People have farmed the straths of the Spey and the Dee for thousands of years, but the high Cairngorms were always a place to cross rather than settle. In the Middle Ages, Badenoch, whose name means the drowned land, belonged to the Comyns, who held the lordship from the early 1200s until their fall in the wars of Robert the Bruce. In 1371 Robert II granted it to his son, Alexander Stewart, remembered as the Wolf of Badenoch. Badenoch passed to the Gordons, Earls of Huntly, in 1452, while the Grants became the great family of Strathspey, with their seat at Castle Grant. Then came the visitors. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought Balmoral in 1852, and the Highlands became the height of fashion. The railway reached Strathspey in 1863, and Aviemore grew quickly once it became a junction in 1898. The first chairlift on Cairn Gorm opened in 1961, the Aviemore Centre opened in 1966, and the funicular railway followed in 2001. Isabel Frances Grant's Highland Folk Museum, founded in 1935, found a home at Kingussie and later Newtonmore, keeping the old ways of Highland life on show. In 2003 the Cairngorms became a national park, and in 2010 it grew to take in Blair Atholl and the Spittal of Glenshee.
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