Aberdeen is a granite city in more than one sense. The buildings are built from the local silvery-grey stone and on a sunny day they catch the light well; on a grey day they match the sky rather too precisely. It’s a city with a particular character — reserved, self-sufficient, used to getting on with things — shaped by fishing and then by oil, and with a prosperity that shows in the quality of the restaurants and hotels.
The old fishing village of Footdee at the harbour entrance is the most immediately charming part of the city — a planned fishermen’s community of the early 19th century, a maze of cottages facing inwards away from the sea. The city centre is a standard mix of Victorian grandeur and subsequent decisions of varying quality. The art gallery is good, the university buildings are impressive, and Union Street running through the middle of everything gives the city its backbone.
Balmoral is the royal family’s Scottish estate on Royal Deeside and can be visited in summer when the family isn’t there. The grounds are open; the castle interiors less so. The surrounding Deeside landscape is managed and well-kept in the way that royal estates tend to be.
Dunnottar Castle, on a cliff stack south of Stonehaven, is the kind of thing that stops people on the coastal road. It’s a ruined medieval fortress on a near-island of rock above the North Sea — impressive in outline and, when you get closer, impressively complete in places despite the ruin. Stonehaven itself is a decent harbour town with a good fish and chip shop and a remarkable cliff-edge open air swimming pool, salt water and heated, that has been maintained by the local community.
Cruden Bay to the north has a good beach and the ruin of Slains Castle, which is said to have given Bram Stoker ideas for Dracula — he visited while on holiday and the connection has been commercially encouraged. Peterhead is Scotland’s largest fishing port and a working town without much concession to tourism. Pennan is tiny — a single row of cottages at the foot of red cliffs, used as the setting for the 1983 film Local Hero. Braemar, up in the Cairngorms, has the annual Highland Games attended by the royal family and is a good base for high-country walking.