Royal Deeside
Royal Deeside
is the upper part of the valley of the river Dee, which rises in the Cairngorm Mountains and, after 140 km or so, flows into the North Sea in Aberdeen. It is part of Great Britain’s largest national park, the Cairngorm national park, and very picturesque, with mountains (often covered by snow until early summer), forests and moors, and sedate little towns such as Ballater, Banchory, or Braemar.
The area gets its “Royal” moniker from the fact that Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, greatly esteemed the place; in the mid-19th century they purchased Balmoral Castle, which since then serves the royal family as a modest holiday residence in the Scottish highlands. Balmoral, incidentally, is the private property of the monarch and not – like, e.g., Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle – part of “the Crown”, i.e., owned by the
institution
of the monarchy and provided to the incumbent for their use as a residence.
From “Anselm's Notes on Dances”, by Anselm Lingnau
(Used by permission.)