Scotland’s North Highlands: Local, Characterful Guides to Britain’s Special Places

Scotland’s North Highlands (Slow Travel) is the latest title in Bradt’s series of distinctive, widely acclaimed ’Slow’ travel guides to local UK regions. Written by a northern Scotland specialist who edits the award-winning JRNY Travel Magazine, this guidebook provides greater detail than any other to the whole of northern Scotland - roaming far beyond the increasingly popular 516-mile North Coast 500 (NC500) driving route. Coupling a wide, personal selection of places to explore with focused advice on travel practicalities, Scotland’s North Highlands (Slow Travel) encourages visitors to adopt a leisurely approach designed to tease out the region’s special qualities - and contribute positively to local communities.

In the far northern reaches of Scotland, Sutherland, Caithness and Ross-shire are regions that, by their nature, demand to be taken slowly. Single-track roads dominate, skirting lochs and winding up and over moorland and mountains carpeted with blanket bog, settlements are few and far between, and you’ll feel outnumbered by sheep as yet another flock ambles across a road leading to a historic castle, old fishing port or alluring ancient site. But biding your time is no inconvenience when every corner reveals a yet more staggering view, when remote coastal cliffs throb with the cries of seabirds, or when following a potholed road leads to an empty cove of sand that shimmers pink and blue in the ever-changing Highlands light.

There are no large settlements here - the second-largest town has 1,500 inhabitants - so visitors focus intently on the outdoors. Getting into wilderness is joyously easy: within moments of parking your car or stepping out of your B&B, you’re striding among scenery so enchanting and dramatic it feels like it’s been conjured up by someone’s imagination. Whether you fancy clambering over rocks to discover a secret beach, watching dolphins leap, playing a round at Royal Dornoch Golf Course, kayaking to uninhabited islands or trekking to villages abandoned during the Highland Clearances (the ousted residents often resettling in the US), northern Scotland is the kind of place that gets its teeth into you. Just the place, indeed, for Bradt’s Scotland’s North Highlands to provide the perfect travelling companion.

Emma Gibbs (emmagibbseditorial.com) is a freelance travel writer and editor, specializing in northern Scotland, and with a particular interest in Slow and sustainable travel. She is the author of North Coast 500: Britain’s Ultimate Road Trip (a best-selling, illustrated guide that identifies the 100 best places to visit along this touring route in northern Scotland) and i-SPY Scotland. She has written for The Guardian, The I, The Independent and Scotland Magazine, among others, for articles about northern Scotland that have seen her snorkeling in the North Sea, stargazing from a campervan, and (perhaps hardest of all) sampling local whiskey and beer. Her first experience of the region was on the far north coast where - despite being repeatedly rained off the beaches and attempting a picnic during a sandstorm - the craggy coastline, quiet roads and brooding mountains led to her realizing there was nowhere she’d rather be than the Scottish Highlands.