
THEY TALK of Aberdeenshire’s historic Castle Trail which features the grandest and most important castles of the north-east. As I drove over Garvock Hill above Laurencekirk, which links the Howe of the Mearns with the coastal plain, it occurred to me that there’s another castle trail right here on our doorstep. (more…)

HOW CAN you think up new things to say? It’s a question that I was asked again by a friend who had just discovered the Man with Two Dogs website. The answer is always the same – I don’t have to think up new things to say, Nature does it for me. (more…)

THERE ARE times when a dog in the countryside, especially one as rumbustious as Inka, can be a drawback. At this time of year the focus is on nesting and breeding and it’s often possible, if you go quietly, to get closer than usual to a lot of wildlife. Going quietly isn’t really an option with Inka, but there’s still plenty to be seen. (more…)

IT’S FUNNY what trips the mind and releases a flood of memories. Last Saturday it was an ordinary egg box. Well, maybe not all that ordinary, for it was a ducal egg box. I don’t know if it had the ducal coat of arms painted on the lid because the lid was open and I couldn’t see the top side, but it was in a ducal residence. (more…)

I TOOK it badly when winter interrupted the summer we were enjoying. There was plenty warning about the snow so it was no surprise when it came last Tuesday, but the steep fall in temperature was still a bit of a shock to the system. (more…)

THREE PAINTED Ladies on the Kirrie Dumplings – were they three colourful girls on a feeding frenzy? It’s the sort of remark my father would have made for he was born and spent his early years in Kirriemuir. (more…)

IT’S ONLY mid-March, for goodness sake, but it’s been so warm you’d think it was mid-April. Mind you, it’s been nippy when I’ve taken the dogs out last thing at night, and when we go out again in the morning there’s frost on the grass and on the cars. (more…)

THE FINE weather is all the encouragement I need to jump in the car and take a drive round some of the roads I haven’t been on since autumn. The countryside is looking brown. Farmers are ploughing the last of last year’s stubble fields and preparing the land for the spring sowing – there’s a lot of activity. (more…)

THE FIRST real adventure stories I read were Kidnapped and Treasure Island and Robert Louis Stevenson was one of my earliest literary heroes. He was a remarkable writer, not just for the output he crammed into his twenty-year writing career but for the range of genres he mastered – novels, plays, essays, musical composition and poetry. (more…)

OUR COUNTRYSIDE – by which I mean the countryside familiar to Courier readers – is criss-crossed by a web of minor roads taking you wherever you need to go. A favourite of mine is the Wide Open which crosses the ridge of hills separating Marykirk in the Howe of the Mearns from St Cyrus on the coastal plain. (more…)