Scotland's magical retreat

Balmoral Castle When John Begg sent a note to the people who had just moved into the big house down the road, inviting them round for a wee dram, he wasn’t sure whether they’d come.They were, after all, probably busy people. So you can imagine how surprised he was when, the very next day, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and three of their children arrived on his doorstep.
But the new owners of Balmoral Castle hadn’t simply come to meet their neighbour. Mr Begg happened to have a small distillery where he made the local Lochnagar Whisky.
So pleased were the family with what they sampled there that they instantly gave it the Royal seal of approval. And so began a relationship between the Royal Family and the community along the River Dee that continues to the present.
The Royal couple bought Balmoral in the late 1840s, attracted by the beautiful surrounding countryside, the area’s reputation for dry weather, and the opportunities for sport in the form of stalking and shooting.
It’s one of the present Queen’s two private homes – the other being Sandringham.
My own visit there wasn’t quite a sporting one. I wanted to do some walking, perhaps some mountain-biking, and to see some of what makes the area a place that the Royal Family enjoys visiting so often.
Ranger John Lovie took me on one of the Range Rover safaris that the 50,000-acre estate offers. ‘On a bonnie day, you’d be able to see right across to the Cairngorms,’ he said, acknowledging that the conditions were what the Scots call ‘dreich’.
In fact, we weren’t even able to see Lochnagar, Balmoral’s very own Munro – the name for a Scottish mountain more than 3,000ft high. But the weather began to improve as we passed some of the ponies used to bring red-deer carcasses down from the hills.
It’s all part of the officially sanctioned cull, which provides the estate with sporting opportunities, enough venison to sell on a commercial scale and a sustainable deer population that won’t ravage the countryside.
On we went through part of the ancient Caledonian Forest, fenced off to keep the deer out, and full of self-seeded Scots pine trees, all of different heights and shapes – so unlike cultivated forestry.
I was hoping to glimpse some red deer, which I’d never seen in the wild, and I wasn’t disappointed as we soon spotted a group of about eight stags, resting and grazing on a hillside.
Some of them looked across, their antlers giving them a distinctly distinguished appearance and showing why Sir Edwin Landseer felt his famous painting deserved the title Monarch Of The Glen.
After my drive, Glyn Jones, the head ranger at Balmoral, took me to see some of the sights on foot.
He pointed to evidence of pine martens, which he says were once rare but are now thriving, although they’re not often seen as they are nocturnal.
We passed the house built by Queen Victoria for John Brown, the ghillie who became her devoted personal servant after Albert’s death. On a hillside, we came across a very life-like bronze statue of him. It is believed to have been moved by his relatives to its relatively obscure site from an original place nearer the castle, for safety.
After Victoria’s death, Edward VII took to destroying all memory of Brown as he disapproved strongly of his mother’s close relationship with her servant. At the tops of various hills surrounding the castle is a series of cairns dedicated to various Royals and Royal events.
We climbed to one to mark Victoria’s son Prince Leopold, who died young as a result of his haemophilia, and then on to the tall ‘Purchase cairn’, celebrating the buying of Balmoral. On the next hill was Albert’s cairn, a huge pyramid, 41ft at its base.
We met a group of German and Chinese students from Aberdeen University, simply walking unescorted on the estate, something the public are welcome to do when the Queen is not staying there officially, as she does every year from August to October.
Although it is called a castle, strictly speaking Balmoral is a hunting lodge – albeit a very large one.
Glyn explains that unlike the Royal palaces, it is not particularly lavishly decorated or filled with valuable artworks because it is effectively mothballed for nine months of every year.
The public are not allowed inside except to view the ballroom, where a Ghillies’ Ball is held twice a year.
However, renovation work prevented us seeing it while I was there. Many of those I spoke to in the area had stories about encountering a member of the Royal Family.
As I explored some of the extensive local cycle routes with Ian Halliday, president of the mountain-biking society in nearby Ballater, he told me he was married to the Queen of Balmoral.
In fact, his wife manages the local Balmoral bar, but he recalls Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall stopping to say hello as he was out on his bike one afternoon near Charles’s house, Birkhall.
‘They just asked us where we were heading and said they were off to Perth races, and wished us a good afternoon. The Norwegian mountain-bikers I was with were gobsmacked! But they’re like that when they’re up here, the Royals. Very relaxed.’
At the Royal Lochnagar Distillery, Stewart Adamson hasn’t experienced the same kind of visit that John Begg was surprised by, but it’s fair to say that he gets a lot more visitors than his predecessor.
Connoisseurs of single malts can take a tour of the small distillery at the edge of the Balmoral Estate.
Stewart showed me the distilling equipment, as well as one of their proudest possessions, a painting of an illegal still on a Scottish hillside by Landseer.
As we sat sampling the distillery’s produce, I could see why keen whisky-drinkers might have raised an eyebrow at Queen Victoria’s preference for taking it mixed with claret!
On my final afternoon, driving up towards the Cairngorms as the sun began to set through the clouds I could just make out the outline of Balmoral’s very own Munro.
At last, I could say I’d not only tasted Lochnagar, I’d seen it too.