Glen Affric

The Scots pines here descend directly from the ancient Caledonian Forest that once blanketed Scotland — their bark smells of vanilla and resin, and their canopy filters the light to something like walking through amber. Glen Affric is Scotland before roads, before agriculture, before everything except trees, water and the animals that never left.

Glen Affric is routinely named the most scenic glen in Scotland, and the claim rests on real ingredients: native Caledonian pinewood, clear river pools deep enough to swim and clear enough to count the gravel, and a chain of lochs reflecting the mountains around them. Red squirrels, pine martens and golden eagles share the canopy in one of Britain's last genuinely wild woodlands, and the pinewood is actively growing — conservation charities and Forestry and Land Scotland are regenerating a forest that centuries of grazing and clearance had reduced to fragments, so this is restoration you can walk through. Way out west, a two-day walk through the glen reaches Alltbeithe, ranked among the most isolated inhabited buildings in Scotland, never once approached by road.