Seven nights in the Highlands

The plan had us somewhere in the Cairngorms on the fourth night. We ended up in Glen Feshie instead, on a spot we came across rather than chose, and it was the best night of the week by a distance. From that point I did not open Quiet Route again. I had built the thing. I had planned the trip with it. And by the middle of the week it no longer described the week we were having, so it stayed shut.

What a plan is actually for

We left on a Saturday afternoon, before five, and drove up the motorway into the dark. The first night was a wild spot about fifteen minutes off the A9 south of Inverness, coordinates rather than a name, found on Park4Night while the light went. Remote enough that nothing came past. My daughter kicked off, which was the worst hour of the week and got it out of the way early, and in the morning I was woken by sheep in the field beside us.

That was night one, and everything up to that point had gone as planned. It is worth saying plainly, because the rest of this is about the plan coming apart, and the first half of it worked exactly as it was supposed to.

Two nights at Ardtower on the edge of Inverness followed, meeting friends who had driven up the day before us. Urquhart Castle was as busy as you would expect. It was worth it anyway. Loch Ness is the thing everyone goes to see and it was, for us, the least interesting part of a very good week, which is not a criticism of the loch so much as an observation about what a seven night trip is actually made of.

The night that broke it

We came south out of Inverness on the fourth day heading for the Cairngorms, and the plan had a site in it, and we did not go there.

We found Glen Feshie instead. In July the Feshie is mostly stones, a wide pale bed of them with a channel running down the middle, and standing out in the middle of it I kept thinking of British Columbia, which is absurd because I have never been to British Columbia. I have watched videos of it. That is the entire basis of the comparison. But the scale of it, the pale river bed, the trees coming down to it, and nothing else there at all.

There were fire warnings in place across the area, and at one point a local came over with his camera already out, on the reasonable assumption that a van parked in a dry glen in July might be about to light something. We were not. He was perfectly friendly about it. But it tells you where the level of concern was that summer, and if you are going up in a dry spell it is worth knowing that the scrutiny is real and it is deserved.

That spot is not on Park4Night. I looked, before and after. I am not going to put the coordinates here either, because the surest way to ruin somewhere like that is to hand it to a few thousand people at once. But if you are heading that way and you want somewhere to stop, email me at david@quietroute.io and I will tell you where it is. What is actually allowed in Scotland is worth knowing before you go looking.

Two nights at Glengoulandie after that, which was the opposite kind of night and just as good, with deer in the field behind the van. The campsites all week were quiet. The nights were properly quiet. The weather was remarkable and we were lucky with it, and I would not plan a week on the assumption of getting the same.

From Glen Feshie onward, though, the plan was a document about a different trip. I did not delete it or override it or update it. I just stopped looking at it, which is worse.

The roads, and what they cost

On the way south we went to the crannog centre on Loch Tay, and then up a hill to a cave where part of Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed, which is a better drive than it sounds and involves some of the best road I have driven anywhere.

The surface was a disaster. Not the route, the surface. I could feel what it was doing to the van as we did it and I said so at the time, out loud, more than once. We came down off it and onto the motorway, and when I pulled off the M74 at Annan for the last night something felt distinctly wrong.

It was the dual mass flywheel. The garage confirmed it the next morning. Eighteen hundred pounds, and it had to be done that week, because we were leaving for Cornwall a few days later.

I am not going to pretend the road caused the whole failure. Flywheels go, and it may well have been on its way out. But a week of B roads with that surface was not what finished it off gently, and the honest version of the advice is this: if you are taking a heavy van to the Highlands, the scenic route is genuinely worth taking and it is not free. Stay on the A roads more than your instincts want to. Take the good ones deliberately rather than by default.

What I would do again

More wild camping and fewer booked sites. The kids' best nights were the two with no facilities and no name, which is not what I expected and is not what I planned for.

Seven nights covers one end of the Highlands properly. It does not cover the Highlands. We knew that going up and we will go back, though next time further west rather than straight up the middle. There is more of Scotland here than one week reaches.

The thing I keep coming back to is not the flywheel or the glen. It is that I spent months building a tool to plan trips, planned a trip with it, and then closed it on the fourth day because the trip had moved and the plan had not. A plan that survives a week untouched is a plan for a week where nothing happened. That is not the good outcome. But a plan you have to abandon the moment you deviate from it is not much better, and that is exactly what mine was.

So it was rebuilt. The version that shipped after this trip lets you move a night and redraw everything after it, on the road, in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Which is what I needed on the fourth day in Glen Feshie, and did not have, because I had not thought to build it yet.