Of this wild and splendid moor, Elizabeth had once said: “It’s an ideal place to hibernate for a few moments, when you lead a constantly moving life…” And it is true that the place seems removed from the world. The Scottish police have also done things well. Thousands of onlookers come from the neighborhood with their bouquet of flowers in homage to the deceased queen, dozens of photographers wearing huge telephoto lenses have access to nothing but a gate behind which extends a vast park and forests. A sort of Balmoral without the castle. A theater Balmoral offered to popular emotion but which preserves the intimacy of “royal” who have been coming and going to greet the body since Thursday.
The real refuge in which the queen spent so many summers and until part of her honeymoon is invisible. Protected on one side by a turbulent river, the Dee, where you can fly fish, and on the other by immense forests of pines and birches, it is impossible to guess only its silhouette. Up close, we bump into the trees. From a distance, the gaze is as if drawn by large soft green meadows where beautiful white sheep and enormous Angus graze, these solid Scottish oxen that look like they have come out of a 19th century painting.e century.
It took a farmer to show us a path full of ruts, climbing a hill covered in purple heather, so that we could finally see this legendary castle from above. It is a majestic neo-Gothic fortress flanked by a square crenellated tower, made for lords and ghosts. A kind of overwhelming, magnificent and mineral splendor, in absolute harmony with the untamed nature that surrounds it and extends as far as the eye can see. “There is such a sense of freedom there. You can walk for hours without meeting anyone, with the impression of having an infinity of possibilities in front of you”had entrusted the queen to the BBC in one of the very rare documentaries authorized by the palace, Elizabeth R, that half of Britons watched when it was broadcast on television in 1992.
Nothing has changed since. The royal family announced a few months ago that Balmoral Castle was going to be equipped with solar panels. But for the rest, the Sovereign has always confessed a certain fascination in having preserved the building and its park as they had been desired by Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Consort Albert, when they bought, in 1852, in Aberdeenshire, in the northeast of Scotland, this huge estate of more than 20,000 hectares.
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