
Paying homage to Braemar’s Victorian roots, furnishings reflect the grandeur of that time: an ornately carved walnut wood fireplace depicting works by national bard Robert Burns dominates the reception; chairs upholstered in Liberty fabrics decorate the drawing room; and natural history specimens are displayed in curiosity cabinets or used to create whimsical tableaux in bell jars. Not to everyone’s modern PC tastes, one corridor alone has 100 pieces of taxidermy, upstaged only by an eerie waxwork model of Queen Victoria in the library, purchased from Madame Tussaud’s.
If a wall of stags’ heads is divisive, modern artworks incorporating antlers are pleasingly palatable: hanging above the main staircase, Richard Jackson’s Red Deer Chandelier is a tangle of neon bagpipe drones and glass antlers.
From outspoken sculptures to understated sketches, every corner of the Fife is covered in conversation-provoking art.
Works by Picasso, Brueghel The Younger and Man Ray hang on the walls; one of Louise Bourgeois’ bronze spiders straddles the courtyard. But an even more impressive find is watercolours of royal estates painted by Prince Charles and a sketch by Queen Victoria of a stag shot by her