The Highlands Issue

We begin the year in the Highlands, and we begin it in late May, which is a choice as much as a date. The region is large enough to defeat a hurried visitor, and most people meet it the wrong way — a loop of long driving days that turns Skye, Glencoe and Loch Ness into a blur seen through a windscreen. This issue argues for the opposite. Pick one base, or two at most, and let a corner of the Highlands open up slowly. The place rewards patience and punishes greed, and May is when it is most willing to reward you.

This issue is organised around a single question, because it is the one that decides whether a trip works: where do you sleep? Inverness gives you an easy landing and the eastern glens. Fort William puts Ben Nevis and Glencoe on your doorstep. Skye needs three nights of its own and gives them back with interest. The Cairngorms offer forest, wildlife and slightly kinder weather. We have walked through the trade-offs so you can match the base to the trip rather than trying, and failing, to run all four at once.

There is a practical reason to come now rather than in July. The Highland midge, the small biting fly that swarms the damp summer west, is barely stirring in late May, so you get the warm, long days largely without it. And the days here are long: this far north the sky stays light well into the evening, enough to take a hill walk and an evening drive and still beat the dark. Come six weeks later and both of those gifts are gone.

We name the Old Man of Storr, the Quiraing, the Cuillin, Glencoe and Culloden because they are real and they earn their reputations; we send you to Culloden for the moor where the Jacobite cause ended in 1746. We hedge the prices and the drive times because the weather and the season move them. And we tell you plainly which base earns its cost and which day trip is worth the single-track miles. That is the deal for the year ahead.

Vivienne Hartwell, Editor-in-Chief