Cruden Bay, Bullers of Buchan and Slains Castle

The walk begins at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel, which retains the same dignified facade as when Bram Stoker, creator of Dracula, took up temporary residence in 1894. The walk heads east to Castlewoods, a calm sanctuary of broadleaved trees in a wind-blasted plateau.

Continuing across flat fields to the clifftops (a blaze of red campion and ragged robin in summer), you reach the tiny isolated hamlet of Bullers O'Buchan. Below the village, the Bullers was once a massive cave whose roof collapsed into a 200-foot chasm where the sea surges through a rock archway. James Boswell described it in 1773 as a 'monstrous cauldron' when he and Dr Samuel Johnson explored it by sea.

The return route skirts Slains Castle, built around 1597 as the ancestral home of the Earls of Erroll. Sold in 1916 and partially dismantled in 1925, its pink granite towers and vaults now form a striking clifftop ruin.

Passing Port Erroll Harbour and crossing the Ladies Bridge over the Water of Cruden, you reach the broad crescent of Cruden Bay — where Tryggve Gran made the first ever flight across the North Sea in July 1914. Bram Stoker frequented these shores, and local legend suggests Cruden Bay was his original landing site for Count Dracula before substituting Whitby.

Acknowledgment: Text derived from the Out and Out Series; Discovering the Countryside on Foot. Pictures courtesy of Wikipedia.