north coast crofting country, one bed for four nights at a time
Reserve a slow week in Sutherland, the far north of Scotland, walked at your own pace
You can reserve this week with two nights in Ullapool and six split between Lochinver and Durness, and it is worth saying up front that the Scottish Highlands by coach tour gets you past far more of Scotland than this does. What it does not get you is an afternoon where nobody is waiting.
Eight nights, from $3,600 per person.
Ask ten people what they want from Scotland and a good number will describe the same eight seconds: a road bending away between two brown hills, water at the bottom of the frame, nobody else in it. That image is real and it is in Sutherland, north and west of Inverness, and you can stand in it. The question is only what you had to do to get there and how long you are allowed to stay.
A coach tour is how most Americans see the Highlands, and it is how most Americans see them well. Seven days, roughly 900 miles, Inverness to Skye to Glencoe and back around, with a driver who knows every layby and a commentary that has been refined over two decades of telling it. For a first look at a country you may not return to, that is a defensible way to spend a week. It is also, hour for hour, mostly sitting. The arithmetic is not hidden: 900 miles on Highland roads is about 28 hours of driving, spread across seven days, plus the loading and unloading either end of each leg. The stops that break it up are timed to the group and the group is forty people, so twenty minutes is what a viewpoint gets. You will have photographed twelve places and stood still in none of them.
This desk books the other version. One county instead of five, two beds instead of six, and the day belongs to you. Sutherland has about 13,000 people in an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island together, which means the emptiness the photographs promise is not a trick of the lens or an early hour. It is just what the place is like at two in the afternoon in July.
What people ask for
the Scottish Highlands by coach tour
A coach means somebody else drives the single track roads, the narration is usually done by a person who has lived there forty years, you meet forty travellers who chose the same thing, and the price per day is genuinely low for the ground it covers.
A Highlands coach tour covers roughly 900 miles in seven days, which works out to eight or nine hours seated on most days and three or four photograph stops of twenty minutes each, and we cannot place a booking whose main activity is the seat.
What this desk will reserve instead
A slow week in Sutherland
North coast crofting country, one bed for four nights at a time.
Eight nights, from $3,600 per person. Send a booking request
How far this sits from the request: a different week, or the country next door
Eight nights: two in a small hotel in Ullapool, three in a guesthouse at Lochinver, three in a converted schoolhouse near Durness. You drive yourselves in a reserved compact car. Bags stay in the room and in the trunk, unpacked twice.
Inverness airport is 57 miles from Ullapool, about ninety minutes on the A835. Beyond Ullapool the road is single width with passing places for most of 90 miles, and the surface is fine but the sightlines are not. Beds are three private rooms, all ensuite, all with a kettle and none with air conditioning. The season we sell runs mid April to the first week of October. Eight nights from $3,600 per person, two sharing.
Eight nights in three private ensuite rooms; full Scottish breakfast every morning; a compact manual car with unlimited mileage and the collision excess bought down to zero; ferry crossing to Handa Island and the return; one guided half day on the Assynt coast with a local geologist; two packed lunches; parking at all three houses; a printed route sheet with passing place etiquette and the location of every fuel pump north of Ullapool; and airport pickup of the car and its return.
Flights to Inverness; dinners, which run $22 to $48 a head and must be reserved by noon in Durness because the kitchen buys to order; fuel, roughly $130 for the week at current pump prices; the automatic transmission upgrade at $210 for the week; single occupancy, which adds $690; drinks; entry to Smoo Cave lower chamber at $9; any second driver at $85; and the boat to the Old Man of Stoer, which is weather dependent and $60 when it runs.
Anyone who will not take the wheel should leave this one alone on the left on a road eleven feet wide with a rock wall on one side, because there is no alternative: the bus through Sutherland runs twice a day in summer and not at all on Sundays. The Handa Island loop is 3.5 miles over boardwalk and peat with a 260 foot climb and no shelter. The Durness house has fourteen stairs and no elevator. Three of the eight days will likely bring rain that lasts all day, and there is nowhere indoors to spend it within twenty miles.
What the ground does between Ullapool and Cape Wrath
The rock here is the oldest exposed in Britain and it behaves nothing like the smooth green Highlands of the postcards further south. Lewisian gneiss makes a landscape of knobs and hollows, thousands of small lochans caught between them, and then a handful of isolated sandstone mountains standing up out of it with nothing around their base. Suilven is the famous one, 2,398 feet, and it looks like a wall from one direction and a dome from another. Quinag and Canisp do the same trick. You do not climb them on this week unless you want to and have the legs; you look at them for three days from different angles, which is a different and slower pleasure.
The coast is cut into by sea lochs every few miles, so the road north is long in a way the map understates. Lochinver to Durness is 43 miles and takes an hour and forty minutes if nothing goes wrong, which mostly means if you do not meet a delivery truck in a passing place. The beaches along that stretch are white shell sand, genuinely, and mostly empty, and the water is 54 degrees in August. People do swim. They do not swim long.
Season is a record, not a forecast, and the record for this coast is as follows: mid April onward the houses open and the light is long; June and July give the most hours but also the midges, which are worst on still damp evenings inland and much better on the coast where there is wind; September has historically been the driest month of the summer half here and the one with the clearest air. Nothing about that is a promise about the week you pick.
The person who gets the most out of eight nights here
This suits somebody who is comfortable with a day that has one item in it. You drive twenty miles, you walk for three hours, you come back and read for two, and that was a full day and a good one. It suits people who have already done a first trip to Scotland by whatever means and want to go back into one part of it properly. It suits two people who like each other's silence, because there are stretches of road where you will not pass a car for eleven miles and there is no radio signal for most of it.
It does not suit somebody who wants to have seen Edinburgh, Skye and Loch Ness in the same week, and there is nothing wrong with wanting that. It is simply a different holiday and a coach does it better than we could.
The year on this coast, as it has run
Houses reopen and the road is quiet. Days already run to fifteen hours of light by early May. Cold wind off the water most days, and hill lochs still too cold for anything but looking at.
Historically the driest stretch and the one locals name if you ask them. Midges have not started properly in most years. Long light, few visitors, and the ferry to Handa running its first full weeks.
Peak light, near nineteen hours of it, and peak visitors, which here still means you might share a beach with nine people. Midges are at their worst inland on still evenings; the coastal houses are noticeably better.
Warmest sea of the year, around 54 degrees, and the busiest roads. Scottish school holidays end mid month and the second half is quieter than the first. Weather has been mixed in most recorded years.
The month people who have been here before tend to choose. Air is clearer, midges are finishing, light is still generous at fourteen hours mid month, and the hills go rust colored.
Last week we sell. Light down to eleven hours, several houses already closed, and the wind has usually turned. Beautiful and thin, and not for a first visit.
We do not book this week. Two of the three houses close, the road over to Durness gets snow, and there are days with under seven hours of usable light.
The part of this week people underestimate
The driving is harder than the mileage suggests, and this is the honest drawback of what we are offering rather than of the coach. Single track means one lane with passing places every few hundred yards, and the etiquette is that whoever is closer to a passing place gives way, which includes reversing forty yards uphill on a wet surface. Most visitors get the hang of it by day two. Some never enjoy it. If you have not driven on the left before, Sutherland is a demanding place to learn, and the honest advice is to spend the first afternoon on the wider road south of Ullapool before you commit to the coast road.
The other thing is food and it catches people out. Between Lochinver and Durness there are perhaps five places to eat, several of them seasonal, and two of them stop serving at eight. The Durness house asks for dinner numbers by noon because the fish comes up from the boat that day and they buy to order. This is not a hardship once you know it, but arriving in a village at nine in the evening expecting a meal will not work, and it is the single most common complaint we hear back. Carry something in the car.
Put a request in front of the desk
This form is open 24/7 and takes booking requests at any hour. It asks for no card number and no payment, because nothing is ever paid to this office. Requests are read in the order they arrive and answered within one business day.
No card number is asked for on this page or held anywhere by this office, and sending this costs nothing and commits you to nothing. A request is not a reservation: nothing is held in your name until the operating company confirms it in writing and you have read its terms.