Stage three of our autumn holiday last year took me on a continuation of my solitary drive from Switzerland to the far reaches of the Isle of Skye in Scotland, with a stop in Kyle of Lochalsh to pick up Jo from the train station.
I spent the first three legs of our autumn holiday travelling alone last year, as Jo had gone on ahead to visit family. The journey by road from our home in Switzerland to my brother-in-law’s house on the Isle of Skye is a mammoth one: three whole days of driving through four countries, travelling across (or, rather, under) the English Channel, and over the Skye Bridge which crosses a narrow channel of the Atlantic Ocean. Covering these two thousand two hundred kilometres may be a familiar journey these days, but it’s still a major undertaking.
Jo and I had arranged for me to pick her up at the train station on the Scottish west coast at Kyle of Lochalsh, to which she was travelling after spending time with her father. After driving from the south of England to the south of Scotland the previous day, stopping off near Oxford and at Hardendale en route, I slept late and planned to spend six hours taking the cross-country route across Scotland, with plenty of stops for photography and drone flights.
After a very late breakfast near Edinburgh, I headed up to Stirling and then turned onto the “tourist route” past Callander, Loch Earn and Crianlarich, before crossing Rannoch Moor and passing through Glen Coe. Although this is a more challenging drive, the scenery more than makes up for it and the weather was glorious. Getting good photographs along the route was like shooting fish in a barrel.
My first stop of the day was a spontaneous one at Loch Lubnaig, around an hour into the journey. The winding road is beautiful but also quite busy, so I chose to stop off for a break after trailing behind a line of traffic for a while. I stretched my legs, then put my drone up to film and photograph the sunlit loch amongst the pine trees.
My next stop was the highlight of the journey. Although nearby Glen Coe is spectacular and well-photographed by thousands of people every year, it is also quite a busy part of the Highlands (despite what social media will have you believe). I much prefer the gigantic space and dramatic landscape of Rannoch Moor: 130 km2 of boggy moorland interspersed with lochans and surrounded at a distance by ancient rounded mountains. The A82 main road drives across the western side of the bleak but beautiful landscape and although it’s much busier than when I first visited twelve years ago, it still feels like being a million miles from civilisation. (Spoiled only by the ubiquitous camper vans in the small, rough car park on the southern edge of the moor.)
After half an hour or so of photography and drone flights, I got back on the road and joined a steady stream of traffic heading through the famous valley of Glen Coe. Making a mental note, once more, to plan a hiking trip for the surrounding mountains one day, I passed the overloaded car park opposite the menacing peaks of The Three Sisters and headed on to the main town in this part of Scotland: Fort William, where I stopped briefly to get a takeaway coffee.
I already had plenty of good photographs in the bag so far and a deadline to keep, so I simply enjoyed the remaining non-stop drive past Spean Bridge (with views of Ben Nevis in my rear-view mirrors) and along the vast length of Loch Lochy (the lochiest loch in the world?) before turning off onto what is becoming my favourite road in Scotland: the A87 between Invergarry and Eilean Donan castle on the coast. (I’ll write more about this road another time.)
Reaching the famous castle on the shoreline means that the Isle of Skye isn’t far away: my meeting with Jo at the quaint railway station by the harbour near the Skye Bridge was only 30 minutes away. I was, remarkably, around ten minutes early despite the long, winding route and photographic breaks. I parked up on the station approach road, cleared some space in the car for Jo’s luggage, and whiled away the short wait by taking some panoramic snaps of the station and of the views across to Skye.
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