Well, let’s be honest from the start. The Isle of Skye, we had heard about it like everyone else: land of fairies, magical landscapes, mysteriou...
The 4 lesser-known stops on the NC500 in a campervan: Tain (Ross-shire), Golspie (Sutherland), Berriedale (Caithness), and Motherwell (Lanarkshire). R...
Itinerary for campervan in Fife (east coast of Scotland): Dunfermline, the former royal capital, Kirkcaldy facing the Firth of Forth, Newport-on-Tay w...
We came into Britain the back way, rolling in from the Netherlands rather than the Calais ferry, and Scotland was the first proper chapter of a road trip that ran well over a year. Edinburgh set the tone: we parked cheap but the app flatly refused our French bank card, cycled a wheezing fifteen minutes uphill to a botanic garden and a gothic skyline, and found the haggis at Greyfriars Tavern left us slightly on our hunger. Over in Glasgow we came for a friend of Caroline’s in the West End, not for sightseeing, and ended up with the wood-carved Tree of Life inside Waxy O’Connor’s, cocktails in a deconsecrated Victorian church, and a plate of spicy mussels at Stravaigin we still talk about. Getting into Edinburgh with a seven-metre van is one thing; emptying the tanks is another, and Glasgow forced us to a peripheral campsite just for the waste water.
Stirling is Wallace country, his monument watching over a town where we skipped the castle ticket because we had an hour left and the price felt steep. It was here, on a Bank Holiday Monday with every garage shut, that Edouard the van sulked and refused to start, kicking off a gas-bottle and key saga we only truly cured in Portugal months later. Our Stirling stop came after three cycling days from Edinburgh that nearly finished us off. From there the coast pulled us toward Dundee and a run of former mill and abbey towns, with forest walks around Dunfermline and a quiet overnight at Kirkcaldy.
The Kingdom of Fife was our gentle warm-up before the wild stuff, and our Fife guide reads like a run of good breakfasts and better light. In St Andrews we slept at The Shore by the harbour and were woken at six by seagulls, then wandered the ruined cathedral, the clifftop castle with its grim underground prisons, and golf shops on every corner. Further up the coast, Arbroath became a proper favourite: seventeen campervans tucked defiantly behind a No Overnight sign, locals swimming in frankly arctic water, smoked haddock in a harbour restaurant, and a cliff-top bike ride where we fought the wind for an hour and a half.
Aberdeen was a curious one: in the town where the North Sea meets Scotland we somehow ended up at the one Italian in the place and rather enjoyed it, a running joke that followed us for weeks. The real jewel of the coast is Dunnottar, near Stonehaven, a castle on a 440-million-year-old cliff where the Scottish crown jewels were once hidden from Cromwell and where seals lounge at low tide below the ruined kitchens. Inland at Ballater we timed our arrival for the Highland Games and parked three nights opposite the church. It was one long, sunburnt afternoon: pipe bands, kilted clansmen, sack races, tug of war, a caber toss where a grown man flips a whole tree trunk end over end, and a Black Angus burger that was, we’ll say it plainly, genuinely not good.
Cutting inland we crossed the Cairngorms, staying on an isolated farm service-stop where the owners’ daughter walked us round in the evening to meet Jimmy the crested donkey, Echo the pony and a small crowd of llamas. We swung by Balmoral, found the castle closed because the Queen herself was in residence that weekend, and were let film the corgi soft toys by two handsome armed guards. Then came Loch Ness and our most expensive lesson: a gust took our drone out over the loch and we lost it to the water, all the day’s footage surviving only in a low-res phone sync. In Inverness we bought a replacement that cost a third more thanks to the euro-to-pound rate, and quietly hoped no more electronics would go for a swim.
North of Inverness the North Coast 500 turns properly cinematic, and our NC500 secondary stops guide is a love letter to sheep on the tarmac and castles nobody photographs. At Wick we found a French restaurant on the harbour and, a month and a half from home, wept a little into a suprême of pheasant, then watched police pile into the Indian place across the road and congratulated ourselves. At John o’Groats we skipped the crowds for a free spot alone with the sheep and the North Sea, and felt what we’d felt at Sagres back in Portugal: the giddy edge-of-the-world feeling we’d set out to chase. On the way we also touched the mystical woods of Golspie and the crossroads town of Tain.
The far northwest was the most spectacular driving of the whole trip. Around Durness and Tongue we found a secret spot by a cemetery with a view into nothing, chased a rainbow across the moor, and got four seasons in minutes, with Caroline managing a lightning-quick swim before the cold won. Down at Lochinver we had the meal that changed our route: langoustines, mussels like an atomic bomb and fish cakes we couldn’t finish, then gin at the only bar for a hundred miles, where a French couple on their fifth visit sent us to Ullapool and handed us a bottle of wine to carry to a painter named Willy. So on to Ullapool we went, queuing at the Seafood Shack for a smoked haddock wrap that beat every fish and chips we’ve eaten, before the midges at Little Loch Broom pinned us inside the van for the best part of an afternoon.
Skye, we’ll be honest, was the letdown of the trip, and our honest Isle of Skye guide says so plainly: after a month of empty Highlands, the Fairy Pools felt overrun and a bit muddy, and Kilt Rock’s waterfall was a dry trickle in that summer’s drought. The saving grace was Portree, its painted houses along Quay Street in rose, blue and green, a working harbour that actually smells of fish, and a bottle of the excellent local Misty Isle gin. From Uig we took the CalMac ferry over to Harris for the emotional close of the whole adventure. We arrived at night on full-beam headlights because Edouard’s dash had failed, learned next morning that Willy was too ill to meet us, and left the wine and a note at his cottage gallery in our French sailor stripes. Willy passed away not long after, which we only learned much later on Facebook. On the ferry home, at last, the dolphins came.
Scotland is genuinely one of the best places in Europe to travel by van, and the biggest reason is the law: wild camping is legal here under the Scottish Outdoor Access Code, which is not the case in the rest of the UK, so a responsible overnight in a quiet layby or a beach car park is your right, not a gamble. That freedom comes with single-track roads where the whole etiquette of the Highlands lives in the passing places: pull in, wave the oncoming car through, and never sit nose to nose. The weather does its four-seasons-in-an-hour trick daily, so pack for sun and sleet in the same afternoon even in August. And the midges are real; near lochs and peat bogs at dusk they are relentless, so bring repellent and, we cannot stress this enough, an actual head net.
That first Scottish book is well and truly finished, but it left us the best memories of the whole road: the ones we never planned, sent our way by a French couple in a bar at the edge of the map.