Banff stands on the west bank of the River Deveron where it meets the Moray Firth. The village of Macduff faces it across the water, and in 2020 each had a population of about four thousand. The two towns argue about which is the better one, as adjacent Scottish towns are required by law to do, but they share a lifeboat tradition, a hospital, and the seven-arched bridge that John Smeaton completed in 1779 to keep them connected. Before the bridge, the river had a habit of carrying things away. The 1765 bridge lasted three years before a flood took it. The ferry that replaced it lasted five before another flood took that. Smeaton's bridge has now lasted 247 years and counting.

The reason most visitors come to Banff is Duff House, the William Adam mansion that sits in parkland on the south edge of town. It is now a branch of the National Galleries of Scotland, which is to say a small but serious art collection in a Georgian country house designed by the architect of Holyrood Palace's modern facade. The house and its grounds also contain the Duff House Royal Golf Course, white tees 6,043 yards, par 68, which means you can play golf around a William Adam mansion, which feels like a peculiarly Scottish privilege.

Sir George Stephen, born in 1829 in nearby Dufftown, rose to become founding president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. When the CPR pushed its line through the Rocky Mountains in the 1880s and the railway needed names for the new station towns, Stephen reached for home. He named one of them Banff. The Canadian town and the national park that took its name now draw millions of visitors a year, while the original Banff that gave it the word continues to have a population the size of a large school. The Scottish Banff does not advertise this. The connection is something you learn from a local, usually accompanied by a small ironic shrug.

The town centre is a confection of 18th and 19th century buildings, dignified ashlar facades on Low Street and High Street and Castle Street. The town's mercat cross stands on the Plainstones, the raised stone pavement in front of the Town House. Next to it, until recently, sat a Russian cannon captured at the Siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, presented to Banff in 1856 and placed on the Plainstones in 1901. The cannon went missing in the twentieth century in circumstances the locals still debate. The Banff Macduff Heritage Trail has a page about it titled, accurately, The Missing Cannon.

Beyond the town, the Banff coast becomes the reason people come back. A sandy beach at Inverboyndie a mile west. A series of small rocky coves and groynes east from Macduff. Royal Tarlair Golf Course east of Macduff sits on land that ends in precipitous cliffs, including a thirteenth hole called The Clivet where lost balls are genuinely lost. Stagecoach Bus 35 from Aberdeen runs every thirty minutes and continues west toward Portsoy and Elgin. There is no railway anymore. The last train ran in 1964, and the nearest stations now are Huntly and Keith, both inland. You come to Banff for the coastline. The bus is part of the experience.