Matt Prior: Go south for airports, go north for pure driving

Matt Prior: Go south for airports, go north for pure driving

Autocar

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Nowhere in the UK is better for touring than rural Scotland

Scotland is rife with prime touring spots, where spectacular roads abound and traffic is rarely seen

Where will you go when this is over – when the open road finally opens again? I’m thinking of heading north. South, or certainly south-east, is to where things have been migrating for decades. It’s why a flat now costs a million quid and the average vehicle speed in London has barely changed for a century.

Perhaps enforcing those who are able to work from home will do more than HS2 – conceived mostly for people just like them – ever will for the viability of living somewhere else.

One of my favourite cartoons from this time shows a man wearing pyjamas, sitting at his computer, saying: “So those meetings could have all been emails!”

And south is to where the biggest airports are. I’d believe the argument that flying is the most exciting thing humankind has ever achieved, and that doing it from the UK to Faro with exceptional reliability for 50 quid is one of our most impressive industrial feats. But while great things happen when brilliant people can travel to share and learn and make the world a more peaceful, open, knowledgable and prosperous place, perhaps it would be better if there wasn’t quite so much of it. The sky certainly looks better with fewer marks in it. I’ve never noticed that before.

So, once I’ve hugged the old folks again, north on wheels it is. One of my friends said the other day that, if you’re feeling claustrophobic, you should open an online map and go places on screen and in your mind. Nice idea.

My journey is still in my head, and it’s interspersed by motorways – because lovely though back roads can be, they can also add hours to a journey, and I don’t see that particular fact changing, no matter how much the rest of the world does.

My first dream stop is in the Peak District, around the Hope Valley and the River Derwent. This is my easy-to-reach getaway from home in the South Midlands.

But the dream journey I want to make carries on and truly starts where England stops and Scotland starts. And it can keep going from there, for a very, very long time.

I’m always surprised by how big Scotland is. Don’t laugh. I know it’s big: I’ve seen it on a map and I’ve been there a lot. But a few times I’ve driven south from John O’Groats and still there comes that point where, after six hours or more, I’m always, without fail, surprised to realise that I’m still – still – in Scotland.

This is a good thing, I should add, because it means the drives last a long time.

Still the best drive I’ve ever had was in 2001, in a Peugeot 106 GTi, from St Albans to Loch Alsh, near the Isle of Skye. I set off very early to arrive at a still-sensible time of the day, stopping only for fuel.

It was the first time I had driven to that part of Scotland. By early afternoon I was driving through Glencoe, on the most spectacular roads I’d seen – perhaps the most spectacular roads I’ve still ever seen and driven, and with so little traffic that they’re the only ‘back roads’ on which you can cover big distances in predictable times. And there are sensational walks when you arrive.

So when this gloom lifts, that’s where I’m headed. In a car? On a motorcycle? That’s still to be confirmed, dependant on the weather. There may, I fear, be plenty of time to decide. See you there.

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