Ben Gulabin rises straight out of the village to 806 metres, and from the south-east it shows the profile that gave it its name: a snout, the snouty mountain. Spittal sits at its foot, at the head of Glen Shee, where Glen Lochsie and Gleann Beag come together and their streams become the Shee Water. The slopes around you are steep and glacier-cut.
Eating here takes a little planning, since the options sit at different points along the glen rather than in one street. The old Spittal of Glenshee Hotel burned down in 2014, and accommodation in the settlement has been thin ever since. Dalmunzie Castle Hotel, up a side road into Glen Lochsie, is a turreted, crow-stepped shooting lodge in Scots Baronial style on a 6,500-acre estate. A published sample menu lists dishes like pheasant, mushroom and truffle pithivier, Persie Gin-cured sea trout, and venison loin with fondant potato and miso-braised celeriac, finishing on brandy-soaked raspberry panna cotta.
For something plainer, drive north on the A93 to the snowsports centre, where Tea@TheShee is licensed and does breakfasts, pies, soups, burgers and traybakes, with the meat coming from Braemar butcher Neil Menzies and the baking from Tower Bakery in Perth. Further down the glen, the Glenshee Café pairs homemade bakes and hot drinks with a gift shop, a small farm shop and a tourist-information point, and it welcomes dogs.
The walking is the reason most people come. The Cateran Trail passes through: eight miles from Kirkmichael climbing over the pass at An Lairig at 648 metres, then fourteen miles on to Kirkton of Glenisla past Forter Castle and Auchintaple Loch. If that is too much, the Last Glaciers circuit is a three-kilometre loop straight from the village that reads the ice out of the landscape—kame terraces, kettle holes and moraines—and passes the Grave of Diarmid, a four-stone setting on a moraine tied by legend to a hunter killed by a wild boar. From Dalmunzie, a four-mile route climbs to the ruined Glenlochsie Lodge and comes back along the formation of a narrow-gauge railway. Sir Archibald Birkmyre built that line in 1920 to carry shooting parties up the glen; ghillies drove the oil-engined locomotive, and once the house became a hotel in the 1940s guests rode it too. It no longer runs, but you can walk the bed.
Glenshee Church, plain and rubble-built with a bellcote, went up in 1831 on the site of an earlier chapel of ease. Set into its churchyard wall is a bronze memorial carrying twenty-seven names from Persie and Glenshee, moved here from the disused Cray Church in 2009. About seventeen metres west of the church stands a prehistoric stone, 1.8 metres high, its edges cut with shallow semicircular notches that no one has been able to explain. The village name itself records a hospice, an inn for travellers on the Blairgowrie–Braemar road; the earliest written form found is from 1542, and Glen Shee has been read as either the glen of peace or the glen of fairies.
The A93 still climbs north over the Cairnwell, with snow gates at Spittal that close the road in bad weather, and the current route bypasses the village and its old bridge. The notorious double hairpin, the Devil's Elbow, lay further up the climb on the road's former line; the Earl of Dundee recalled attempting it in the House of Lords in 1968: "I got so flummoxed that I went into reverse." Below the village, Glenshee Bridge—single-arch, hump-backed and still carrying traffic—was built for the military road between 1749 and 1763. No railway reaches Spittal; Pitlochry, about thirty-one miles off, is the nearest station, and Stagecoach's 71 comes up from Blairgowrie sparingly enough that you should check before you rely on it.
In summer the Cairnwell chairlift runs too, weather permitting, for anyone who would rather be carried up the hill than walk it, and it will take your dog.