Driving across Scotland

Our Great British Adventure

April 30, 2018

Poor planning (I did a proper itinerary only a week before we left) meant we had a long drive across the whole width of Scotland to St Andrews for a few days, after which we'd drive halfway back again to Loch Ness. Thankfully Anthony doesn't mind driving!

After leaving Skye we stopped at Eilean Donan castle for a couple of exterior shots, and encountered a small cloud of midges - the first insects we'd encountered on our trip. We drove on and randomly stopped at the Darwin's Rest Cafe at Roybridge. Wow! It turned out that Charles Darwin had written a paper speculating on how an interesting nearby geological formation called The Parallel Lines was formed (which turned out to be wrong, which he acknowledged once the correct theory appeared). There was lots of interesting information in the cafe and we decided to take our lives into our hands and follow the vague instructions up the lane to look at the formation.

There was lots of crawling along, trying not to run over cute lambs frolicking next to their mothers who were grazing on the verges. We found the lookout eventually. The Parallel Lines ran right along both walls of the long valley and I could see why they'd fascinate geologists. Then it was a crawl back past the pair of bemused farmers having a chat at their gate, and onto the road to Dundee. We largely skirted Dundee itself, driving alongside the River Tay to the bridge. Then it was a short hop to our accomodation south of St Andrews.