Our first anniversary in the Cairngorms
A cabin, no phone signal, and the wedding album — how we marked one year in.
A year to the day after their wedding at a barn near Blairgowrie, Fiona and Callum drove north with no agenda beyond finding somewhere with no phone signal and a fire that needed feeding. They ended up in a converted stalker's cottage above Nethy Bridge, the Cairngorms doing what they do best in early autumn — turning gold and going quiet.
Their plan was simple: no laptops, no wedding admin, just the two of them, a stack of firewood and the wedding album they had finally collected from the printers three weeks earlier.
Why they chose the Cairngorms over somewhere warm
Both had spent the first year of marriage commuting between Perth and Aberdeen, and the appeal of a long weekend without a to-do list outweighed any temptation towards a beach. 'We got married in Scotland because we love it here, so it felt strange to leave the country to celebrate loving it,' Callum says.
The cottage they found through a small local letting agency had underfloor heating, a wood burner, and views straight down Strathspey towards the Cairngorm plateau. At £140 a night in late September, it was a fraction of the cost of the wedding day itself, and gave them something the big day never had: total, uninterrupted quiet.
- Good bases for a Cairngorms anniversary trip: Aviemore, Nethy Bridge, Boat of Garten, Tomintoul
- Book wood-burner cottages early for autumn — they go fast once the leaves start turning
- Pack proper boots; forest tracks turn to mud quickly after rain
Reading the album, a year on
They had deliberately avoided looking at the finished album until this trip, wanting some distance from the day itself. Fiona says the biggest surprise was how much they had forgotten — the specific joke their best man told, the exact colour of the sky during the ceilidh's last set.
They went through it slowly over two evenings, a dram of Cairngorm Gold each, picking out the guests they had barely spoken to on the day and promising, again, to arrange a proper dinner with them soon.
What a first anniversary actually needs
Neither of them wanted a re-creation of the wedding, and their advice to other couples is to resist that urge. The wedding day is deliberately full of people and noise; an anniversary, they say, works best when it is the opposite.
- Choose somewhere genuinely different in character from your wedding venue
- Bring the album, the playlist, or the video — but only once, don't turn it into a ritual you dread repeating
- Leave at least one day with zero plans; the best conversations happened on their unplanned walk to Loch Garten
- Book restaurants ahead in the Cairngorms in high season — options are limited and popular
By the Sunday, with the fire down to embers and the album back in its box, they had already picked the following year's destination: somewhere on Mull, this time, chasing otters rather than red squirrels. The tradition, they decided, was never about the place. It was about choosing to disappear together, once a year, on purpose.