Duncan Harley

The flight path into Aberdeen’s Dyce Airport offers spectacular aerial views of the Aberdeenshire landscape. Hills and lochs appear quite different when viewed from ten thousand feet and even familiar features, such as Bennachie, can take on a completely new and unexpected form. One such landscape feature is Place of Origin in the village of Kemnay. Conceived as a piece of landscape art and officially opened by HRH the Duke of Kent in 2006, the sculpture addresses the long and important history of granite quarrying in Aberdeenshire. In its heyday, the quarry at Paradise Hill employed 400 men with much of the quarried stone going to make iconic structures such as Sydney Harbour Bridge and Marischal College in Aberdeen. Ten years in the making, the Place of Origin artwork takes the form of a series of woodland walks and stone built features culminating in a high vantage point where visitors can appreciate the sheer scale of the old quarry workings within the surrounding ...

The snagging list for the next book pounds on. Off for an edit, the new tome – to the best of my knowledge – has but three embarrassing bloopers. Not so last night’s blog about Dracul, which had just the two. Fortunately, both Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker were forgiving and, following a wee hint, suitable amendments were made to the inaccurate portions of the piece. That’s the essence of the blogging problem really. Bloggers generally have no editor. You write, publish and generally wing it. Unless readers take umbrage, or better still make suggestions, the blogosphere relies on feedback and hopefully kind words. I don’t as yet have a cover image for the new book, but here – in the hope of some pre-publication appreciation – is an extract … “In his circa AD 98 biography of his father-in-law Agricola, Tacitus records amongst other things the victory of the Roman general Agricola’s armies over the Barbarian hordes of Caledonia. Much has been made of the fact that, although...