"Atholl Palace is a wonderful place to visit. The staff are very helpful and polite, nothing is a problem! The food is amazing and the rooms are made up daily. This is great for either a weekend break or stay for a week. Great for couples or families. The spa is also brilliant and relaxing. Book now and stay, you won't be disappointed!"
March 2006
The tail-end of February saw us, finally, complete the upgrade of the path network. It seems to have been going on forever( actually merely a month and 1000m) but from comments we have had from regular walkers in the woodlands, the majority see these improvements as a major boost to the outdoor facilities which are being provided within the Palace grounds.
Yet another component of our forestry management plan was to clear the bank above the old boating pond and restore this, potentially, lovely area to a silver birch bank. As always with rhodie clearing it was hard work and it leaves the resulting woodland looking a bit battle-scarred but we are confident that when the new buds of spring emerge and the undergrowth begins to “green-up” it will prove to be a major improvement to our woodland resource.
Gardening-wise we haven’t been doing much, in the traditional sense, work has been more targeted towards clearing, renovating and preparing areas for planting at a later stage. No area typifies this approach more than the proposed Japanese-style water garden, one of the director’s most innovative garden projects. Multitudinous amounts of silt have been moved, several hundred tons of whinestone brought in and….finally we have a meandering lade with small rills to give the calming effect of “tinkling” water which we were after. Planting won’t begin in this area until next winter so if you venture down to an area that looks to have potential, you will be in the “proposed” Japanese water garden.
And when we thought all our civil engineering works were over for the year and Kenny and I could return to some “gentle weeding” we had a major landslide on the 8th of March. Several hundred, possibly thousand, tons of banking collapsed into the Kinnaird burn taking some major trees with it. The cause, a fractured Victorian water main, took a bit of finding, as it was 10 feet down under a road, and even more sorting. As I write at the end of the week all those involved are still shell-shocked at the effort required to bring the situation under control…..but under control it is and , by early summer, hotel guests will be enjoying a walk along our new pathways, listening to the birds in the trees and they will be blissfully unaware of the power that water can have when it breaks loose from human constraint. Enjoy the coming spring, we will! Innes
acer.jpg)
