Jacqui Cooper (Host of LoveTravelScotland& JCooperTravels) & Yvette MacDonald (Scottish Entrepreneur & Expert) are hosting travels around Scotland & visits to Castles and the Heritage Trails. In this ongoing series we are will be visiting Castles in all regions of Scotland. We will also be interviewing individuals within the local areas of the featured castles.
Cathes Castle - Banchory, Scotland
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Crathes Castle (pronounced /ˈkræθɪs/KRATH-iss) is a 16th-century castle near Banchory in the Aberdeenshire region of Scotland. This harled castle was built by the Burnetts of Leys and was held in that family for almost 400 years. The castle and grounds are owned and managed by the National Trust for Scotland and are open to the public.
Crathes sits on land given as a gift to the Burnetts of Ley family by King Robert the Bruce in 1323
The castle estate contains 530 acres (2.1 km2) of woodlands and fields, including nearly 4 acres (1.6 ha) of walled garden. Within the walled garden are gravel paths with surrounding specimen plants mostly in herbaceous borders. Many of the plants are labelled with taxonomic descriptions. There is also a grass croquet court at a higher terraced level within the walled garden. Ancient topiary hedges of Irish yew dating from 1702 separate the gardens into eight themed areas. Crathes and its grounds are open to tourists throughout the year. A visitors centre provides information about the castle and its surroundings. There is a tea shop on site and a car park for any size of car.
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World’s oldest lunar calendar discovered in Scottish field
Archaeologists excavating Warren Field, an area next to Crathes Castle in Aberdeenshire from 2004-06 uncovered 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months. Unusual crop marks had been spotted from the air by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) which led to the dig being started.
Dave Cowley, aerial survey projects manager at RCAHMS, said: “We have been taking photographs of the Scottish landscape for nearly 40 years, recording thousands of archaeological sites that would never have been detected from the ground…Warren Field stands out as something special, however. It is remarkable to think that our aerial survey may have helped to find the place where time itself was invented.”
Archaeologists believe now they have discovered the world’s oldest lunar “calendar” in the world.
A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago.
Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at Birmingham, led the analysis project.
He said: “The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East …In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself.”
The Mesolithic “calendar” is thousands of years older than previous known formal time-measuring monuments created in Mesopotamia.
The pit alignment also aligns on the Midwinter sunrise to provided the hunter-gatherers with an annual “astronomic correction” in order to better follow the passage of time and changing seasons.
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THE GREEN LADY OF CRATHES CASTLE
To read about The Green Lady, click here.
The Green Lady always appears in the same room, pacing back and forth from the fireplace, sometimes cradling an infant in her arms. Queen Victoria is counted among visitors to the castle who have witnessed her, but her true identity remains shrouded in mystery.
To visit the Cathes Castle Location, click here
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