Glenlivet

Thai cooking in a scattered glen

The Croft Inn has ten tables, seats about thirty-two, and serves beef massaman curry in a Scottish glen better known for whisky. Chris Gordon Brown runs the front of house; his husband, Nat, cooks. They arrived from Dorset and opened the place in November 2021, which was a change of pace for Chris, who had spent twenty-four years, seven months, three weeks and one day driving trains on the London Underground. Nat grows kale, cabbage, spring onions, herbs and edible flowers for the kitchen, and turns local estate duck into spring rolls. Pheasant sometimes finds its way into a green curry. There is chicken satay and prawn tempura, and pad Thai if you order it ahead. Board games are out on the tables and nobody is hurried through a meal. "Everybody's a VIP," Nat says. "I want to make them feel special." Dogs are welcome.

Do not come to Glenlivet expecting a village square. It is a dispersed place, scattered farms and hamlets spread along the River Livet with no single centre to walk to, hemmed by spruce and pine plantation, open heather moor and the Ladder Hills. The Bochel rises over it all.

Trails, coffee and legal whisky

Another place to eat is the café at BikeGlenlivet, the trail centre. It does home-cooked breakfasts, brunches and lunches, cakes and ice cream, with coffee from the Glen Lyon Roastery, and keeps a small stock of bike spares and merchandise. The trails themselves range from blue trails suitable for families and less-experienced riders, with names like Bazza's Berms and Underthinker, plus a skills area and pump track, up to a red route that climbs Carn Daimh. Families and less-experienced riders can stay near the café; the jump lines are best left to people who know what they are doing.

The distillery sits down the B9008 at Ballindalloch, with a visitor shop, a licensed bar, tours and tastings. Its founder, George Smith, learned to distil illicitly in this valley when doing so was against the law. After George IV asked for illegal Glenlivet during his 1822 visit to Scotland, Smith rode to Elgin in 1824 and took out the parish's first legal licence, a decision that made him enough enemies that he carried two flintlock pistols. Charles Dickens later wrote to a friend recommending "rare old Glenlivet."

Hidden Catholic heritage

The glen kept other secrets before whisky. At Scalan, a clandestine Catholic seminary trained around a hundred priests between 1716 and 1799, its staff and students forced into hiding in the 1720s and the original cottage burned by the Duke of Cumberland's men after Culloden. The building that replaced it in 1767 was made to look like a farmhouse. Up at Chapeltown, the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, built in 1897 to a design by John Kinross and paid for by the Marquess of Bute, has a stencilled red chancel ceiling and an altar front with panels of angels playing instruments.

Walks through history

You can walk the history straight. Waymarked routes run from the short Scalan Heritage Trail at 2.8 miles to the six-mile Livet Path and the eight-mile Battle of Glenlivet walk, which ends at a clearing and an interpretation panel where the Catholic earls beat a much larger royal army in 1594. Take a map on the moorland routes; the ground can get wet.

Travel, ruins and dark skies

The bus is the 368, Tomintoul to Keith by way of Dufftown, weekdays only. Blairfindy Castle, a ruined Gordon tower house, stands half a mile from the distillery along a waymarked path. After dark there is not much to do but look up, and here that is the point: the sky over Tomintoul and Glenlivet is a certified dark sky park, and on a clear night the dark skies make the stars especially vivid.