Exploring the Snow Roads. Este artículo no está disponible.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.

A native of Banff, Scotland, David M. Addison is a graduate of Aberdeen University. As well as essays in various publications, he has written several books, mainly about his travels. As well as a short spell teaching English as a foreign language in Poland when the Solidarity movement was at its height, he spent a year (1978-79) as an exchange teacher in Montana. He regards his decision to apply for the exchange as one of the best things he ever did, for not only did it give him the chance to travel extensively in the US and Canada but during the course of the year he made a number of enduring friendships. His award-winning An Innocent Abroad is the first in a planned trilogy about this extraordinary year while the second, Still Innocent Abroad, was published in 2016. Since taking early retirement (he is not as old as he looks), he has more time but less money to indulge his unquenchable thirst for travel (and his wife would say for Cabernet Sauvignon and malt whisky). He is doing his best to spend the children's inheritance by travelling as far and wide and as often as he can. In 2015 An Innocent Abroad received an award in the Bookbzz Prize Writer Competition for Biography and Memoir. David's most recent travels took him to the Highlands of Scotland, exploring Visit Scotland's recently unveiled NC500, dubbed "Scotland's Route 66", and rated one of the top five most scenic road journeys in the world. For more details about David and his work, please visit his website at www.davidmaddison.org.