Natural highs in the Highlands — Scotland’s new wellness experience | Travel
There are some words and phrases you need to learn before a trip to the frosty Scottish Highlands in autumn: “dreich” (rainy, miserable) and “drookit” (extremely wet) are the obvious ones, and then there’s “chanking” (very cold) and “blowing a hoolie” (very windy).
Last week, I got to use another one: “pure Baltic” (so cold you feel like you’re in an entirely different latitude). It was the result of jumping into Aberdeenshire’s pewter River Dee for a swim when the water was a bum-clenching 5C. In an instant it made everything shrivel and my bones squeak. Then, after a sudden exhale, I was momentarily paralysed. Good job there was a Highlander’s first aid kit — a warming flask of lemony whisky — to revive me on the riverbank.
I’d come to try out a new wellness experience in the Cairngorms, which promised foraging, meditative hiking, breathwork, cold-water therapy and (mostly) healthy food and drink over the course of three days. I wanted to see whether I could warm to wellness in the wild to help declutter my scrambled city brain – and with hot toddies as well as plenty of other perks to ease in gently, it seemed hard not to buy in.
The Fife Arms
SIM CANETTY-CLARKE
“Switch off. Be present. Forget the tether to email,” our wilderness guide, Annie Armstrong, had instructed before the swim. “Knowing the world around us better helps us to navigate our everyday lives — that’s the point of all of this.” I hoped that it would work.
My journey of self-discovery all began the day before with a reflective afternoon’s landscape-drawing on a rocky spur above the woods and landed estates of Braemar. At this time of year in the Highlands, magic washes into the glens and everyone becomes obsessed with their colour — and no wonder. Leaves popped orange and rust-red, heralding autumn’s arrival. Black and gold birch trees sparkled, and at our feet lay blue-berried juniper bushes and the kinds of toadstools that could have inspired the fairytales. Sniffing in the cold air, Annie introduced our group of four to scabious, a cotton ball-topped wildflower the colour of Buckfast, and hallucinogenic bog myrtle, a lamb’s lettuce-like shrub. “The oil [from the plants] is ideal for scaring off midges,” she added. Not that we needed it at this frigid time of year, but the point was it encouraged us to slow down, to absorb every detail, and relax in the process.
Fittingly, considering the art session, I was staying in a Nature and Poetry room at the Fife Arms, a luxury hotel in Braemar with an Outlander-on-opioids aesthetic thanks to its proprietors, the international art dealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth.
The hotel is filled with artfully cluttered Victoriana, and every room gives less-than-subtle hints as to the Wirths’ expertise: the lobby is centred around a steely-jawed Lucian Freud portrait and Robert Burns-motif chimney piece; the lounge has a Pablo Picasso; the Clunie Dining Room is bookended by a colossal oil-on-canvas by Pieter Brueghel the Younger and a taxidermy stag. Over breakfast here, I was told by staff that Judi Dench, a regular, orders the dippy eggs. But I got my teeth into the broccoli and onion fritters with sriracha yoghurt. It was invigorating — and even better after cream porridge with a nip of Royal Lochnagar whisky. To aid digestion, of course.
The River Dee on the Mar Lodge Estate near Braemar
ALAMY
The sun was filtering through the pines later that morning when, before our big River Dee moment, Annie led us on a looping nature walk around Ballochbuie Forest on the nearby Balmoral Estate. Rumour had it that the new Prince of Wales was somewhere shooting stags, but we were headed instead to where the late Queen frequently escaped the world around her for a picnic — the Honka Hut, a log cabin that was a gift from the people of Finland.
Then, we picked a path to the spirit-soaring Falls of Garbh Allt and its ornate iron bridge, constructed for Queen Victoria in 1878, three decades after the royals became Deeside residents. I don’t know my royal history, but she might well have gone wild swimming here too — Annie said she plans to take groups here in summer. The air smelled of pine resin and I was conscious of life in motion all around us — bellowing stags and ghostly ospreys moved just beyond our vision. Perhaps my brain was adjusting.
On the last day, beneath storm clouds shielding an invisible sun, we entered the trees for the last time, joining “human rewilder” Lisa Krause for a breathing session in a bell tent laden with sheepskins. Have you ever tried to tune yourself into the mindset of a forest? We stayed motionless and horizontal, making our breath louder than our thoughts, filling the unused spaces of our lungs with gulps of pine-scented air. It was an attempt to stimulate our parasympathetic nervous system to relax our body, slow our heart rate and lower our blood pressure — or so Lisa explained. And yet it was dizzying and finger…
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