Flying Down the West Coast, Durness to Ullapool to Ben Nevis, Scotland

Zagan the motorhome’s a blur across the landscape folks. Well, not quite, but we’re shifting at a right old pace compared with how fast we’d like to be, which would be roughly stationary, 0mph, still parked up by the beach at Sango Bay in Durness! We’re currently sat in the forest car park which is the base for walking to the north face of Ben Nevis (N56.84220, W5.04291). The main car park for the mountain is at the visitor centre at Achintee, a couple of miles from here, but it’s not possible to overnight there in a motorhome, so we bounced down a short rough track to get here instead.

It was only a week ago we were sat at Dyhart just north of Edinburgh, waiting to complete some filming work in Dunfirmline. Since then we’ve headed up the east coast to John O’ Groats, across the north to Durness, and then south again to Ullapool, following the North Coast 500 route. But we’ve not managed to complete the full five hundred-odd miles, not by a long shot. We ended up doing our own version, the OurTour NC343. We’ve opted to save quite a chunk of the west coast side for another visit, as we’ve committed to be at home in Nottingham on Saturday for a race on Sunday, and to go and see Ranulph Fiennes talk on Monday. I suspect that if we were on a week’s holiday we might have forced the issue and driven the full NC500 circuit but, the gods willing, we’ve plenty of time available to us to come back and do a proper job of it when we’re not in a hurry.

When we left Durness I was a little on edge, faced with the prospect of many miles of single track road. The NC500 seems to have developed a popularity problem, and motorhome travellers on it are sometimes berated for clogging up the roads and making life difficult for the locals and other tourists. We didn’t want to be part of the problem, but it’s not been an issue:

• In November the roads (and the various small parking places available) have been very quiet.
• The passing places are frequent and well sign-posted (we only passed 5 five oncoming vehicles, none of which were motorhomes, and no-one came up behind us wanting to overtake).
• We could mostly see well up the road, and could get into passing places early.

So the drive down from Durness to Ullapool was easy, and passed straight through some beautiful countryside, with sweeping hills fired orange and black as we pass into late autumn. There’s been mention of snow, but it’s kept itself high on the mountain tops, and the nights have been under cloud-laden skies, fending off the frosts too.

We pulled off the road after an hour or so for lunch, parked alongside a small visitor’s centre at Knochan Crag, which explained the geology of the rocks around us. Some millions of years back, two continents collided at this point, and a series of signs explain what happened.

Last night we stayed in the car park of the Royal Hotel in Ullapool (N57.89749, W5.15307). The hotel has six large bays marked out for motorhomes, with electrical hook-up points and a water supply, and allows us to stay for free (or £10 if you need hook-up). Pretty great for us! The town’s campsite is closed, and we don’t always need the full facilities of a site anyway, so we happily stayed there and ate a couple of pizzas in the bar that evening to give something back. Before dinner Ju took in the town, custom-built in 1788 as a herring port to fend off Dutch vessels which were taking advantage of the lack of local competition. I got a different vantage point, hiking and running the icy trails in the hills, using the conditions to test some new waterproof gear.

This morning we left the NC500 route (again) and headed east towards Inverness, taking a small detour after a wee while to see the Falls of Measach. One problem with doing too much touring is this: the more you see, the less impressive things can start to seem. Having roamed Norway and seen some simply magnificent scenery, smaller waterfalls and viewpoints fail to have the same wow factor. The Falls of Measach though, packed a punch! An old suspension bridge stands above the Corrieshalloch Gorge, which is so deep and steep it reminded us of the Corinth Canal in Greece, and further along the path a metal vantage point’s been built out above the edge of the cliff, giving a good buzz as we stood on it peering back up at the water plummeting under the bridge we’d just been stood on. The gorge is, apparently, too deep to have been cut by this river, and was more likely formed by a power flow of water under a glacier. Wow.

As Ju isn’t sure whether she visited Loch Ness as a child, we opted to drive alongside it today instead of taking the faster A9 back to Edinburgh. After driving almost as far east as Inverness we turned south onto the edge of the enormous loch, which holds more fresh water than all the lakes and reservoirs in England and Wales combined, turning back west. A short drive along the north shore we pulled into Urquhart Castle, a ruined fortress which has seen plenty of action over the years. After a spot of lunch partaken Chez Zagan in the car park (we know how to live), we rode the A82 here, just shy of Fort William.

After supping a cuppa when we arrived and rubbing any my aching back a little (the A82’s fairly fast, has plenty of lorries, winds a bit back and forth and isn’t that wide!), we walked about a mile up the Allt a’Mhuillin track to get a view of Ben Nevis. It was 3:30pm by the time the photo below was taken and it gets dark not long after 4, so we beat a retreat back to the van. The higher parts of this path are for the more serious hill walker/mountaineer anyway, not for us two!

Right, that’s me done! Just one last thing: should you have a burning desire to snap up a couple of desolate remote islands in the Atlantic, now could be your chance. Ju spotted these two in an agents in Ullapool:

Cheers, Jay