An Enduring Landscape

Renowned documentary film-maker John Griersontook an overall view of

T IGHNA S GIATH C OUNTRY H OUSE H OTEL

nr Grantown on Spey, Inverness-shire

Special Spring Breaks From £55 per person, per night, dinner, bed and breakfast

Recently featured in Country Living's Best Rural Escapes this elegant, Romantic Country House Hotel is set in 2.5 acres of mature wooded grounds and gardens in the heart of Speyside. Excellent Scottish Cuisine using local and organic produce. Seafood and Highland Game feature daily. Vegetarian/gluten free diets catered for.

Warm, unobtrusive, professional service. Romantic open log fires, all bedrooms individually appointed with many many extras.

Pets Welcome.

Recently awarded “Commended Small Scottish Country House Hotel of the Year 2007”

For further details Tel: 01479 851 345

Email: iain@tigh-na-sgiath.co.uk

www.tigh-na-sgiath.co.uk

Resident Proprietors: Iain & ElaineMacDonald-Coulter

16

Inverness Airport - 40 mins• Aviemore Rail Station - 15 mins •A9 Trunk Road - 10 mins• Central Belt 2hrs drive

Scotland is an old country as Western European nations go and carries the evidence on its landscape of Roman battles,medieval towers and the courtly graces of the Renaissance. You will find,if you look hard enough,reminders of our centuries-old relationships with France, the Low Countries and the Baltic: but the odd thing is that nowhere do you feel you are in museum territory. In the likes of Linlithgow,the Lothians and the ancient Kingdom of Fife, with their visual memories of Scottish kings,you are at the same time in the immediate presence of agriculture in its most modern array and of Aberdeen Angus that are splendid to any international eye. You can look down from castle walls to the mineheads and the futurist skylines of distilleries and strip mills. At Kincardine and Queensferry,where the once ever-questing Scottish captains mustered their fleets,the bridges swing across the Forth with the widest stretches of steel in Europe. Where once the courtiers of the Stuarts kept their ornate apartments,you are likely to find,close by some architectural reminder,new houses and gardens laid out in some style and with the same bright colours, the old centuries being paraded and the later more Covenanting ones dimmed. You will find yourself discovering the road to Glencoe and the Isles and the spectacular fastnesses of the northern glens by highways that sweep you along at high speeds. This is the first and most notable paradox of seeing Scotland. You begin by asking an old question but are soon asking a new one. It is a little and old country,clearly making itself over yet again,swallowing some of its ancient pride but for anyone to see hard at work forging new paths ahead. You are bound to look on Scotland as a lucky country,for it has the bones in its face,as a carver or painter might say. It is photogenic,as the cameras know. Travelling in the Highlands,the seasons,the light and the blooms on the peaks will give you colourings quite fantastic;and I once heard a bewildered Frenchman say the effect was so far past ordinary imaginings that it was “grotesque et ridicule!” The Highland melodrama is matched for sea- going eyes by the Atlantic sweeping in towards the high cliffs,with stormy waters sometimes reaching up to five hundred feet and more. I have seen expansive flotillas scatter in both the Pentland Firth,one of the wildest stretches of water in the world, and the Sumburgh Roost, that fierce tidal current sweeping round the Shetland headlands. In the whole of Scotland you are nowhere far from either the high country