A FOUR-DAY festival in Deeside attracted more than 1,500 people.
Visitors descended on the Deeside Activity Park, near Aboyne, on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday for the first MacBethfest, aimed at re-educating people about MacBeth, who reigned in Scotland from 1040 until his death in 1057.
More than 2,000 pints of MacBeth beer, which is produced at the park’s brewery, the Deeside Brewery, was consumed over the four days.
Park owner Ken Howie, 46, said: “Shakespeare did MacBeth a disservice. He was actually a really good king and was indeed slain at Lumphanan.
“I thought, ‘Wow, it would be great to re-educate people about MacBeth and promote this bit of Scotland at the same time’ – and selling a few bottles of beer along the way is always a help.”
The festival kicked off with a three-mile fun run on Wednesday, led by members of Deeside Pony Club on horseback. It followed the route MacBeth would have taken to Lumphanan before his death.
The festival also featured the Mediaeval Realm group which held battle re-enactments and demonstrations and a mediaeval banquet.
Mr Howie added: “The first reason for holding it was to do a re-education job on the whole MacBeth story. He’s an iconic Scottish king that everyone has heard of and I doubt anyone knows the real story of what happened.
“The second job was to sell beer. We have to try and earn a crust here, and from that point of view it was hugely successful.
“Thirdly, we wanted to attract people to the activity park here. We already have about 40,000 visitors a year, but we want more, and what we succeeded in doing was bringing in people who haven’t been here before. We probably will do parts of the festival again. There was a lot of positive feedback.”