Historic Places to Stay in Aberdeenshire

Royal Deeside has been a favourite with the royal family since Queen Victoria fell for Balmoral, and the glens around it are full of buildings from the great estates. There are hunting lodges and farm steadings, schoolhouses and farmhouses, and cottages built for the people who kept the big houses running. Many have been carefully restored, and now you can stay in them.

We've picked out our favourites. There's an ancient stone house that was an inn for centuries, and a hunting lodge begun in 1746 that Queen Victoria rode over to from Balmoral. You can stay in the early 1900s home of an estate's butler, with its original doors still in place, or a granite cottage in a walled garden that was once the head gardener's. There's a farm workers' bothy with the old chicken coop at one end, and a Victorian steading whose big window sits where the tractors once came in.