The Highlanders Bakehouse stands at Ben Avon, in a building that was the family garage before it became a café and bakery. You go for the croissants and the butteries, and if you want something particular you can ask for Shona the Baker by name. There are breads too, and sweet wreaths and swirls. It is the kind of thing a village this size does not always manage to keep.
A short way off the A93 is Tarmachan, a café run by Sophie Orr, Celine Couasse and Ben Addy, pouring speciality coffee and leaning on local produce and whatever the season is doing. Down by the Balmoral Castle car park, the Crathie Gallery and Post Office opened in May 2024 to sell the work of local artists and makers: oils and watercolours, needlefelt and embroidery, woodcraft, handloom textiles, ceramics, jewellery, candles and willow. You can post a parcel and buy a painting in the same visit.
There is no pub. The Inver, the old roadside inn on the A93, closed in October 2013 and became self-catering. For a sit-down meal you drive — Ballater is eight miles east, Braemar nine miles west, both with cafés, restaurants and shops.
Crathie Kirk is the reason most people stop. Queen Victoria laid its foundation stone in September 1893 and it opened in June 1895, a cruciform granite church by Alexander Marshall Mackenzie with a steep nave, a crossing tower and a spire. There is a separate Royal entrance and a Royal transept on the south side. Inside, the communion table is Iona marble, the organ is a Father Willis, and the hexagonal pulpit is built from eighteen Scottish granites, set with Iona pebbles that Princess Beatrice collected herself. The Sovereign still worships here while staying at Balmoral.
This is not the first church on the site. Its 1805 predecessor seated 800; Princesses Beatrice and Louise ran a Balmoral bazaar that raised more than £2,000 towards the replacement. In the old burial ground beside the Dee are the ruins of a fourteenth-century kirk, on ground linked to the ninth-century missionary St Monire, and the grave of John Brown, Queen Victoria's personal attendant.
Balmoral itself is across the river. Victoria and Albert leased it in 1848 and bought it in 1852; the present castle, by the Aberdeen architect William Smith, was finished in 1856, with a signed parchment and coins of the year sealed in a bottle beneath its foundation stone. The estate runs to roughly 50,000 acres. Of the ground beyond the castle, Queen Elizabeth II once said, "You can go out for miles and never see anybody, there are endless possibilities."
The walking bears that out. The Balmoral Cairns circuit is six miles on woodland paths and estate tracks, climbing past the cairns raised for Victoria and Albert's children, the 1852 Purchase Cairn and the tall pyramid built in Albert's memory, with Deeside opening up below. It is not waymarked, and it needs care with the map. When the Royal Family is in residence the full round is discouraged, though the path to Prince Albert's Pyramid stays open. Longer and harder is the route over Conachcraig to the Gelder Shiel bothy — close to fourteen miles, with Lochnagar in sight for most of it, and boggy going near the end. A gentler core path loops back through the woods to the kirk.
For a drink of a different kind, Royal Lochnagar sits on the south side of the Dee. John Begg built the present distillery in 1845, after two earlier ones on the site burned down. It gained its "Royal" prefix once Victoria and Albert walked over from Balmoral in 1848. There is a visitor centre, a shop and a picnic area, though children under eight are kept off the production floor.
On the way in, look at the bridge over the Dee. Isambard Kingdom Brunel designed this plate-girder crossing between 1856 and 1858, possibly the earliest of its kind in Scotland, after the Royal Family closed the older suspension bridge to traffic. Crathie sits directly on the A93; the nearest railway station is fifty miles east at Aberdeen, and the Stagecoach 201 stops at the suspension bridge and Balmoral road end as it runs between Ballater and Braemar.
The croissants and butteries are what the Bakehouse is known for. Go early.