Landscape in brown, orange and yellow

We've just returned from a cold but mainly sunny week near Aboyne in eastern Scotland. Regular readers of this blog will know that we visit this area frequently. This time, we walked, visited favourite haunts and met up with friends, but above all, we enjoyed the wonderful autumn colours. This year seemed especially beautiful. The bracken (not usually my favourite plant) combined with the beech, silver birch and larch trees to give the most extraordinary range of browns, oranges and yellows everywhere we looked.

I took, as usual, lots of photos. The birch trees especially caught my eye following those we saw in western Canada in September but the coppers and oranges of the beeches were equally magnificent. First of all is a group of photos taken while walking around Loch Kinord in the Muir of Dinnet National Nature Reserve, between Aboyne and Balleter. It was a lovely 5 mile walk which we were lucky enough to do on a wonderful cloudless day:

On the last day of our visit, we visited the grounds of Crathes Castle, a magnificent National Trust for Scotland property east of Banchory. Just as you enter the grounds, there is a beautiful pool on the right, always good for photographs of reflections on a still day. On this occasion, with the sun shining again, hardly a breath of wind and the browns, oranges and yellows of autumn, it was unmissable. 

Finally, as we left to come south over the Cairn O'Mount, the weather was cloudier, but the browns were no less striking.

We won't be back in eastern Scotland now till the spring. We always go south with regret as we miss the wildness of the mountains but family is too far away and the climate less kind. Our first visit of the year, usually at the beginning of April, is always something to look forward to.