There is an odd feeling that comes with handing your van over to a mechanic. Walden is not just our transport, he is our bed, our kitchen, our address. With him up on the rack at the Keith Motor Company for a couple of days, we needed something we almost never need on the road: a room with a door and four solid walls.
We went looking for whatever was closest to the garage, expecting a roadside inn and grateful for anything with a kettle. What we found instead was Macdonald Pittodrie House, a stately home tucked into the Aberdeenshire countryside that is, by the standards of two people who sleep in a van, a full and proper castle.
We arrived road-worn and a little sheepish, and the staff could not have been lovelier. There was none of the polite distance a place like this could easily carry. They simply took us in, sorted us out, and made two slightly stranded travellers feel like invited guests. The room was wonderful, generous and warm and full of the quiet grandeur of an old house that has learned how to look after people.
Downstairs there were lounges made for exactly the kind of evening we had, the sort of rooms with deep chairs and a fire and the good sense to let you sit and do nothing at all. After days of car parks and worry, it was a balm. We sank in and stayed put.
The house wears its history openly. Character is everywhere you look, in the panelling and the portraits and the creak of an old floorboard, the accumulated texture of a place that has been standing far longer than anything we are used to calling home. You feel, walking its halls, pleasantly small.
And then, in the morning, a full Scottish breakfast in an elegant dining room, the whole works, unhurried, with the grounds laid out beyond the windows. If there is a better way to start a day that had begun, a few towns over, with a van on one lug nut, we have not yet found it.
We came to Pittodrie House because our van was broken and we had nowhere else to be, and we left thinking it was one of the most perfect stays of the whole trip. That is the strange arithmetic of the road: sometimes the thing that goes wrong hands you a night you would never have thought to book, in a castle you would never have found, looked after by people you are sorry to leave. We will remember Pittodrie House fondly. And then Walden was ready, and we climbed back into our small, moving home and pulled away happy. Grateful for the castle, and just as glad to be back on the road.
