Angus & The Mearns is an area of North East Scotland that I have great affection for. It was the area I was (for the most part) brought up in.

Its an area of great natural beauty and while it might not have the grandeur and rugged terrain of the West Coast, its beauty is of a far more subtle nature. Huge skies, wide sandy bays, woodland and forest, heather-clad glens leading up into high-domed mountain plateaux.

The area lies between Dundee and Aberdeen on the East side of Scotland and its often ignored by tourists on their way to and from the "honeypots" in the Highlands or Edinburgh.

Maybe that's just as well as it means the area is not inundated with the unwashed hordes and the tat that seems to be part and parcel of mass tourism.

Its small towns have great charm while its climate although cold in the winter is dry and often very sunny. Its farmlands are rich and fertile with a great history of quality produce such as Aberdeen Angus beef, soft fruits, barley for whisky-making and so on. The seas produce a great variety of fish and shellfish and the area is home to the famed "Arbroath Smokie".

It also has a rich history, with prehistoric sites as well as more modern ones, a testament to the colourful cultural background within which modern life carries on.

I spent my childhood years in the towns of Brechin and Montrose, but the other towns in the area are of similar sizes......none very big, each with its own character.

Villages are few and far between in this part of the world, mostly what one would call "ferm touns", collections of dwellings in rural areas, with maybe a church, occassionally a pub and a shop, but not much else.

The coast of Angus runs north from the Firth of Tay to Montrose Bay which sweeps along to the old boundary with what used to be Kincardinshire or "The Mearns". From there a host of indented rocky bays and headlands take you up to Stonehaven. Inland there is a coastal plain up to 8 miles wide fringed by the Sidlaw Hills in Angus and the Pert Hills in the Mearns.

To the northwest of these low hills lies Strathmore, a broad vale up to 12 miles wide in the Brechin area, sweeping down to sea level near Montrose and running north and east into the The Howe of The Mearns towards Stonehaven. This great valley is one of the most fertile areas in Scotland, the soil rich, reddish and intensively farmed.

Beyond Strathmore and The Howe, lie the heather clad Grampian Mountains rising to over 3000 feet with glens running up into them all along the boundary with the lowlands. These glens are today the most remote and sparsely populated parts of Angus and The Mearns and when the winter snows come they are often isolated for many days and weeks.

The Hill of Wirren above Kirriemuir