Spittal of Glenshee

Mountain Setting and Estate Dining

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.

Food stops are scattered along the glen, so plan where to eat. The old Spittal of Glenshee Hotel burned down in 2014, leaving little accommodation in the settlement. 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. Its sample dinner menu ranges from pheasant, mushroom and truffle pithivier and Persie Gin-cured sea trout to venison loin with fondant potato and miso-braised celeriac, with brandy-soaked raspberry panna cotta for dessert.

Cafes and Walking Routes

For a café meal, drive north on the A93 to the snowsports centre, where Tea@TheShee is licensed and serves breakfasts, pies, soups, burgers and traybakes, with meat from Braemar butcher Neil Menzies and 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 welcomes dogs.

Walking routes start in and around Spittal. The Cateran Trail passes through: eight miles from Kirkmichael over An Lairig, then fourteen miles on to Kirkton of Glenisla past Forter Castle and Auchintaple Loch. For a shorter outing, the Last Glaciers circuit runs three kilometres from the village past kame terraces, kettle holes, moraines and the four-stone Grave of Diarmid. The four-mile Glenlochsie Lodge walk begins at the estate hotel driveway in Glen Lochsie, reaches the lodge ruins and returns along the bed of a railway built into the hillside in the 1920s. After heavy rain, follow the railway line both ways to avoid difficult river crossings.

Church, Standing Stone and Place Name

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.

Roads, Bridge and Public Transport

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 is the nearest railhead. Ember's E11 links Spittal of Glenshee Road End with Blairgowrie, Dundee and Aberdeen; the Spittal stop requires advance booking.

The Summer Chairlift

The Cairnwell chairlift carries summer visitors up the hill when weather allows, and dogs can ride too.