Lose yourself in books during your cateran country adventure.
Adventure into Books in Blairgowrie is a place to browse, discuss books, get recommendations and share stories. A place to thaw out, wait for the bus, linger before getting a haircut, wait while your car charges, find some peace after a funeral (all true)
It’s a place to plot your route round the Cateran Trail, find out more about the area’s famous berries, get the perfect gift for that awkward relative, and restock on holiday reading when the pile of books you packed has run out. A place where adventures start.
Kate Davies and her husband Ralph Baillie moved to Blairgowrie five years ago and almost immediately felt at home. The couple love the town and the vast and varied surrounding countryside, with rolling farmland, rivers, woods, hills and mountains nearby, but felt that the only thing they missed was having a bookshop to browse in.
So they decided to open one.
Kate’s background is in writing and storytelling and says that the idea of sharing and selling stories seemed a natural progression.
She says: “We couldn’t have found a more perfect place for our bookshop than Blairgowrie’s Wellmeadow. A place where caterans gathered and told their tales of herding cattle, where monthly markets take place, Braemar day is staged, the fallen are remembered and the town’s Christmas lights are switched on. A place where stories are made and exchanged.”
Although the coronavirus pandemic delayed the shop’s opening for several months, Kate says that “the pandemic never shook our belief that the world, and our town, needs books – to inform, feed our imaginations, and offer escape and solace”.
Customers come from near and far, and have described Adventure into Books as a bit of a TARDIS, with Kate commenting that she is “pretty sure they mean we’ve more books on the inside than seem possible from the outside, rather than being a space and time-travelling police box… though you never know!”
The bookshop has a large children’s area, a focus on Scottish authors and a comfy reading nook. There are the classics, fiction, fantasy, crime and biographies, poetry, histories, travel memoirs, maps and hobby books, with a few ‘bookish’ jigsaws, games and gifts as a further treat – something for every reader, whatever your interests, whatever your age.
And of course, a very warm welcome awaits you from the intrepid adventurers into books themselves, Kate and Ralph.
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