Byways
Our picnic place is
exactly ten miles away up the mountain roads, and you pass maybe
three cars on the way there of an evening. It's a busy place in
the summer daytime, and the big country hotel on the way has
"Lochs and Glens" coaches lined up, with as like as not, three
or four dazed town holidaymakers wandering across the road -
they have never been in such a quiet place.
The road goes over to the next small town, Aberfoyle, in the
heart of Trossachs country, forests, mountains, Rob Roy stories
etc. It was named the Duke's Pass fairly recently, to balance
the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park, but I call it the Piper's Road,
as I am told there always used to be pipers playing at the top,
the travelling people using this area a lot. There are almost no
homesteads between the small towns. This is one of the by-roads
and they are a joy to explore, as long as you are intrepid with
regard to steep descents and ascents, twists, narrow bridges,
passing places, rocky corners, wild animals especially deer, and
breathtaking views with which you cannot always concern yourself
while driving.
Vintage bus
climbing the Piper's Road
You can go a long way in Scotland on the small roads under these
conditions, but for business travel (or for a fast return home
after an outing), there is of course a network of major roads,
some of them motorways but more often dual carriageways which
still have farm entrances and other features, so they do not
reach motorway standard. We are seeing improvements. The
dangerous right turns cannot be phased out quickly enough for
me, but where they exist there are now warnings, road lighting,
and road markings giving a turning lane. A poet friend, Margaret
Gillies Brown, lives on a farm which recently got its own
interchange junction with overhead bridge. The local doctors
were among those who had campaigned for improvements.
Some of these important roads are not even dual carriageway
throughout, but have sections of two-way traffic with a variety
of overtaking lanes, short dualled stretches, etc. The A9 which
now runs form Perth to Inverness, part of the original London -
Edinburgh - Perth - Inverness route, is the most notorious of
these inadequate roads.
A junction called Ballinluig, on the Inverness road, had fatal
accidents every year. In my new long poem The Bees, the story
needed somebody to be killed in the Highlands, so I killed them
at Ballinluig, partly of course to help campaign for a safer
crossing. I am glad to say that, just as my poem has been
published, work on this junction has been completed and there is
now an overbridge.
Typical small west
coastal road, near Ullapool
These main roads go from city to city but there are not enough
of them, and in particular there is a dearth of diversion
routes, so that traffic accidents and even roadworks can close
roads or cause insufferable delays. You can miss your ferry to
the islands, or your air flight, if you are caught up in a
sudden road closure. The mountain passes and coastal roads don't
always offer much choice of road planning: there often isn't
anywhere to put an alternative road. However, when our local
roads are busy I often use the little farm road the other side
of the river, and I also go round from Stirling (our nearest
city) via Dunblane, because queues develop on the main road
outside the local safari park on busy days. (Dunblane is a city
too, but village-sized.)
You can tell from this that I am a keen and happy driver, though
there are problems for drivers in Scotland too, mainly bridge
closures due to high winds and the resultant jams of heavy
vehicles on the motorways, urban queueing, shortage of petrol
stations in country areas, and of course parking difficulties in
the cities. But many people get around without cars. In the
highlands you will see walkers and hitch-hikers (I still pick up
hitch-hikers occasionally if they are young people or students).
The poet Douglas Lipton has a poem about two girls on Skye,
hitching with a sign saying Anywhere Please. Once we met an
American who was spending his summer walking round the whole
highland coastline from Aberdeen to Ayrshire. He had done it the
previous year, in the other direction. We met him at a campsite
where we were holing up during a northern trip, and a poem came
out of that too. There is a lot of scope for individual
inexpensive touring in Scotland.
The Skye Bridge
People going to the islands can either go by air, in the small,
busy aircraft that land sometimes on beaches, or by ferry, which
they do, of course, if they are taking their cars. Some of the
journeys take many hours, though of course the famous Skye
ferry, replaced by a modest bridge, was a very short crossing.
You see many bicycles on the roads - ordinary ones, racing ones
and mountain bikes which are hired out everywhere, and usually
used off-road, though there are concerns about erosion on some
of the mountain routes. And minibuses loaded with canoes, which
disgorge their passengers and craft onto rivers, white water or
what have you. You can even travel by narrow boat on the
re-opened central Scotland canals.
In summer the lochside beaches are dotted with campers - some
walking or on bicycles but some with vehicles. A few cause
problems, often associated with cans of beer. Once they have set
up camp and started drinking, the police cannot move them on,
because they cannot drive after drinking. Of course, they shove
off when they feel like it, leaving their cans as litter, as
often as not. But I still think it's good that people from the
cities will come out and enjoy this incredible countryside.
Not all of them do. Many people in the cities just stay there,
getting local buses or using bikes to go a little way out into
the country from time to time. Or they will make train journeys,
of which there is plenty of scope in the more highly populated
lowlands, so that Edinburgh and Glasgow stations are always busy
with commuters and travellers. Longer distance trains are
generally more expensive but many of the routes are spectacular
- along the coast to Aberdeen, through the Western highlands to
Mallaig, through the deer-filled mountains to Inverness, along
the cliffs to Wick and Thurso for the Orkney boat. And the gem
of the journeys, between Inverness and Kyle of Lochalsh, single
track through tiny Gaelic-named villages where no direct road
runs, a route unparallelled in Britain, many would say. But now
there is no connecting ferry at Kyle, the Skye Bridge is miles
away from the station, and the train-a-day each way is never
very full.
Highland road stop
We made this journey in winter a couple of years ago, in unusual
circumstances. I had been travelling on Skye in a borrowed car,
or rather a lent car, but that's another story. This car had a
defect I didn't know about, and its back axle broke near
Sligachan. Without steering or brakes I went off the road,
through a fence, down a gully and landed in a bog - which
probably saved my life. I stepped out unscathed but slightly
high on the experience, and complained to the rescuing garage,
which wrote off the vehicle, that I had just put a whole lot of
petrol in the car. My husband hearing this, said I had
naturalised as a Scotswoman.
And that's how we came to travel on the scenic railway from Kyle
to Inverness.
