MEMORIES OF A HIGHLAND QUEEN
THE Queen is enjoying her annual holiday at Balmoral. Over the course of nine decades, Her Majesty has relished the breathtaking beauty and solace of the Royal Deeside estate. It is a Highland home that has long held a special place in her heart. Today, the Mail looks back at the Queen’s intimate Balmoral photo album and revisits some special moments in Royal history.
ONE sunny Highland afternoon many years ago, the Queen was out walking across the Balmoral estate with her Royal protection officer when she was approached by a group of tourists enquiring if she lived in the area. She responded by saying she had a house close by.
‘Have you ever met the Queen?’ they persisted.
‘No,’ she apparently replied, before pointing at the officer and adding: ‘But he has.’
Since her earliest days, the rolling moors and baronial turrets of Balmoral have represented a particular sort of freedom for Queen Elizabeth II. It is a place of solace and refuge, a quiet bolthole where she can shrug off the stiff cloak of sovereignty and become, for a few short weeks, herself.
‘I think Granny is the most happy there,’ her granddaughter Princess Eugenie revealed in a recent documentary. ‘I think she really, really loves the Highlands.’
It is a love affair that was forged early. The young Princess Elizabeth would take the train from London each August with her sister Margaret and spend the next ten weeks flitting between the austere corridors of Balmoral during the reign of her grandfather George V, and the more rambunctious atmosphere of her mother’s family home, Glamis Castle.
Occasionally, the girls would be taken to Aberdeen to pick out toy animals for Elizabeth’s farmyard at the local Woolworths.
It is also where the Princess spent part of her honeymoon, a blissful respite with her new husband Philip after the pomp and ceremony of their Royal wedding. By then, the Balmoral routine of long walks and pony rides, sensible tartan skirts and picnics by the loch, was firmly imprinted on her DNA.
Indeed, apart from a few jaunts in the 1940s to Malta and Kentucky, she has never holidayed anywhere else.
‘I think it has an atmosphere of its own,’ she remarked once. ‘You just hibernate; but it’s rather nice to hibernate for a bit when one lives such a very movable life.’
She inducted her own children into the Balmoral routine, and the happy clan were often photographed in matching kilts in the estate’s manicured gardens. In the late 1960s, as part of a documentary, she took four-year-old Prince Edward to one of the local shops for an ice cream – and had to borrow the half-crown to pay for it from a member of the crew.
She has a deep and intimate affection for the people of Royal Deeside, and is said to be first with the gossip when it comes to local affairs.
‘Her intelligence network – of who’s done what, what’s happened, who’s ill, who’s died, who’s had a birth – is extraordinary,’ her second son, the Duke of York, remarked once. ‘How she finds out is a mystery.’
Yet Balmoral is also where the Queen faced her greatest constitutional crisis when, in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, she stayed there to provide love and support for her two grieving grandchildren and was deeply criticised for doing so. The affair is said to have wounded her deeply.
As she makes her annual pilgrimage north to her favourite place in the world, Her Majesty will no doubt reflect once again on Balmoral’s beauty, and the solace it has given her for 90 years. ‘You can go out for miles and never see anybody,’ she said once. ‘There are endless possibilities.’
Balmoral is a special place of solace and refuge for the Queen