More castles

Aberdeenshire is one of 32 council areas in Scotland and is located in the NE corner of the country. As we traveled through here, we found a number of neat castles with their gardens, as well as prehistoric stone circles.

Castle Fraser was our first stop. We just wandered in the gardens and on the grounds…

… admiring the Copper Beeches, like the one above. These offer great contrast to other trees, and we saw a lot of them in Scotland. I also liked the turrets that looked like they had faces -

We then moved on to my favorite castle grounds, at Crathes Castle -

I even made a note that when we return to Scotland, we need to devote at least a half day here, just wandering the grounds and gardens. There were topiary…

… as well as Giant Sequoia!

There was a very interesting and aptly named tree - a Handkerchief tree:

A Horse Chestnut…

… had some really beautiful and dainty flowers -

We visited some other castles, but they were rather boring, so I’ll advance on to Dunottar Castle, with its great siting -

We didn’t explore inside, but opted to walk down to the beach…

… as well as check out the coastline -

We spent the night in Aberdeen, and then wandered around stone circles…

… visiting several…

… and learning about recumbent stones. I’ll share this info board with you, as it was quite informative -

This was the nicest one we visited…

… and the stones were quite large -

The Speyside Cooperage was a fascinating place that we visited on our drive to Inverness. This is where whiskey barrels are made. Both new ones, and older ones that distilleries want resized or repaired, are made by hand.

An apprenticeship typically starts at age 16 and lasts 4 years…

… and you’d think it was a young man’s game, given all the pounding and rolling of barrels, but we heard of a guy who’d been there 51 years!

Rather than stopping along the whisky trail through the Speyside area (very reminiscent of Napa or Sonoma Valleys) at the numerous distilleries…

… we headed to picturesque Inverness…

… with its castle overlooking the River Ness -

There were some great old stone buildings here…

… and churches -

I’ve got a collection of pretty shots that I want to share. This was from the Hermitage, outside of Dundee (where the sunset on the clouds was taken) -

These were from the gardens…

(a hillside of rhododendrons above the ferns)

… at Glen Grant distillery.

This area of the Back Burn called “the gorge” was particularly lovely -

Ta ta for now!