Three days in Aberdeen: a city built entirely of granite, and it glitters in the rain

Start with the art. The gallery reopened in 2019 after four years of rebuilding, and behind the Victorian front it is now one of the best civic collections in Britain: Impressionists and Scottish Colourists upstairs, Emin and Gilbert and George downstairs, and a hall of granite and marble columns in the middle.

Walk down the hill to the harbour for the maritime museum, which occupies a merchant's house of 1593 and a glass building grafted onto it, and which is far more interesting than it sounds. Clipper ships built here ran to Australia in record time; the top floors are given over to North Sea oil, with a rig model three storeys high and the plain accounts of men who worked out there.

Then walk east along the quay to the end. Footdee is a planned village of 1809 built for the fishing families, in tight squares with the houses facing inward across a courtyard and their backs to the weather, and the sheds in the middle decorated by their owners with anything that came to hand.

Fifteen miles south, a ruined fortress stands on a flat topped rock joined to the mainland by a neck of land, with cliffs on every other side. It was rebuilt about 1400 and turned into a palace after 1581, and its famous week came in 1652, when the Scottish regalia were held here against Cromwell's besieging army and then smuggled out, by one account lowered down the cliff to a woman collecting seaweed and carried off to a parish church down the coast, where they stayed under the floor for nine years. The site is spectacular and the walk down and back up is steep.

Stonehaven itself is a mile away and worth an hour: a curved harbour of stone houses, fishing boats, and an open air seawater pool built in the 1930s that is heated to twenty eight degrees and swum in at midnight under a full moon in summer.

In the afternoon, turn inland along the Dee. The castle at Crathes is a sixteenth century tower house of the local kind, all corbelled turrets and small windows, with painted ceilings from the 1590s inside and a walled garden divided by yew hedges that were planted in 1702.

The last morning belongs to the other town. Old Aberdeen is a cobbled high street of low houses with the university at one end and the cathedral at the other, twenty minutes north of the centre by bus, and it feels like a small burgh that a city happened to grow around.

St Machar's is granite, fortified looking, and mostly fifteenth century, with two squat spires and a flat oak ceiling of about 1520 carrying forty eight painted coats of arms: the pope and the kings of Europe on one side, the Scottish king and his nobles down the middle, the bishops on the other. Local tradition holds that part of William Wallace's quartered body was built into the walls after his execution.

Five minutes south, the university chapel was finished about 1500 and still has its medieval oak screen and stalls, which almost nothing in Scotland does after the Reformation. The crown shaped spire on top is one of two left in the country. Then the bus back into town takes twenty minutes.