Travel notes

close confidant, John Brown. Braemar’s relationship with British royalty reaches back to 1852 when Prince Albert purchased Balmoral Estate for his sovereign wife.

“She was passionate about this place,” Katy Fennema of Braemar Highland Experience tells me. The former musician, whose family have 300 years of history in the area, now runs local history, wilderness and wildlife tours with her husband, Julian.

During a morning driving tour, she shares tales of brigands hung from tree boughs and delights in stories of Chanel’s fashion rival Elsa Schiaparelli, who became fascinated with Braemar when her friend, Vogue editor Frances Lovell Oldham, married a laird. The two ladies would literally go on to paint parts of the town shocking pink, celebrated in an Art Deco bar at the Fife being named after Elsa.

Much of the land here has been shaped by aristocracy. Patchworks of charred

Rooms at the Fife Arms start from £230 (including breakfast) in a Croft Room. For more information or to book, visit thefifearms.com heather on the hillside are the remnants of controlled burns, used to boost the grouse population in time for shoots.

Yet so much remains wild. Along the Queen’s Drive walking trail, trees are laden with tufty beards of lichen, an indicator of the air’s purity.

At 5.30am one morning, mum and I ramble through the Morrone Birkwood, a relic of deciduous woodland that once covered the Cairngorms. On the way up, we watch hares and red squirrels scamper through a stadium used to host the Braemar Gathering, one of the most popular Highland Games. And we detour past the house where Robert Louis Stevenson spent a miserable, rainy three months in 1881, emerging with the first 16 chapters of Treasure Island.

It’s a very different scene today. Sunlight splinters through gate pickets as we clamber on to a trail strewn with pine cones. Streams trickle melodically from the mountainside and the scent of honeysuckle is dizzying.

Juniper, blaeberries, meadowsweet and yarrow – so many plants thrive in this healthy environment. Later in the day, herbalist and forager Natasha Lloyd introduces us to her open-air medicine cabinet. She recommends treatments for my mum’s liver, and I learn how to eat a raw nettle without getting stung. The common nettle is packed with Vitamin D, which may boost the immune system against respiratory viruses such as Covid-19.

Fortunately, there were no cases of coronavirus in Braemar. Although one famous figure down the road made headlines: Prince Charles controversially self-isolated at Balmoral when he fell ill at the beginning of lockdown.

It’s easy to see why the royals come here to escape and recuperate. This month, the Queen will arrive for her annual summer holiday. We follow one of her favourite trails through the Ballochbuie Forest, a protected tract of 300-year-old pines saved from felling by Queen Victoria, leading to the Honka Hut – a simple cabin where she likes to picnic.

In the past, hikers claim to have “run into” Her Royal Highness walking the corgis but, blissfully, we don’t see a soul.

It was silence and solitude that guided Nan Shepherd into the mountains. Similarly, it helps my mum readjust to an outside world fraught with complications, but beautiful at its core.