NIX NC500: 520 MILES AROUND THE EDGE OF SCOTLAND

September 2025. Vanilla. The North Coast 500. Cameras charged, diesel in the tank and absolutely no intention of rushing.

There are road trips, and then there are roads that get under your skin.

The North Coast 500 did exactly that.

I drove it anti-clockwise in Vanilla, my VW campervan, starting from the Inverness side and heading first towards the east coast before swinging around the very top of Scotland and eventually dropping down that magnificent western edge.

The actual NC500 section came in at around 520.4 miles, but by the time I'd travelled from Staffordshire, explored Scotland and made my way home again, the whole expedition had stretched to roughly 1,357.9 miles.

And those numbers tell almost none of the story.

📷 VIEW MY FULL NC500 FLICKR ALBUM

THE NORTH WAS CALLING

I love the idea of travelling with a plan that isn't actually too much of a plan.

I knew the big names. John o' Groats. Durness. Ullapool. Applecross. Bealach na Bà.

But one of the reasons I travel in Vanilla is that the interesting bits are often the places between the famous names. A lay-by overlooking a loch. A tiny harbour. A beach that appears from nowhere. A road climbing over empty moorland with nobody else in sight.

The NC500 isn't really one attraction.

The road itself is the attraction.

Visit the official North Coast 500 website

BALINTORE AND THE MERMAID OF THE NORTH

One of my first memorable stops was Balintore on the Moray Firth.

And yes, I really did see a mermaid.

Not the sort involving sailors being lured onto rocks, thankfully. Vanilla survived intact.

The Mermaid of the North sits on Clach Dubh, the Black Rock, looking out across the Moray Firth. At high tide she can appear almost surrounded by the sea, which makes the whole thing wonderfully strange.

She was exactly the sort of thing I wanted from this trip. Something unexpected, slightly eccentric and absolutely worth stopping for.

I could easily have driven straight past Balintore chasing one of the famous NC500 destinations further north.

I'm glad I didn't.

🧜 FIND THE MERMAID OF THE NORTH

The NC500 rewards curiosity. The moment you stop treating it as a road to complete and start treating it as a coastline to explore, the whole trip changes.

JOHN O' GROATS: THE NAME EVERYBODY KNOWS

Then came John o' Groats.

It is one of those names embedded in British travelling folklore. Even people who have never been remotely interested in road trips know John o' Groats.

For generations, the phrase Land's End to John o' Groats has represented the great end-to-end British journey.

Technically, John o' Groats isn't the most northerly point of mainland Britain. That honour belongs to Dunnet Head.

But facts have never stopped John o' Groats becoming the symbolic end of the road.

Standing there with Vanilla after travelling north from Staffordshire felt significant.

There's the famous signpost, the harbour, the big northern sky and that peculiar feeling that Britain is beginning to run out beneath your feet.

📍 Open John o' Groats in Google Maps

THURSO, TONGUE AND THE GREAT EMPTY NORTH

From the northeast corner I continued west through Thurso and towards Tongue.

This is where the landscape starts changing dramatically.

The east has fields, settlements and long horizons. The north starts feeling bigger and emptier.

Roads stretch across moorland. Mountains begin appearing ahead. Sea lochs cut deep into the land.

At the Kyle of Tongue, the road runs through one of those landscapes that forces you to slow down even if you're not trying to.

That's one advantage of travelling in Vanilla.

I wasn't attempting to beat a timetable. I could stop. Make a drink. Get the camera out. Launch a drone where legal and appropriate. Stand there for ten minutes doing absolutely nothing except looking.

That is proper travelling.

DURNESS: WHERE THE LAND FALLS INTO THE ATLANTIC

Then came Durness.

If somebody asked me to explain why northern Scotland is so addictive, I'd probably show them this part of the map.

Huge skies. Pale beaches. Turquoise water that looks completely wrong for northern Scotland until you remember that Scottish beaches have never received the memo saying cold places aren't allowed tropical colours.

Sango Bay is particularly spectacular.

Cliffs surround a sweep of sand while the Atlantic rolls straight in from the northwest.

On a bright day it can look almost Mediterranean.

Then you open Vanilla's door and Scotland politely reminds you where you are.

🌊 EXPLORE SANGO BAY

SCOURIE AND THE WEST COAST BEGINS TO SHOW OFF

Heading south through Scourie, things became increasingly dramatic.

This is the Scotland I had imagined before setting off.

Rocky coastline.

Still water.

Little boats.

Mountains appearing beyond the lochs.

At places such as Scourie, the reflections alone can keep a photographer occupied for ages.

And that's the danger of taking cameras on the NC500.

A five-minute stop becomes twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes becomes an hour.

Then you realise you've taken 86 photographs of essentially the same mountain.

Obviously they're all completely different photographs.

Photographers will understand.

CLAchtOLL, ACHMELVICH AND THAT COASTLINE

The northwest coast is where the journey really starts becoming gloriously ridiculous.

Places such as Clachtoll and Achmelvich are surrounded by some of the most extraordinary coastal scenery in Britain.

White beaches appear between rugged rocky headlands.

Tiny roads weave through landscapes that seem designed specifically to make you say, "I'll just stop here for a minute."

I stopped a lot.

This is not the part of Scotland where you want to be obsessed with average speed.

It's the part where average speed becomes completely irrelevant.

KYLESKU: ENGINEERING IN THE WILDERNESS

The Kylesku Bridge is another classic NC500 landmark.

It sweeps elegantly across Loch a' Chàirn Bhàin in a landscape where you'd almost expect nothing man-made to work visually.

Yet somehow the bridge does.

Before it opened in 1984, traffic relied on the Kylesku ferry.

Now the curved concrete bridge has become part of the identity of the route itself.

It's not merely something you drive over.

It's something you photograph from every available angle.

Several times.

Because apparently one photograph of a bridge is never enough either.

🌉 Find Kylesku Bridge

ULLAPOOL AND LOCH BROOM

After miles of wild coastline, Ullapool feels almost metropolitan.

That's a slight exaggeration.

But after the remote northwest, suddenly having shops, cafés, boats and an actual harbour feels positively extravagant.

Ullapool sits beautifully on Loch Broom and has long been tied to fishing and maritime life.

I watched the ferry heading away across Loch Broom and out towards Loch Seaforth and Stornoway.

It's one of those little travel moments that doesn't require anything to happen.

A ferry leaves.

The mountains sit behind it.

The water changes colour.

And I stand there with a camera thinking this is exactly why I drove all the way to Scotland.

GAIRLOCH AND LOCH MAREE

Further south came Gairloch and then Loch Maree.

Loch Maree is one of Scotland's great freshwater lochs, surrounded by mountains and ancient woodland.

It has more than sixty islands, several containing remnants of ancient Caledonian pine forest.

The road alongside it delivers one enormous view after another.

By this stage of the trip I had developed a very sophisticated navigation technique:

TORRIDON: SCOTLAND TURNS THE DRAMA DIAL TO ELEVEN

Torridon doesn't do subtle.

The mountains here are among the oldest rocks in Britain.

Massive Torridonian sandstone peaks rise from sea lochs and glens, creating scenery that feels far larger than the actual dimensions on a map suggest.

Driving through in a campervan makes the scale even more obvious.

Vanilla isn't exactly tiny.

Against Torridon, she looked like somebody had dropped a Matchbox van into a geology documentary.

SHIELDAIG AND APPLECROSS

Shieldaig is one of those Scottish villages that makes you question why anybody lives anywhere else.

White houses curve around the water with mountains rising beyond.

Then came Applecross.

Applecross isn't simply a place on the map.

For road-trip people it has become a destination in its own right because of the road that follows.

The famous one.

The road with the sign.

The road that makes campervan owners suddenly pay extremely close attention to the width of their mirrors.

BEALACH NA BÀ

Bealach na Bà.

The Pass of the Cattle.

One of Britain's most celebrated mountain roads.

Originally built in 1822, the road climbs from near sea level to more than 600 metres with steep gradients and tight hairpins.

Historically it was used for driving cattle across the peninsula.

Today it is used for driving campervans while occasionally muttering things such as:

Please don't let anything large come around that corner.

It is steep, narrow and absolutely magnificent.

The views from the top extend across the Applecross peninsula and, in good conditions, towards Skye and the islands beyond.

This is not simply another road on the NC500.

For me it was one of the great driving moments of the entire trip.

🚐 FIND BEALACH NA BÀ

BACK TOWARDS INVERNESS

Eventually the great western section curved back towards Inverness.

And that's the odd thing about completing a route like this.

At the beginning, 500 miles sounds enormous.

At the end, it suddenly feels much too short.

I had driven the east coast, the wild north, the beaches around Durness, the northwest coastline, Ullapool, Gairloch, Torridon, Applecross and Bealach na Bà.

I had filled memory cards.

I had stood beside lochs.

I had watched ferries.

I had photographed mountains.

I had seen the Mermaid of the North.

And Vanilla had carried me through the whole thing.

THE JOURNEY SOUTH

The adventure didn't simply stop when the official NC500 loop finished.

I continued south through Scotland, including Fort Augustus at the southern end of Loch Ness.

Then came more Scottish scenery around Glencoe and eventually Loch Lomond.

By then the NC500 had become part of a much bigger journey.

That is why I prefer thinking of the entire trip as an expedition rather than simply saying, "I did the NC500."

The NC500 was the spine of the journey.

Everything around it was part of the story.

THE PHOTOGRAPHY

This trip was almost purpose-built for me.

Campervan.

Drones.

Photography.

Big landscapes.

Weather changing by the minute.

Roads disappearing towards mountains.

Harbours, beaches, bridges, villages and vast open spaces.

I photographed places including Balintore, John o' Groats, Sango Bay, the Kyle of Tongue, Scourie, Clachtoll, Ullapool, Loch Broom, Gairloch, Loch Maree, Applecross, Bealach na Bà, Loch Ness, Glencoe and Loch Lomond.

Some photographs were about the place.

Others were simply about the light.

And when the Scottish weather started moving across the landscape, the entire view could change within minutes.

That's exactly the sort of photography I enjoy.

📸 OPEN THE NC500 PHOTO ALBUM

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WHAT I LEARNED

The biggest lesson was simple.

Don't race the NC500.

It's possible to drive around it quickly.

But I think you'd miss the point.

The memorable bits weren't simply arriving at the locations everybody recognises from Instagram.

They were the little places.

The lay-bys.

The boats.

The beaches.

The weather.

The road climbing towards another horizon.

The moments when I opened Vanilla's side door, put the kettle on and realised my view would have cost a fortune if it had been outside a hotel room.

WOULD I DO IT AGAIN?

Immediately.

But I wouldn't try to repeat the same trip.

That's the beauty of it.

The weather would be different.

The light would be different.

I'd stop at places I drove past last time.

I'd probably spend longer on the northwest coast.

I'd undoubtedly take thousands more photographs that I absolutely definitely needed.

And Vanilla would once again be pointed north.

Because ultimately the NC500 gave me exactly what I wanted from campervan travel.

Freedom.

Scenery.

Photography.

Roads worth driving simply because they exist.

And that wonderful feeling of looking at a map and realising you're about as far from ordinary daily life as you can reasonably get without requiring a ferry.

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NIX | VANILLA | SCOTLAND | NC500 | SEPTEMBER 2025