Exploring the Snow Roads

Starting at Blairgowrie and proceeding through Royal Deeside and the Cairngorms National Park, the 90-mile-long Snow Roads Scenic Route ends at Grantown-on-Spey. It features the highest main road in the UK and, along the way, it offers the traveller some of Scotland's most spectacular scenery.

What this book seeks to do is to take a look at what lies behind the incredible vistas, to tell the story of the people who once inhabited this ancient landscape, from the Picts to the more recent past.

It's a story with a huge cast of disparate characters. Kings and queens; dukes and duchesses; earls and lairds. Criminals and conmen; chieftains and caterans. Road builders and railway builders; radical ministers and rhymers. Saints and smugglers; storytellers and songsmiths. Jacobites and Redcoats. Pioneers and heather priests.

As testimony to their times, the landscape is dotted with standing stones and stone circles, castles and churches, old military roads and railways, holy sites and battle sites. And associated with them are myths, legends, and folklore - tales galore of love and death and derring-do, murder and ghostly goings-on.

Appreciate the scenery for its own sake, but you will get much more from your trip, see the Snow Roads Scenic Route through more informed eyes, if you read this book first, or take it with you on your travels.

And appropriately enough for a route with snow in its title, the author goes off piste as he visits other places of interest which should not be missed - and where he comes across even more astonishing tales to tell.