Tarland’s name comes from Turlann, Gaelic for a flat plain, and the village sits in the middle of the Howe of Cromar, a bowl of farmland between the Dee and the Don. A charter of 1683 made it the only market town in Cromar, and the Square is still its centre. Above the Square is a memorial stone to Peter Milne, the ‘Tarland Minstrel’, a fiddler who employed the young James Scott Skinner as his cellist. A kilometre south, Tomnaverie is a recumbent stone circle, with one huge stone laid on its side, and Culsh, a mile east, is a 2,000-year-old underground passage you can crawl into with a torch. The Tarland Show is on the second Saturday in August.
© Richard Webb / Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0
