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Places to visit in Scotland

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Castles, beaches, gardens, standing stones. Choose one, or scroll down for every place to visit.

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Quiz23 hours ago

In 1902 John Dewar & Sons, the Perth firm whose family built Aberfeldy distillery, trademarked the name of a way to drink whisky. Which?

Place of the day22 hours ago

Lochbuie Stone Circle.

Mull's only stone circle, in a field below Ben Buie at Lochbuie, with three standing stones at different distances from the ring.

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Did you know22 hours ago

In 1892 Tommy Dewar set off round the world to sell his family's whisky, and threw bottles into the sea along the way.

Tommy was one of the two sons of John Dewar who built the family's distillery at Aberfeldy, in Perthshire. He left in August 1892 on a sales tour that lasted two years. Among his less usual ideas was to throw bottles overboard with notes inside, telling whoever found one to get in touch with Dewar's for a whisky by way of reward. By the time he came home he had appointed 32 agents in 26 countries and opened an office in New York, and his travel journals became a book, A Ramble Round the Globe, in 1894.

An old Dewar's advertising painting in the museum at Dewar's Aberfeldy distillery.See Dewar's Aberfeldy · Perthshire
Today22 hours agoFifeSt Andrews CastleAttractionInvernessCawdor CastleAttractionEdinburghEdinburgh CastleAttractionIsle of SkyeDunvegan CastleAttractionAberdeenshireDrum CastleAttractionAberdeenshireHuntly CastleAttraction

Today calls for a castle.

7° and cloudy across Scotland. Dry enough for the ramparts and the walk round the walls.

See them all
Did you know21 hours ago

You can tell who the lords of Lochranza were afraid of by which way the front door faces.

The MacSweens, who probably built the first castle here in the late 1200s, put their main door high up in the seaward wall, reached by a wooden stair or ladder. Everything that could threaten them came up this loch. Three hundred years later, when one of the Montgomerie earls of Eglinton rebuilt the place as a tower house, the entrance was moved: it now faced the land, and it sat at ground level. The sea had stopped being the thing to watch.

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In Issue 13The magazine

Into the Gloaming

Inspired by her new book, Gloaming: Folklore, Recipes and Crafts to Spark Glimmers of Joy in the Darker Months, Rosie Steer explores how our ancestors learned to find the light and embrace the darkness in autumn and winter.

Read it in Issue 13
In Angus21 hours ago

Bonfest in Kirriemuir and Summer's End in Brechin are both finalists in this year's UK Festival Awards.

Bonfest, the AC/DC weekend in Kirriemuir run by a local music charity, is up for a community award. Summer's End, which began at Brechin Castle in August, is shortlisted for Susan Boyle's set with the Red Hot Chilli Pipers, and the winners are named on 1 December.

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From Issue 10 of Hidden Scotland magazineIssue 1020 hours ago

Craft and Soul

Hugo Macdonald and James Stevens on Bard, their shop and gallery on the shore at Leith, where Scottish craft and design are chosen for the stories behind them.

Read the story
Did you know20 hours ago

In 1818 a former Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, Lord Erskine, rode to Gretna Green dressed as a woman to marry his housekeeper.

Thomas Erskine, once the most senior judge in the land, was in his late sixties when he set off north with Sarah Buck, his housekeeper. To slip past anyone who might stop them, he travelled in women's clothes. His son raced after them and arrived at Gretna Green, the first village over the Scottish border in Dumfries and Galloway, too late: the couple were married on 12 October 1818. The story is told in the Famous Blacksmiths Shop, where old coaches still stand.

An old coach in the Famous Blacksmiths Shop museum at Gretna Green.See Gretna Green · Dumfries and Galloway
Easter Ross19 hours ago

In 1742 the flagstone roof of Fearn Abbey, the Lamp of the North, fell in during a service.

Fearn Abbey, in Easter Ross, was known as the Lamp of the North. The community moved to this site in 1238. In 1742 the flagstone roof fell in during a service and nearly fifty people died, and the church was rebuilt in 1772. No services have been held here since 2023.

Find out more about Fearn Abbey
Quiz19 hours ago

Springbank distillery in Campbeltown was officially founded in 1828. What had its site been used for before that?

In Aberdeenshire19 hours ago

Deeside Antiques Emporium in Kincardine O'Neil, on Royal Deeside, fills a former church with antiques, old books and props from television dramas.

The Press and Journal went inside and found stags' heads, a glass decanter that glows green under ultraviolet light and a giant bull's head from The Winter King standing in the yard. It opens five days a week and is closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

Read about it
Did you know18 hours ago

Mills Observatory, on Balgay Hill in Dundee, is billed as the only full-time public observatory in Britain, and its dome is made of papier-mâché.

John Mills, a Dundee linen and twine manufacturer and a keen amateur astronomer, left money for an observatory that anyone could use. A site on the summit of Dundee Law was planned first, but the First World War stopped the project, and the observatory finally opened on Balgay Hill on 28 October 1935. Its papier-mâché dome, made by Grubb Parsons of Newcastle, is still turned by hand on its original wheel and cog system. Inside, the telescope is a 10-inch Cooke refractor first built in 1871, older than the building itself, and there is a small planetarium too.

Dundee and the River Tay from above.See Mills Observatory · Dundee