At 65, most of us would be thinking about winding down, but Anne gets busier.
This week alone, she’ll be in Cornwall, Liverpool, Oxfordshire, London and Wales, to name just a few.
But how does the Princess Royal spend her precious spare time?
Well, the thing she is most interested in — and it’s not horses — might actually tell us a lot about her.
She is utterly beguiled by lighthouses.
Anne has vowed to see all of Scotland’s lighthouses, even the most remote ones, and she is very proud to have “bagged” many of them.
Anne, often with husband Tim Laurence, will turn up at out-of-the-way lighthouses, from one end of the UK to the other, unannounced and without any royal fuss.
Some lighthouse keepers, in fact, have been completely taken aback, while a few even failed to recognise the lady they were talking to.
Anne has set off on many a private boat trip or has travelled by land to reach these wonderful, solitary places.
She seems to get more fascinated by lighthouses the more she sees.
The love affair began when her mother took her along to see Tiumpan Head, on the Isle of Lewis, when the princess was just five years old.
Since that day, it’s been a joke among the royals that while the Queen came home quite impressed, Anne came home utterly enchanted.
From that day onwards, whenever she did a classroom painting, it always featured a lighthouse.
Last year, she wrote of her love for these historic buildings, in the foreword for a new book about Scottish and Manx lighthouses.
“The lighthouses were built to last for the benefit of the mariner,” she wrote with great enthusiasm.
“Each light being quite different from the next as the generations of an engineering dynasty developed their own style, but still very obviously and easily recognisable as Stevenson lighthouses.”
For the past 23 years, she has also been a very active patron for the Northern Lighthouse Board, but she still has plenty to see.
It’s reckoned she has visited only just over half of the lighthouses she has earmarked!
The world’s oldest sea-washed lighthouse, Bell Rock off the Angus coast, Bass Rock, Cape Wrath, Sta Abbs Head and others are among those she has “bagged” on her travels.
Lighthouse keepers were never easy to find, of course, with it being such a lonely, solitary job, so it says a lot about Anne that she can think of nowhere nicer to be.
Perhaps the constant attention from the media makes her dream of getting away to the edge of the land, or some hard-to-reach island!
Eshaness Lighthouse, north-west of the Shetlands, saw her arrive in bright-orange Northern Lighthouse Board’s waterproofs and baseball cap, on board The Red Chariot, the NLB’s official helicopter!
Having been told that royal protocol meant staff should stand back and give their important visitor space, they were surprised to find Anne shaking them warmly by the hands.
No wonder — she was doing the thing she loves most of all. Visiting yet another lighthouse!
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