NIX NC500: VANILLA WENT NORTH, AND I ACCIDENTALLY DROVE THROUGH 9,500 YEARS OF SCOTTISH HISTORY 🟠🏴🚐📸

Yes. This time I’d keep it completely NIX-safe: plain text only, no HTML, no Markdown links, no clever formatting. The Flickr album URL sits on its own line wherever you want readers to jump into the photographs.

Copy from the title down.

1,357.9 miles. Thirteen days. Twelve nights. Picts, Vikings, Jacobites, fishing villages, mountains older than imagination, German U-boats, the Mermaid of the North, one of Britain’s greatest driving roads and one extraordinary day when I managed to travel 0.8 miles.

This was supposed to be a road trip.

It turned into something much bigger.

I left Staffordshire thinking I was going to drive the NC500.

Load Vanilla. Point north. Reach Inverness. Follow the famous loop. Photograph Scotland. Drive some spectacular roads. Come home.

Simple.

Except the actual GPS trail tells a rather different story.

My complete expedition covered 1,357.9 miles.

Inside that was an actual Inverness-to-Inverness NC500 of 520.4 miles.

Thirteen days away.

Twelve nights.

Ten nights around the NC500 itself.

And once I started looking properly at the places I’d stopped, photographed and slept in, I realised I hadn’t simply driven around the top of Scotland.

I’d driven through thousands of years of history.

I’d crossed Pictish country.

Followed roads through landscapes shaped by Vikings.

Stopped in places connected with Jacobites, Highland clans, herring fleets, crofters and the Clearances.

I drove beside a loch where German U-boats surrendered.

I slept close to a Christian sanctuary founded in AD 673.

I drove through mountains made from rock more than two billion years old.

And somewhere in the middle of all this I found a mermaid.

Not bad for a campervan holiday.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/

The NC500 is marketed as roughly 500 miles.

Lovely.

Unfortunately, I live in Staffordshire.

Inverness is not just around the corner.

My first proper day therefore came in at 431.1 miles.

That’s not easing yourself into a holiday.

That’s ignition, launch tower, engines at full thrust.

Vanilla and I left home and headed north.

For the first few hours it was familiar Britain.

Motorways.

Traffic.

Services.

Coffee.

More motorway.

That quiet internal debate about whether to stop at the next services or risk another forty miles and discover that the following one is somehow worse.

Then Scotland begins changing.

The horizon lifts.

The roads become more interesting.

The hills become mountains.

The names on the signs start sounding like places from adventure books.

Eventually there comes a moment I absolutely love.

You’re not travelling towards the trip anymore.

You’re in it.

At about 4:13pm on 21 September 2025, I reached Inverness.

That is where I now put the official NIX start line.

NC500: GO.

Most normal people, having already driven most of the length of Britain, might have stopped.

I carried on to Balintore.

Obviously.

Balintore was exactly the sort of place I wanted for the beginning.

A small village on the Easter Ross coast.

Sea.

Fresh air.

Vanilla parked after one enormous run north.

And yes, I actually saw her.

The Mermaid of the North.

She sits out on the rocks looking across the Moray Firth, an unexpected piece of sculpture that immediately gives Balintore its own identity.

I’d barely started the NC500 and Scotland had already provided a mermaid.

That is excellent service.

But underneath the slightly magical first impression was something much older.

This coastline sits in the middle of important Pictish country.

Around Hilton of Cadboll, Shandwick and Nigg are some of the great carved stones associated with the Picts, the people who dominated much of northern and eastern Scotland in the early medieval period.

These aren’t crude scratches on rock.

They are intricate monuments decorated with animals, symbols, riders and extraordinary designs.

So while I was worrying about whether Vanilla was level enough for the night, people had been leaving their mark on this landscape more than a thousand years before me.

Night one.

Mermaid.

Picts.

Sea.

I’d say the trip had started rather well.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/

I drove anti-clockwise.

East coast first.

Then the roof of Scotland.

Then west.

And looking back, I think that was perfect.

The journey builds.

The east coast gives you space to settle into it.

The north starts making everything feel remote.

Then you turn down the west and Scotland appears to say:

Right. Enough warming up. Look at THIS.

The mountains grow.

The roads shrink.

The Atlantic appears.

And every corner seems determined to improve on the previous one.

The next day was my biggest proper NC500 stage.

107.4 miles.

Balintore north through Caithness.

Then eventually one of the most famous names on the British map appeared.

John o’Groats.

Everybody knows the sign.

You almost cannot arrive there without taking the photograph.

And yes, I know Dunnet Head is actually farther north.

Somebody somewhere is currently reaching for a keyboard to point this out.

But that’s not really the point.

I had driven Vanilla from Staffordshire to John o’Groats.

That felt bloody good.

Even the name is interesting.

It is traditionally linked to Jan de Groot, a Dutchman associated with a ferry route between mainland Scotland and Orkney centuries ago.

The famous story says his family argued about who should sit at the head of the dinner table.

Jan’s solution?

Build an eight-sided house with eight doors and use an eight-sided table.

Nobody had the head position.

Family dispute solved by geometry.

Brilliant.

I reached John o’Groats around 2pm on 22 September.

Took in the moment.

Took the photographs.

Then kept going.

Because the GPS later reminded me of something I’d slightly blurred in my memory.

I didn’t stay at John o’Groats.

I slept at Thurso.

Memory keeps the famous sign.

GPS keeps the receipts.

Then my mileage collapsed.

49.6 miles.

Thurso to Tongue.

At home, fifty miles is a journey.

Up here it can be an entire day.

Because every few miles something interferes with the plan.

A beach.

A viewpoint.

A sea loch.

A mountain.

An empty road curling into the distance.

A place that makes me think:

I’ve got to photograph that.

This was the point where I stopped asking:

How far am I driving today?

And started asking:

What looks good next?

That’s when the trip really came alive.

Tongue sits around the Kyle of Tongue in one of those settings where it looks as though somebody designed the landscape first and added the village afterwards.

Above it sits Castle Varrich.

The origins of the site are uncertain, but it became associated with Clan Mackay and the wider area carries strong Norse influence.

Then the Jacobites arrive in the story.

During the 1745 uprising, money intended to support Bonnie Prince Charlie’s cause became caught up in events around this stretch of coast.

Stories of Jacobite gold have lingered ever since.

Which means I’d driven fifty miles and collected:

Vikings.

A castle.

Clan history.

Jacobites.

Possible treasure.

The NC500 was becoming less a road trip and more a history channel with parking spaces.

Now we reach one of my favourite statistics from the entire trip.

24.4 miles.

A full day’s movement.

Twenty-four miles.

I drive an HGV for a living.

Twenty-four miles is barely enough time to decide whether the cab temperature needs adjusting.

But here?

Perfect.

This is where campervan travel makes total sense to me.

I wasn’t rushing towards somewhere to sleep.

I already had somewhere to sleep.

Vanilla was carrying the destination.

Kitchen.

Fridge.

Bed.

Heating.

Power.

Cameras.

Drone gear.

Coffee.

Home.

When the view looked good, I stopped.

When the day felt finished, I parked.

Simple.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/

The next day I went slightly mad and drove 25.1 miles.

At this pace I was in danger of reaching Ullapool before the following decade.

But this was exactly how I wanted the northwest to feel.

Slow.

Remote.

Huge.

The settlements become smaller.

The roads narrow.

The mountains grow.

Phone signal occasionally decides modern civilisation is optional and leaves.

Scourie sits in old Mackay territory, an area shaped by crofting, fishing and life beside the sea.

But travelling through this landscape also means confronting another part of Highland history.

The Clearances.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, large numbers of people were displaced as landowners changed how estates were managed.

Families moved.

Communities disappeared.

Many people emigrated.

Others ended up pushed onto less productive coastal land.

It changes the way I look at the empty Highlands.

Empty does not always mean untouched.

Sometimes there is a human story explaining why nobody lives there anymore.

Then Kylesku.

Today, crossing it is effortless.

Vanilla climbs onto the bridge, crosses the water and carries on.

But the bridge only opened in 1984.

Before that, traffic used a ferry.

I remember 1984.

That one fact made me stop.

Because this isn’t medieval infrastructure history.

This was during my own lifetime.

A journey that I completed in seconds once required waiting for a boat.

Road trips feel permanent when we’re driving them.

They aren’t.

The landscape may have been sitting there for millions of years.

The road network through it is surprisingly young.

Then the B869.

Absolutely brilliant.

Single track.

Passing places.

Climbs.

Drops.

Blind corners.

Rock.

Sea.

More corners.

Then another corner apparently included free of charge.

At some point I became convinced the road designer had simply dropped a piece of string onto the map and said:

That’ll do.

This is exactly where Vanilla makes sense.

A short-wheelbase Transporter on roads like these is perfect.

She’s not a giant motorhome bringing a spare lounge, dining room and west wing with her.

She fits.

She turns.

She gets through.

And when I stop, she’s still home.

B869: DONE.

And I was grinning.

Then Achmelvich.

White sand.

Clear water.

Dark rock.

The sort of beach that causes people looking at photographs to say:

Where’s that?

And then not believe the answer when you say Scotland.

The northwest does this constantly.

You expect grey mountains and weather.

Then it casually drops in a beach that looks as though it has escaped from somewhere several thousand miles farther south.

And underneath it all is geology that makes human history look microscopic.

This region contains some of the oldest rocks in Europe.

Some of the Lewisian gneiss exposed across northwest Scotland is more than 2.5 billion years old.

Billion.

I like new technology.

I get excited about new cameras, batteries, drones and gadgets.

Standing beside rock more than two billion years old rather destroys the phrase “latest generation”.

Vanilla suddenly felt fresh out of the factory.

Then came Ullapool.

Possibly my favourite data point from the entire expedition.

I arrived on 27 September.

I stayed.

On 28 September, my total recorded movement was:

0.8 miles.

Not eighty.

Not eight.

Zero point eight.

I had begun the trip with a 431-mile day.

I had now reduced my daily mileage by approximately 99.8%.

Excellent progress.

I had finally mastered one of campervanning’s most advanced skills.

Parking.

Ullapool became my reset.

Two nights.

No destination to chase.

No imaginary deadline.

No need to move simply because I owned something with an engine.

And the village itself has a fascinating story.

Ullapool was deliberately developed in 1788 by the British Fisheries Society as a herring port.

That is why the place feels more planned than many Highland settlements.

Its streets and harbour weren’t accidental.

Fishing was the reason.

The enormous herring industry once connected small Scottish coastal communities to a much wider economy.

Then the wider Highlands experienced the Clearances and enormous emigration.

Later, fishing booms brought international fleets back into these waters.

So the peaceful town where I decided to do almost nothing had spent centuries connected to trade and migration stretching far beyond Scotland.

My main contribution was coffee and 0.8 miles of movement.

Eventually I restarted Vanilla.

49.7 miles to Gairloch.

By now, fifty miles felt like a serious driving day.

And this is where Wester Ross begins absolutely showing off.

The mountains get more dramatic.

Sea lochs cut into the landscape.

The roads twist along shores and disappear around headlands.

Vanilla begins looking tiny against everything around her.

I love that.

Park a Transporter in Staffordshire and it can dominate a photograph.

Park one in Wester Ross and the landscape basically says:

Cute van.

Gairloch has thousands of years of human history around it.

Fishing and crofting shaped life here.

But I particularly love the modern twist.

Gairloch Museum occupies a building connected to Britain’s Cold War defence system.

A place designed in an era when people were genuinely worried about hostile aircraft and nuclear war now preserves Highland history.

That’s brilliant reuse.

Nuclear apocalypse cancelled.

Stick the museum in there.

Then Torridon.

Good grief.

There are places that look old.

Torridon looks geological.

The mountains are huge, stripped back and elemental.

Torridonian sandstone makes up many of the great peaks.

Beneath and around it are exposures of Lewisian gneiss more than 2.5 billion years old.

I struggle to comprehend 2.5 billion years.

Humans don’t fit into that number properly.

Neither does civilisation.

Neither does Britain.

Neither does almost anything I normally think of as old.

I parked my 2022 Volkswagen beside it.

For once, Vanilla wasn’t vintage enough.

The roads curl between mountains and sea lochs.

Clouds hang on summits.

Water fills the gaps.

And every time I thought I’d just seen the best view of the trip, the road turned another corner and Scotland produced another one.

This was the NC500 in full widescreen.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/

Then Shieldaig.

White cottages.

Water.

Mountains.

An absurdly photogenic Highland village.

But its development around the beginning of the nineteenth century was connected not only with fishing but with Britain’s need for seamen during the wars with Napoleon.

Which means part of the origin story behind this peaceful little village is essentially:

Nice harbour. Could be useful if the French start anything.

History is rarely as peaceful as the postcards.

Then came Applecross.

This was the moment where the trip felt as though it was building towards a finale.

The peninsula has evidence of human presence stretching back thousands of years.

Then in AD 673, the Irish monk Maelrubha founded a Christian community here.

Applecross became known in Gaelic as A’Chomraich.

The Sanctuary.

That is a wonderful name.

For centuries this remote place had spiritual significance long before anyone thought of putting a café, campsite or campervan route here.

I was sleeping somewhere that people had regarded as a sanctuary for more than a thousand years.

And waiting for me the next morning was the road I’d been looking forward to for the entire trip.

1 October.

About 08:44.

Vanilla leaves Applecross.

Then the road starts climbing.

Bealach na Bà.

The Pass of the Cattle.

Even the name tells the history.

This route existed because people needed to move cattle across the mountains.

Long before campervans.

Long before sports cars.

Long before somebody invented the idea of the NC500.

People were getting livestock over this landscape.

Today the road is famous.

Steep gradients.

Hairpins.

Single track.

Passing places.

Huge views.

And the interesting problem that the scenery desperately encourages you to look away from the road at exactly the moment when looking away from the road is probably not ideal.

Vanilla loved it.

Hairpin.

Climb.

Passing place.

Another climb.

Another view.

Another ridiculous grin.

This was exactly why a Transporter made sense to me.

She’s compact enough for this.

She’s capable enough for this.

And she’s still home when I stop at the other end.

The GPS confirmed it afterwards.

B869: YES.

Bealach na Bà: VERY YES.

The old cattle road had now carried a diesel Volkswagen full of camera equipment, campervan gear and one increasingly delighted man from Staffordshire.

Technology marches on.

At about 1:24pm on 1 October I reached Inverness again.

And the NC500 was complete.

Actual loop distance:

520.4 miles.

Time:

9 days, 21 hours.

Nights:

Direction:

Anti-clockwise.

Average mileage around the loop:

about 47 miles a day.

That last figure might be the most important.

Forty-seven miles.

I didn’t attack the NC500.

I didn’t sprint around Scotland collecting locations.

I lived in it for ten days.

Some days I barely moved.

And that was the whole point.

The loop had finished.

The expedition hadn’t.

I continued south through the Great Glen to Fort Augustus.

Again, somewhere that looks scenic first and historical second.

The town developed around an eighteenth-century military fort built after the Jacobite uprisings.

Then came the Caledonian Canal.

An extraordinary engineering project linking natural lochs and artificial waterways to create a route across Scotland.

So even after finishing the NC500 I was still travelling through military history, Highland politics and major engineering.

I had merely intended to find somewhere nice to sleep.

The next day came the serious mileage again.

268.2 miles.

Fort Augustus south to Over Kellet near Carnforth.

Then on the final day I still couldn’t simply drive straight home.

I went to Lytham St Annes first.

Because apparently even after nearly two weeks away, a direct route was now against NIX policy.

Eventually Vanilla turned back towards Staffordshire.

Home came at around 3:22pm on 3 October.

Total expedition:

1,357.9 miles.

There it was.

The famous 500-mile road trip had actually been almost 1,400 miles from my front door and back.

Total expedition: 1,357.9 miles

Actual NC500 loop: 520.4 miles

Total adventure: 13 days / 12 nights

NC500 duration: 9 days 21 hours

Nights around the loop: 10

Direction: Anti-clockwise

Biggest overall day: 431.1 miles

Biggest proper NC500 day: 107.4 miles

Shortest proper travelling day: 24.4 miles

Ullapool reset day: 0.8 miles

Mermaid of the North: SAW HER

John o’Groats: YES

Picts: YES

Vikings: DEFINITELY

Jacobites: YES

Napoleon: SOMEHOW YES

German U-boats: YES

2.5-billion-year-old rocks: YES

Applecross: YES

Bealach na Bà: VERY YES

Vanilla: ABSOLUTE STAR

This is the bit I didn’t expect.

Researching the history afterwards changed my photographs.

At the time, I photographed what I saw.

The Mermaid of the North.

A beach.

A mountain.

A village.

A bridge.

An empty road.

A sea loch.

Vanilla beneath a huge Highland sky.

Now I look at the same photographs differently.

Balintore isn’t simply my first night.

It’s the Mermaid and Pictish Easter Ross.

John o’Groats isn’t simply a sign.

It connects to old ferry routes and Jan de Groot.

Tongue isn’t simply a beautiful Kyle.

It’s clan country, Norse influence and Jacobite history.

Durness isn’t simply dramatic coastline.

It’s caves, Viking history, U-boats and John Lennon.

Kylesku isn’t simply a spectacular bridge.

It’s a crossing that operated completely differently within my own lifetime.

Ullapool isn’t simply where I stayed two nights.

It’s a village deliberately built around the herring industry.

Torridon isn’t simply mountains.

It’s billions of years of Earth’s history sitting in front of my camera.

Shieldaig isn’t simply pretty.

It’s connected to fishing and an age when Britain was fighting Napoleon.

Applecross isn’t simply a famous stop on the NC500.

It’s The Sanctuary.

And Bealach na Bà isn’t simply one of Britain’s great driving roads.

It’s the Pass of the Cattle.

The photographs stopped being pictures of where I went.

They became pictures of where thousands of years of other people had been before me.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/

Slow down.

That’s it.

That’s the secret.

There will always be somebody who says they drove the NC500 in three days, climbed a mountain before breakfast, rebuilt their gearbox at lunchtime and cooked a roast dinner in a lay-by.

Excellent.

Good for them.

I don’t want their trip.

I want my 24-mile days.

I want my 25-mile days.

I want the photograph that becomes half an hour.

I want to stop because the light suddenly changes.

I want to stay because I like somewhere.

And I definitely want my magnificent 0.8-mile day in Ullapool.

That wasn’t a wasted day.

That was the point where I finally stopped driving long enough to realise there was nowhere else I needed to be.

AND VANILLA?

Superb.

This trip is exactly why I wanted a campervan.

Not just somewhere to sleep.

A little expedition machine.

Compact enough for single-track Highland roads.

Big enough to live in.

Kitchen.

Bedroom.

Heating.

Power.

Photography base.

Drone base.

Shelter.

Front-row seat.

Wake up.

Open the door.

Scotland.

That is hard to beat.

WOULD I DO IT AGAIN?

Tomorrow.

But next time I’d probably go slower.

Because now I know what I’ve been driving through.

I’d stop and ask more questions.

Why is that village there?

Who built it?

Why did people leave?

What sailed through that loch?

Who crossed that mountain before there was a road?

Why is that ruined building empty?

What am I actually looking at?

That’s where road trips become really interesting.

Not simply where did I go?

But what happened here before I arrived?

I left Staffordshire thinking I was going to drive a famous road.

What I actually found was an enormous outdoor museum with spectacular parking.

I saw the Mermaid of the North.

I stood at John o’Groats.

I travelled through Pictish country and landscapes shaped by Norse settlement.

I followed roads through clan territory and Jacobite history.

I drove beside water connected with Viking fleets and German submarines.

I crossed a bridge that hadn’t existed when I was young.

I stayed in a village created for the herring industry.

I photographed mountains sitting on rocks billions of years old.

I slept in Applecross, The Sanctuary.

Then I drove Vanilla over the Pass of the Cattle.

Some days I travelled more than 400 miles.

One day I travelled 0.8.

Somehow both were essential parts of the same adventure.

NIX.

VANILLA.

SCOTLAND.

520.4 miles around the actual NC500.

1,357.9 miles from my door and back.

Thousands of years of history.

Billions of years of landscape.

And one bloke from Staffordshire driving through all of it with a camera and an increasingly ridiculous grin.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnnickolls/albums/72177720329571646/