Welcome to peak Scotland: why the NC500 is the drive of a lifetime

AN hour’s drive separates Dunrobin Castle from Fosinard Flows. Very different destinations – one a ‘fairytale palace’, the other peatland teeming with life. Leave Scotland’s far north east coast via a single track road and keep going inland into the blanket bog country, hoping not to lock horns with an oncoming timber lorry taking no prisoners. It’s the perfect preparation for an epic NC500 road trip. 

This is Antler Central but a stuffed elephant head, crocodile and giraffe also feature – the family must have blasted shotguns across the globe

Now almost a decade old, the 500 mile scenic coastal route offers more than just spectacle – this drive of a lifetime is a window into Scotland’s turbulent history and contemporary challenges.

Take Dunrobin (open between April and October), ancestral pile of the Sutherland family. Still privately owned, it is a heritage magnet. Daytrippers get to visit a handful of the 189 rooms in this replica French chateau on a site continuously inhabited since the 1300s.

The charming falcon displays in the formal gardens echo that history. Less is made of the Highland Clearances instigated by George Leveson-Gower, first Duke of Sutherland. The clan system collapsed after the Jacobites’ defeat at Culloden and with it protection for traditional farming communities. Savage evictions ensued. More profitable mass sheep farming took the place of the common folk forced to emigrate.

Meanwhile, the Sutherlands indulged in the pleasures of their caste. Seek out the quirky Castle Museum tucked away among the giant rhubarb borders. In the 18th century it was summer house, now the galleried space displays everything from a Tibetan temple bell to medieval mining relics and Pictish carved stones but what you can’t ignore is the grotesque plethora of hunting trophies. This is Antler Central but a stuffed elephant head, crocodile and giraffe also feature. The family must have blasted shotguns across the globe.

The World Heritage Site peatland that combats global warming

If conservation was not a Victorian priority it is today. That’s why the RSPB reserve at the aforementioned Fosinard Flows is a very special place. Off the beaten NC500 track but a must-visit. This July, after a 40 year campaign, it and a further 4,000 sq. km of peat bog across Caithness and Sutherland received UNESCO World Heritage Status. For its global importance as an eco system it’s up there with the Great Barrier Reef and the Galapagos Islands.

It is called blanket bog because it covers the landscape like a blanket. This patch locks in approximately 400 million tonnes of carbon – more than all the UK’s forests and woodlands combined. So vital in defence against climate change but also an important habitat for rare fauna and flora. 

Here around the Fosinard visitor centre, where the RSPB cares for 21,000 hectares, in spring and summer you might find upland breeding birds such as the red-throated diver, golden plover, greenshank and hen harrier.

It’s free to roam but stray off the trails and the ever-sodden bog will cling to your boots. Stoop to look closely and the wonders of this ecosystem strike you. Bog asphodel and several types of sphagnum moss cover the surface alongside insect-eating plants such as sundew and butterwort; dragonflies flit and frogs and lizards swarm around the pools. The weather for our visit was what the Scots call ‘dreek’ but, as throughout our trip, the sun would burst through and form rainbows.

Inverness – launch pad for an incredible Highland journey

Our journey had begun at Inverness, capital of the northern Highlands. We’d flown up with Loganair from Manchester, enjoying the complimentary cuppa and shortbread, and picked up our Avis hire car. Ahead of us a week’s driving, the first five days staying at separate hotels belonging to Highland Coast Hotels. The group organises itineraries around the NC500, based upon their quite individual properties. The latest addition to the roster is Lochardil House on the affluent outskirts of Inverness.

From this solid stone mansion dating back to 1876 it’s a surprisingly bucolic walk into the city centre. Cross onto the Ness Islands, which divide the torrent of the eponymous river (the Loch itself is eight miles upstream) and follow waterside paths. En route grab an IPA at Uile Beheist, an impressive new low carbon whisky distillery and brewery. Alternatively hold your fire until you are in the city’s oldest thoroughfare Church Street where the Black Isle Bar serves cutting edge craft beer (38 pours, mostly their own). Sprawl in their pleasingly ramshackle rooftop hideaway and order spicy venison pizza from the wood-fired oven.

Further up Church Street drop in on Scotland’s largest second hand bookshop, Leakey’s, set in 17th century Gaelic Church. Inverness is rich in ecclesiastical piles. The nearby Old High Church (18th century but with parts dating back to the 14th) has been on the market at £150,000. Not many properties come with bullet holes from the execution of captured Jacobites after their defeat at Culloden. The battlefield itself, with visitor centre, is seven miles to the east.

Though it dominates the cityscape Inverness Castle is not open to the public. On Castle Wynd and well worth a visit is IMAG (Inverness Museum and Art Gallery), which is interactively good on history dating back to the Vikings and the Highland landscape we were about to encounter.

The panoramic pilgrimage begins (with a detour naturally)

Our base for Dunrobin was Highland Coast Hotel number two, The Royal Marine at Brora. It’s Edwardian architectural quaint given a maritime contemporary twist. Smoked haddock chowder and venison carpaccio were particularly appealing from the Curing Yard restaurant while breakfast was enlivened by general manager Billy’s brother playing the bagpipes out on the lawn.

The hotel is handy for the local golf links, if you are that way inclined, alongside a golden little beach, while at dusk the roe deer come down to Loch Brora to refresh.

En route from Inverness the temptation was to veer right onto the Black Isle, home to the brewery and the wonderfully 18th century coastal town of Cromarty, but on this trip we craved a waterfall, so turned west and landed on a beauty. Rogie Falls is a comfortable walk from its car park on the A835 to Ullapool. Where the torrent tumbles through a series of gorges it’s a famous place to watch salmon leap up river. We waited 20 minutes for the lone fish sheltering under a rock to take the plunge but eventually gave up. 

After Fosinard Flows we hit the North Coast proper, which has a string of glorious beaches, some more accessible than others. We liked the sandy expanse at Farr. Walk down after visiting the old church, now Strathnaver Museum, which charts the local Clearances. Torrisdale further along is a magnet for surfers, while 100ft above the cove at Bettyhill you can zipline with Golden Eagle. 

Our next hotel port of call was Tongue and its eponymous hotel in a beautiful setting on the east shore of the Kyle of Tongue. Back in 1746 this long sea inlet was the escape route for a French sloop pursued by a British frigate. Pounded by cannon, the crew carried ashore their cargo of gold coins, destined to fund Bonnie Prince Charlie, into an ambush by the anti-Jacobite Clan Mackay. Outnumbered, they chucked the gold into the Kyle. Legend has it that a cow occasionally wanders out of the shallows with a gold piece stuck in its hoof.

Our room at the Tongue Hotel offered the best view of any of our stays – out toward ruined Castle Varrich on its wooded promontory, built by the Mackays in the 11th century. You can walk there and back in under an hour. Not too strenuous. These treks are all relative. 2,500ft high Ben Loyal looms over the Tongue area. We supped Orkney Brewery ale in the hotel’s cosy Brass Tap bar with a bearded Swede who had just climbed it – nine hard miles in four hours.

A cave called Smoo, a boy Beatle and at last… a seafood feast

The next leg of our journey started bleak and segued into incredible beauty. Our single track road swept all the way around the sublime deep water anchorage of Loch Eriboll, nine miles long and a mile wide, en route for remote Cape Wrath, the British mainland’s most north-westerly point.

We didn’t quite reach that far. It is realistically accessible only by ferry and mini-bus in season. Durness, the mostly northwesterly village in Britain, was where we turned south. I’d recommend stopping off first to explore Smoo Cave, a 200ft long hole blasted by the sea out of the limestone cliff. We peered into its awesome interior where a torrent poured into the burn. Caving trips further in were cancelled for the day because of excess flooding. 

Less spectacular was the village hall’s memorial to John Lennon, a communal garden and pebble feature celebrating the Beatle, who spent boyhood summers up here with relatives. The lyrics of A Day in The Life are reckoned to be about that idyll. When later in life he revisited with Yoko he crashed their car, injuring them.

That was back in 1969 and some of the roads that make up the NC500 today still offer their share of rough rides. Getting around, though, is easier thanks to projects such as the Kylesku Bridge that sweeps the A894 over the mouth of Lochs Glencoul and Glendhu. Before this long, curving concrete span was completed in 1984 there was a choice of a bottleneck ferry crossing or a 100 mile detour.

Boat trips from the Kylesku jetty will take you out to view Eas á Chual Aluin, Britains highest waterfall with a sheer drop of 658 ft and in full flow three times higher than Niagara Falls. Seals and otters frequent the Loch shores and there’s a chance of spotting of one of the eagles who nest up in the Quinag range.

We settled for a close-up of scallops, mussels and halibut in a fine lunch at the Kylesku Hotel. Surprisingly the first seafood binge of our trip (we would make up for it later). This lochside boutique lodging is also a Highland Coast Hotel; we were staying two miles south at its stablemate, Newton Lodge. 

Our hotel number 4 is different from the rest. A Large bungalow in style, off-season it can be rented out exclusively (see Fact File) under the stewardship of its excellent manager Toni. You might be lucky like us and over breakfast find a deer staring straight at us against a glorious mountain background. It was the wildlife moment of the road trip.

The school of rock, garden of the animals and a Wicker Man flashback

Heading south, the scenery around Loch Assynt was so awesome we twice had to stop and gawp – at Ardveck Castle, then at Knockan Crag.

The first is one of those quintessential Highland photo opportunities, ruined ramparts with a history of treachery and bloodshed; the second has a very different back story as a key geological site. The open air visitor centre and educational walk is a window into conditions 420 million years ago, demonstrating that great slabs of rock can be pushed to the surface and sideways over adjacent rocks. This was one of the great Victorian geological discoveries. 

It’s called the ‘Moine Thrust’ and, in a hands-on experience, you can feel how the older Moine metamorphic rocks have ended up on top of very different limestone.

Next stop the West Coast transport hub, Ullapool. High season the little town is thonged with folk heading for the Outer Hebrides via the Stornoway ferry. In October it felt quite sleepy. Three things not to miss – the independent Ullapool Bookshop, the Ferry Boat Inn and, in season, the outstanding Seafood Shack.

The Plockton Inn was our final NC500 destination. An altogether less wild landscape along the way as we dropped down from Wester Ross. A detour to the privately owned Attadale Gardens is recommended. The house dates back to 1755 but the varied gardens have a strong Victorian feel and are dotted with contemporary animal-centric sculptures. I particularly liked Alexander Jones’s 2005 bronze Chameleon.

The phrase 'picture postcard' hadn’t applied to many villages along our route, but Plockton has that wow factor. Hence it was used as the location for Nineties comedy mystery drama Hamish Macbeth with Robert Carlyle playing the local cop. I recognise it more vividly from the opening sequence of The Wicker Man, a far less cosy proposition. In the movie opening sequence puritanical Sergeant Howie lands his sea plane on Loch Carron to be greeted sardonically by the locals on the palm-tree lined shoreline. It won’t end well. 

The cottages may be spruced up these days, but otherwise it’s little changed. Eerie flashbacks aside, we witnessed a glorious sunset and sunrise on our rambles and enjoyed jolly times in the Inn (chic bedrooms upstairs, decidedly pubby downstairs).

The Kyle of Lochalsh and the Skye Bridge are only a 15 minute drive away. Over the sea to Skye has a ring to it. Look out for a whole new chapter in our Scottish road trip saga…