The group carrying her coffin left Balmoral at about 10am. and slowly made its way through the villages of Royal Deeside, allowing the thousands who followed the route to say goodbye to the country’s longest-serving monarch and the woman many locally considered a dear neighbour. . After passing Craithie kirk, the small granite church where the Queen worshiped every Sunday during her annual summer holiday in the Highlands, the hearse arrived at the nearby village of Ballater, where the Queen was a regular shopper and well known to the locals. Close-up of coffin leaving Balmoral. Photo: Russell Cheyne/Reuters There the crowd had gathered since before 7am, with the well organized arriving with supermarket bags of snacks and folding chairs. Some of the first to arrive were the Alexander family, three generations of whom had driven from Hadley, an hour’s drive through the woods from the north. Eight-year-old Hamish said his iPad told him the Queen was dead. Florence, 11, said they had seen the Queen in her car, while five-year-old Gracie closely guarded their shared tub of sweets. Nobody likes those, she said, holding up a pink and white sweet. Their grandmother Elizabeth Anne Alexander, who was named after the Queen and was born on Coronation Day, said it was a family tradition to visit Balmoral. She had traveled here on Sunday morning with her two daughters and three grandchildren. “The Queen has always been a part of our lives, in the summer she stays in Scotland. We saw her often locally and the community always respected her privacy. She was so relaxed here, even in how she dressed. I felt like having her as the head of this family was a constant.” As the sun rose, warming the crowds on the main street, all generations gathered, from toddlers in prams to elderly people using the ample benches around the church. Some had come in full mourning dress, some in dress or military uniform, others in more practical rustic clothes of the kind the Queen herself preferred when she holidayed here. Carol Gregory and her husband, from Birmingham, had turned away from a planned holiday in Inverness in Ballater, draping a union flag over the metal crowd barriers opposite the church. Like many in the crowd, when asked why she felt moved to come, Gregory simply replied, “We had to be here. She was our queen.” People line the streets of Ballater waiting for the cortege carrying the Queen’s coffin. Photo: Hannah McKay/Reuters He said there was value in meeting at such a critical time as this. “I wanted to be a part of it, it’s a moment in history and the end of an era. And maybe when I see her pass, it will sink in that she’s really gone, because right now it feels surreal. She was always steady.” From Ballater, the cortege had to travel east along the winding, single-lane A93 through a series of villages – Aboyne, Banchory and Peterculter, which are strung along the Dee – before reaching the A90, a dual carriageway leading the cortege south, passing Dundee and Perth before arriving in Edinburgh six hours later. The First Minister will attend a gathering of party leaders in parliament to watch the coffin pass. He will remain at Holyroodhouse Palace before lying in state on Monday at St Giles’ Cathedral. Frank Groves sat alone on a black pew in Glenmuick parish church dressed in a dark suit and tie and holding a bouquet of flowers tied with a black ribbon. The 70-year-old had driven an hour and a half from the fishing village of Cruden Bay in Ballater, which he had visited with his wife, Jeanette, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Inevitably this public grief reminded him of his own loss, seven years ago now. “On our darkest days we would drive up here and treat ourselves to a meal at the Old Station Restaurant,” he recalls. “You end up feeling like part of her family,” he said of the queen. “Ballater is a special place and he was able to relax here. Since I was born the Queen was there, when I went to school, got married and when my wife passed she was there. It almost feels like a distant relative.” Seeing the casket go past would have been “the height of grief,” Groves said. “But you need it to move forward. Britain won’t be the same without her.”
