The road north takes us through a landscape muted by frost, the hills hazy beneath the milky winter sun. My friend Anna and I are heading for the Cairngorms in a red campervan called Rowan, which we picked up from Big Sky Campers, just across the Forth from Edinburgh. It’s an appropriate name, for we see the red berries of rowan trees everywhere we go, shining so brightly it’s as though someone’s strung tiny clusters of baubles on the silver-barked branches.
At 1,748 square miles, the Cairngorms is the UK’s largest national park, stretching from Perthshire in the south to Moray in the north; mountains rear up just after we pass the riverside village of Dunkeld, armed with pastries from Aran Bakery. When I’ve been up here before, I’ve only skirted the edge of the park, sticking close to the hiking-shop-crammed town of Aviemore and seeing the hills – cloaked in snow at Easter and resplendent in purple heather in summer – from afar.
