Gliders lift off from Aboyne Airfield, which sits at Dinnet rather than at Aboyne, launched by aerotow from the Deeside Gliding Club, with views over Royal Deeside and the Cairngorms. The club runs two-seat trial flights with an instructor and keeps a simulator for the days when the weather grounds everyone else.
The village sits on the A93, the Aberdeen to Ballater road, in the Dee valley at the eastern gateway to the Cairngorms National Park. The Loch Kinord Hotel has a restaurant and bar: a family-run country inn of twenty-two rooms, whose bar is known as The Holly Tree, with a lounge bar carrying a wide range of malt whisky. The restaurant holds one AA rosette and cooks traditional Scottish and international dishes from local meat, game, fish and seasonal vegetables. Andrew and Jenny run it. Dinner can be limited, so it is worth calling ahead.
Dinnet has no shop of its own; for groceries you are looking at Aboyne or Ballater, both about five miles off. Aboyne has a large green, cafés and the Boat Inn; Ballater has independent shops and cafés and its Victorian and royal connections.
What draws people to Dinnet lies across the B9119, which turns north out of the village towards the Muir of Dinnet reserve. The visitor centre at Burn O'Vat is 2.5 miles away, about an hour on foot; the B9119 has no pavement, and visitors can drive to the main car park and walk from there. The Vat itself is a granite cauldron cut by glacial meltwater around 20,000 years ago; the way in crosses uneven stepping stones and can be slippery.
There are gentler routes. The Loch Kinord trail circles the water on a mostly firm but rooty path that turns muddy after rain. The Little Ord trail passes a crannog and the Kinord Cross, a ninth-century Pictish slab carved with an interlaced cross. Parkin's Moss crosses raised bog on boardwalk. Dogs should be kept on a short lead near the lochs between April and July.
The Deeside Way runs through the village along the bed of the old railway, which closed in 1966. West towards Ballater it is eleven miles of gentle former-railway gradient through heather and birch, past the Cambus o' May suspension bridge and Tullich kirkyard, the mountains showing more as you go. The former Dinnet station still stands, now the Dinnet Estate office.
The ground here has been worked and fought over for a long time. Two Iron Age settlements at Old Kinord left nine house stances and three souterrains. In 1335 the Battle of Culblean was fought beside Loch Davan, where Sir Andrew de Moray defeated the Earl of Strathbogie after the Earl tried to seize the royal family at Kildrummy. In 1648 the outlaw Gilderoy Macgregor hid stolen cattle in the Vat gorge; he was caught and hanged ten years later. At Black Moss, diatomite was mined from 1876 to make dynamite, paints and pigments until the work stopped in 1919.
Dinnet Old Kirk, a small granite Gothic church with crow-stepped gables and a Celtic-cross finial, was built in 1875 for £700 as a chapel of ease to Aboyne. It has since been decommissioned and converted towards living in; its pews went to Aboyne Parish Church, and the initials of its benefactor, Sir William Cunliffe Brooks, are cut into a gatepier.
Beside the paths from the village car park there is a children's play park, and the reserve grounds have toilets, picnic benches and cycle racks. Kinord Hall takes bookings for local events. The nearest station is at Insch, some way off on the Aberdeen to Inverness line, and the Stagecoach Bluebird 201 stops at Dinnet Crossroads on its way between Aberdeen, Aboyne and Ballater.
One regional guide describes the woods around the reserve as some of Deeside's prettiest, and "a loch clothed in water lilies."