The Intrepid Cowboy Cyclist in his Wonderful Bicycle Leap through Space
One of the greatest pleasures of writing about the North-east involves the discovery of the strange and unexpected. I mean, who would have thought that the devil had a wife and that – while she was wandering around the village of Midmar frightening the locals – he lobbed a giant boulder at her. He missed his spouse by a mile of course and the rock now sits in the policies of nearby Tillycairn Castle at Cluny. Seemingly, and this is according to no less a source than Victorian writer Alex Inkson McConnachie, ‘the credulous may yet see the mark of the Devil’s hand upon it’. To top the Devil’s unlikely feat, Scottish super-hero and revolutionary William Wallace seemingly chucked a 20-ton rock all the way from Mither Tap to Oldmeldrum, a distance of some six miles. Seemingly his aim was good, but the missile, known as Wallace’s Putting Stone, overshot his intended target and now sits just north of the Hill of Barra. There are many more tales such as this in my A-Z of Curious Aberdeens...