Scotland 2022: The Journey to Skye

Over the summer of 2022, following my 10 weeks stay in Aberdeen, I found myself back up in Scotland for two weeks on holiday, but this time staying on the west side: on the Isle of Skye and in the Cairngorms National Park. Now that I'm back home, I thought I’d share some of the things I got up to and saw whilst out there, some of the scenery is out of this world! The first edition to my Scotland travels (part 2!) will focus on the journey to our first destination: the Isle of Skye.

We drove up to Scotland, approximately a 600-mile journey that took us two days to complete. Setting off from London, our first destination was Carlisle, a town located 8 miles south of the Scottish border. The journey took about 7ish hours to complete, a whole day of travelling. It was mostly a lot of motorway driving with pretty boring views, but there was a section that ran through the Lake District, providing some nice views of the rolling hills and green landscape.

Arriving in Carlisle in the late afternoon, we had a walk around the town. The early origins of the town lie in its status as a Roman settlement, serving the forts on Hadrian’s Wall. It then became a military stronghold due to its proximity to Scotland. Later on, during the Industrial Revolution it became a densely populated mill town, with a lot of textile manufacturing. Some of the sights we saw included Carlisle Castle and Cathedral. Saturday night also seemed like a popular day for people to go out to various pubs, bars and clubs too!

Dinner was at Pizza Express, which now do vegan garlic butter with their dough balls! Having had quite a long day travelling and with even more driving on the menu for the next day, we went to the hotel and called it an early night.

Day two of travelling involved driving from Carlisle to the Isle of Skye, with some stops along the way. Our first stop was in the city of Perth (not the Australian one!) where we grabbed some groceries and lunch from Asda. I found out they also do a lot of vegan options for lunch which is great.

Setting off from Perth, we then entered the Cairngorms National Park on our journey, the UK’s largest National Park at ~4,528 square kilometres. To put that in perspective, it is twice the size of the Lake District National Park and bigger than the whole of Luxembourg! It was officially established in 2003 and is home to 4 of the 5 highest mountains in the UK. More facts about this amazing place can be found here. The views along the drive were great, the best way I would describe it is like the Lake District, but on a bigger scale. We saw lots of wind farms, and then pulled into our next stop at Loch Laggan. Here we stopped off for some tea on a barge, while enjoying the views of the Scottish countryside.

Afterwards we set out on the final leg of our journey to Skye, with a quick stop off at Eilean Donan Castle, which has featured in movies such as James Bond and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

The Isle of Skye is an island 50 miles long and is part of the Inner Hebrides. To get across we crossed the Skye Bridge, which supplements the ferry service that can take people and vehicles across. Portree is the biggest town on the island, and were staying close by to that in a cottage. Day 2 of travelling took about 9 hours to reach our destination, but we made it! First impressions of Skye were that it was quite chilly, sparsely populated, lots of sheep, and stunning views! It was nice to be in the middle of nowhere and disconnect from the fast pace of life that I often find myself in most of the time.

I was based on Skye for 1 week, and the blogs that follow this will go into more depth about where I did on this island. Stay tuned for the rest of the blogs on my adventures in Scotland that will be released over the coming weeks!

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