If you’re looking for an active adventure holiday in the heart of Scotland, with some history and attractive scenery thrown in, the central Scottish county of Perthshire is the place to take your next exciting break.

Only an hour’s train trip from Edinburgh and Glasgow, the city of Perth itself is a fantastic location to kick-off your Scottish adventure holiday. Other outstanding locations to rent a farmhouse or holiday lodge in Perthshire include the villages of Pitlochry, St Fillans (on Loch Earn), Crieff, Kinross, Killin, Glenisla, Aberfeldy, Comrie and Dunkeld.

Perthshire’s quiet glens, hills, forested slopes, open fields, still lochs and fast rivers all offer a great canvas for the art of adventure. Perthshire offers the quintessential Scottish outdoor activities for your park holiday (walking, fishing, golf and cycling), but it also offers other less common pursuits.

If you wish, you can spend your days in Perthshire abseiling, cliff-jumping, canyoning, canoeing or mountain biking. You could even try ‘sphering’ – being strapped inside a 12 foot plastic ball as it bounces down a hill!

Plus, if you want to see Perthshire at a machine-powered pace, there’s quad biking, 4W driving, microlight aircraft flying, or even riding a hovercraft.

For activities that don’t require helmets, there are plenty of other more sedate attractions to visit on your cottage holiday in Perthshire. History-buffs should make sure to visit the splendid and ever-popular Blair Castle at Blair Atholl, or Scone Palace near Perth, an amazing historical location and the original home of the Stone of Scone (on which British monarchs are still crowned). Whisky-lovers might like to rent a holiday cottage in the ancient town of Crieff, which boasts the oldest distillery in Scotland, or a maybe take a self-catering farm-style accommodation in Aberfeldy in the Tay Valley to visit Aberfeldy Distillery and its colony of rare red squirrels.

Plus, Perth and Pitlochry hold a multitude of theatrical, music and literary festivals, including July’s ‘T in the Park’ music festival. Pitlochry itself is an exquisite Victorian-era town which has been a popular resort holiday destination for hundreds of years.