The Vale Hotel stands on Turriff Road, ten minutes' walk from the castle, and it is the village's main pub. The food is cooked to order — fish and chips with a side salad, steak and ale pie with, as one reviewer put it, "beautifully cooked veg." The menu runs from vegan dishes to fresh fish and meat, and portions are generous. Reviewers are mixed on the building itself, which some find dated and chilly, but they agree on the welcome, the food, and a lovely warm fire. There's Sunburst on draught. It has five letting rooms upstairs if you want to stay put.
Beyond the pub, the village keeps things brief. There's no butcher, deli or farm shop of its own; for those you go to Turriff, eight miles up the A947, or Oldmeldrum. Fyvie is small and content to be.
What it has instead is the estate. Fyvie Castle sits on the village edge, and the National Trust for Scotland's 123 acres of woodland, loch, gardens and fields are free to roam year-round. Locals use them daily. The shortest circuit takes you around Fyvie Loch — roughly a mile and a half on a good path, with a couple of rougher sections near the start — through old woodlands to a bird hide on the lakeside. There are swans nesting, geese passing through, and an osprey now and then. In spring the rhododendrons flower. If you want more of a walk, the castle-loch-and-kirk circular runs about four miles.
The loch is younger than it looks. Colonel William Gordon dug it in 1785 as part of landscaping the castle grounds, which is the kind of thing you could do if you owned the castle. The castle itself has five towers, each added by a successive owning family — Preston, Meldrum, Seton, Gordon, Leith — and enough ghost stories to fill an afternoon. The Green Lady is Lilias Drummond, first wife of the 1st Earl of Dunfermline; the night her husband remarried, her name is said to have appeared carved into an outside window ledge, where it still reads "D LILIAS DRUMMOND."
The village church earns a proper look. St Peter's Kirk was built in 1808, but set into its east gable are three Pictish symbol stones and the shaft of a Pictish cross — crescents, an eagle, a beast, a mirror. Inside is one of only two Louis Comfort Tiffany windows in Scotland, showing the Archangel Michael, put up for Percy Forbes-Leith, who died of enteric fever in the Boer War at nineteen.
In the kirkyard stands a gravestone dated 1673, said to be that of Agnes Smith — Tifty's Annie of the ballad, beaten to death by her brother for loving Andrew Lammie, the castle trumpeter, who was below her station.
There's no railway here; the nearest trains are at Aberdeen, twenty-five miles south-east, and Stagecoach buses run there via The Square. Fyvie has given the world a lot of songs for a village this quiet. One of them, The Bonnie Lass o' Fyvie, ended up in America as "Pretty Peggy-O." An old lady sang it to a collector from memory, having learned it as a girl.
