A Bus Journey Through Britain

Callendar to Fort William The pretty town of Callander marks something of a transition. As I've already said, it stands on the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands and I'm about to head into a landscape rather different to any I have travelled through before. This is wild, sparsely-populated country with relatively few roads and its public transport, what there is of it, is every bit as sparse. Callander also marks a transition in the kind of vehicles I can expect to travel in. With so few potential passengers, operators tend to buy vehicles which can be put to more than one use. Not too many capacious double deckers here, and conventional single deckers are rare, too, except around the bigger towns. Instead, coaches are often used, partly to make the distances between highland settlements more comfortable and partly because they can also be used for tourist excursions to Edinburgh and the Isle of Skye during the summer, for school visits to the baths an...

Glasgow to Callendar I've known people who are colour blind and have difficulty identifying particular colours. I've also known people who are tone-deaf and who couldn't, as the saying goes, carry a tune in a bucket. I am neither of these things, fortunately, though I do admit to having a similar and equally troubling affliction. I think I might be bus-blind. I'm not sure if 'bus-blindness' is actually a thing, but if it is then I fear I am thus afflicted.  Telling one design of bus from another is something I genuinely struggle with, though of course this isn't helped by the fact that few of them seem to have manufacturers badges or model names emblazoned on them. Oh sure, some of them occasionally have a badge telling you who supplied the engine or perhaps a cryptic graphic alluding to the coachbuilder built into a ventilation grille somewhere, but often little more. So whenever I come across bus enthusiasts making notes of fleet numbers a...

Dumfries to Glasgow I’ve been looking forward to today’s run through Galloway. I first visited Dumfries and Galloway some years ago as a journalist and it made a huge impression on me. I found it to be quietly beautiful and unlike anywhere else in Scotland, a country of rolling fields, forests and heathery tops, of steep granite cliffs washed by rough seas, wide estuaries, tall pines, gorse-flecked moorland, even tropical palm trees. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to come here?  And yet so few people do. When I wrote about it previously I called it the Forgotten Scotland and I think that’s as true today as it was then. It’s a bit off the beaten track, I suppose, and the only travellers who pass this way are generally those en route to the Northern Ireland ferry crossing from Stranraer. But today I am going to fulfil a desire to travel right through the heart of Galloway to the sea and I’ve chosen an absolute peach of a day for the purpose. I pick my way carefully th...