One of the basic and immutable laws of holiday blogging is ‘the longer the blog goes on, the less frequent the entries become’. It’s not that you have less to say, just that for some reason as the days go on it becomes more of an effort to remember where you’ve been and what you’ve done. So that’s my excuse sorted, now let’s get on with the blog.
The weather in the Scottish Highlands in May can be wonderful – in fact I think that I may have promised as much when I first raised this trip as a possibility. To be fair we have had some sunshine and there have been days when it hasn’t rained too much, but in all honesty the weather has been just a little unkind and not quite what we had hoped for. For night 7 we wild-camped just above the picturesque village of Sheildaig where the wind blew and the rain hammered down on the Van giving us a true Highland experience. Fortunately we managed to fit in a short walk to the village pub before the weather set in, and as we arrived ‘home’ we watched the Hebridean Princess as she anchored for the night in Loch Sheildaig. Now, that’s one way to tour the Scottish coastline in real luxury- and at only £500/night per passenger, what a bargain!
From Sheildaig we headed south towards Loch Carron. On balance we decided to give Applecross a miss – the weather was poor and the prospect of yet more difficult single-track roads didn’t really appeal. Plus, we decided that Denise’s buttocks probably weren’t up to the challenge. From Loch Carron we headed back towards Inverness and in doing so we completed the North Coast 500 and the circumnavigation – disappointingly there was no fanfare, though we gave ourselves a well-deserved pat on the back.
With a little time to spare and a decent break in the clouds we decided to visit Culloden which, along with our superior World Cup record, is one of the many things for which the Scots won’t forgive the English. We struck lucky and arrived just in time to join an excellent short tour led by our guide, Raymond, who not only had all the facts of the 1746 battle at his fingertips but even managed at one stage to get his audience marching around the battlefield in three ranks. He explained how Bonnie Prince Charlie managed to turn a potentially winning position into a complete military disaster –the fact that as a Scot he told the story without once uttering those immortal words ‘we was robbed’ was especially impressive.
