Commonly referred to as the UK’s most epic road trip, the North Coast 500 has been blighted by local tales of woe—particularly surrounding touring vehicles. With her family in tow, Emma Gibbs sets out to discover whether sustainability and van life can coexist on the route.
It’s 8am and the sun is only just beginning to show itself: A band of yellow just visible behind the hills. The water in front of us is a silver sheet, stretching the short distance to Isle Ristol, where wispy clouds dance over the top of its low ridges.
“This is the life,” my daughter, Lydia, says, taking a sip of hot chocolate and stretching out her boot-clad toes, as though she is on a sun lounger by the Med, rather than the back seats of a van in northern Scotland. As we watch, the sea loch shifts to a cornflower blue and a heron swoops low, large wings outstretched, to land on a rock.
We’re at Port A Bhaigh campsite on the Coigach Peninsula, a moor-clad arm of land that juts into the strait that separates the Scottish mainland from the islands of Lewis and Harris. There are a dozen or so other vans here, but we may as well be the only ones: Everyone else is still tucked up inside theirs.
After breakfast, we climb the hill that peers over the campsite. At the top, mouths full of the chocolate I’d bribed them with to keep going, the children are silent as they take in the view. The coastline curves around in a perfect C to Old Dorney harbor, the water scattered with colorful fishing boats. In the distance, hazy in the morning sun, are the layered headlands of Scoraig, Gruinard Bay and distant Skye.
As we head downhill, the kids exclaim with excitement when they spot our bright blue van—which they lovingly now call Oona—looking like a toy model below us. And now, it’s the only vehicle still at the campsite. “Where has everyone gone?” Alex, my son, asks. “They’re probably doing the NC500,” I say. “So they’ll be moving on to the next place.”
Arguably the UK’s most popular road trip, the North Coast 500 (NC500 for short) traces a 516-mile loop around the northern coast of mainland Scotland, starting (and finishing) in the Highland capital of Inverness. There’s no denying it’s a glorious drive, taking in windswept beaches and old fishing villages on the East Coast, the wide-open spaces of the North, and the intense drama of the mountainous West.
In simple terms of bringing tourists to far north Scotland, the success of the route is indisputable. But speak to locals and you’ll hear the same things again and again: There isn’t the infrastructure to accommodate the number of people who drive the route; many visitors are still not stopping long enough to experience the region; and the roads are swamped by convoys of motorcycles, fast cars, and lumbering motorhomes.
This is all thrown into particularly sharp relief when it comes to campervanning (a word I’m using here as shortform to encompass motorhomes and vans, though I appreciate they’re all different beasts), which for many locals remains the biggest pinch point of all the route’s issues. “The problem is when people in campervans don’t stay in campsites,” Sue Groocock, who runs Spindrift B&B on the Applecross Peninsula, told me. The previous day, her husband Andy had seen someone emptying their toilet cassette into a burn that flows into a beach – and not for the first time. “They don’t realize that ‘wild camping’ means legs and a tent, not a van,” she says. “The only way to sustainably camp is to stay in a campsite.”
The real magic lies in the quiet, relaxed nature of campervanning. With no early checkouts and no packing up to do, we ease into our days with hot chocolate and the back of the van open to the views.
It’s a sentiment shared by Big Sky Campers, whom we rented Oona through. Situated just north of Edinburgh, owners Alexandra Black and Rob Dawkins have purposefully kept to a small fleet of unbranded VW vans.
“We’re increasingly aware of the impact holidaymakers have on Scotland, especially those touring in vehicles,” Alexandra says. “So we made the decision to stick with smaller vans that don’t have an on-board toilet in the hope it would encourage customers towards campsites.” The team has recently started offering a route-planning service, making this even easier for guests. We hit the road with a list of suggested campsites, with personal insight from Alexandra about what each place had to offer.
The thing about traveling with kids is that it forces you into a kind of slow travel that is the antithesis of how many people experience the NC500. With only five days to play with, there’s no point in attempting the entire route, so I’ve decided to focus instead on the far northwest and north coasts. Traveling like this on a popular route—relieved of the pressure of ticking off sights—means we often have places to ourselves. At Knockan Crag, we place our hands on sun-warmed rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old. Near Clachtoll we clamber into an Iron-age broch (roundhouse)—in the silence, it’s no stretch to imagine what life would have been like there three thousand years ago. In the Strathnaver Museum, Alex spends ten minutes listening to the evocative accounts of people evicted during the Clearances, unhurried by other visitors.
The real magic, however, lies in the quiet, relaxed nature of campervanning. With no early checkouts and no packing up to do, we ease into our days with hot chocolate and the back of the van open to the views while everyone else seems to leave the campsites en masse, like a procession of migrating animals. In the evenings, we cook dinner sourced from local shops and play card games, and the kids let go of all those little niggles that have worried them during the term at school.
Most days, we pass more touring vehicles than any other kind, leading to new games like “Is it a bus or a motorhome?” (the answer, most often, is the latter), and the kids develop my habit of loudly urging slow-moving vehicles to pull over. I do wonder, frequently, if we’re just adding more strain to the local area, but at least in Oona I can drive the winding roads as quickly as in my own car, effortlessly nipping into a passing place when a faster vehicle approaches.
On our last day, the mountains of the west at our backs, we cut across flat, rolling farmland to visit the flock of reindeer at Lichen Caithness. “Are we still on the NC500?” Alex asks when we leave. “No,” I say. “We’re taking a route that most other visitors don’t.” Soon enough, the green fields give way to russet-brown moorland punctuated by huge white wind turbines that gleam in the half-light of the overcast day. “But why?” he asks. “Don’t they know there’s more to see than just a road?
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Emma Gibbs is a writer and editor specializing in far north Scotland, with a particular interest in slow and sustainable travel. She is currently writing a slow travel guide to the region for Bradt Guides and is also the writer of ‘North Coast 500: Britain’s Ultimate Road Trip’, published by HarperCollins. In addition to being Editor-in-Chief of JRNY Travel Magazine, she has written for The Guardian, The Independent and Scotland Magazine, among others.
