A Bus Journey Through Britain

Portree to Inverness I have tried to avoid long distance coaches on this Land's End to John O'Groats journey of mine because the whole idea was to test  local  public transport to see if it really was possible to hop from one place to another all the way from Land's End to John O'Groats just by using the buses that ordinary commuters use. However, it was soon apparent when I started planning my route that it's virtually impossible to catch a local bus from one Highland village to another for no other reason than there mostly aren't any.  Take today, for example. Admittedly there are a few local bus services in and around Skye (I used one yesterday) and I could probably catch one to the mainland at Kyle of Lochalsh. But from there, I'd be totally stranded because there seems to be no bus service of any kind beyond Kyle, with one exception – the City Link long-distance express service to Inverness. The only realistic way of getting off the isl...

Fort William to Portree I'd spent my previous night in Callander resting on the geological fault line dividing the Highlands from the Lowlands. It occurs to me this morning as I dive manfully into my superb breakfast of poached eggs, tomatoes and vegetarian haggis that, oddly, I'd spent last night on another geological fault line. Honestly. I'll need to be careful people don't mistake me for a geography teacher or something... Fort William stands with its toes in the sea at Loch Linnhe, more or less at one end of a huge fracture across the middle of Scotland which we call the Great Glen. At the other end is Inverness and the North Sea, and in between a string of lochs, the largest of which is Loch Ness, the second largest loch in Scotland after Loch Lomond.  It didn't take a genius to work out that if you linked all those lochs together with a few lengths of canal then you'd have an extremely useful way of crossing from the Atlantic to the North...

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...