Aberdeenshire is a large historic county of north-east Scotland, traditionally divided into the districts of Mar in the mountainous south-west, Buchan in the flatter north-east, and the district properly called Aberdeen around the twin rivers Dee and Don. An eighteenth-century survey followed the Dee from its source deep in the Mar mountains, past the fertile vale of Braemar beneath the ancient seat of the Earls of Mar, some forty miles from the sea and reckoned the most inland spot in all Scotland, down through the dramatic Linn of Dee waterfall to the fertile, well-cultivated lowlands nearer the coast.
The rival River Don, flowing more gently through beautiful and fertile banks, inspired a well-known local rhyme judging a single foot of Don's land worth two of the Dee's, save only for the wood and stone upon it; both rivers supported such productive salmon fisheries, caught in stone-walled traps called cruives, that a single short stretch of the Don was said to yield some two thousand pounds in a good year, much of the catch carried fresh to the London market. Kildrummy Castle, ancient seat of the Earls of Mar, added a darker note of history as the place where Robert the Bruce's wife and mother were captured by the forces of Edward I.
Buchan, the county's flatter north-eastern district, combined good upland pasture around Strathbogie with broad moors and morasses nearer the coast, its cliffs rising nowhere higher than about 900 feet even at their most dramatic. Two Aberdeens anchored the county's south-east corner, Old Aberdeen with its cathedral and ancient King's College, New Aberdeen a rapidly growing port city, their combined population already approaching 30,000 by the 1790s and their trade in salmon, textiles and Baltic goods giving the shire an economic reach far beyond its own fertile straths and mountain glens.