Activities - Walks and Trails

This walk covers an exceptional piece of coastline, with superb birdlife and the dramatic ruin of 'Dracula's Castle'. It is worth savouring. If you can arrange to be picked up at the Bullers car park, you can walk it one way, but it's more satisfying to cover it in both directions.

From Cruden Bay, walk out along the track towards Port Erroll and pick up the coastal footpath, which is signposted all the way to the Bullers of Buchan and beyond.

Before long, the ruin of Slains Castle comes into view. One of many dramatically sited fortresses around the Scottish coast, it has won extra renown because of its supposed association with Bram Stoker, who is said to have used it as the inspiration for the terrifying lair of Dracula when he created that nightmare character.

In fact, the castle is a vast 19th century mansion built by the Hay family, Earls of Erroll, in 1836 on the site of a much earlier castle dating back to 1597. Stoker, who stayed at nearby Whinnyfold several times, must have seen it complete, as he wrote Dracula in 1897 and the building was not abandoned until the 1920s. It is not open to the public but is still impressive seen from the outside.

Continue north up the coast along the cliff, around the small inlets known as the Twa Havens and past the headland called the Grey Mare. There are caves in the cliff here. The coastline turns sharply west at Robbie's Haven before swinging north again to reach the cliffs and natural arches known as the Bullers of Buchan.

The path teeters along the edge of a 60m cliff. It is thought that the circular rock formation here was once a huge cave whose roof has long since collapsed. It now provides nesting places for thousands of seabirds, and the noise, both from the birds and the sea crashing in, is tremendous. An earlier visitor, equally impressed, wrote of 'whole systems of slabby rocks, thrusting into the maddened North Sea which heaves and foams over them in deafening surges'. This was none other then T E Lawrence - Lawrence of Arabia - far from the desert at a holiday cottage in Collieston.

The birds at the Bullers (the name deriving from a Scots word for rushing water) include kittiwakes, fulmars, gannets and if you are lucky, some puffins. Take your time and enjoy the spectacle here before starting the return walk. If you have a lift waiting, follow the signs to the nearby Bullers car park. Otherwise, enjoy walking south along the cliff, past Slains again, back to Cruden Bay.