Bealach na Bà gets the headlines but the 'wee mad road' gets my attention!
I have been driving around the North Coast 500 for more than twenty years, completing more than three hundred full circuits in everything from summer sunshine to winter darkness. Most of the route will not trouble an experienced, competent driver. It is not the continuous ordeal sometimes described on social media, but neither is every mile the same. A little knowledge before you set out can make the difference between approaching a road calmly and arriving at it already convinced that something dreadful lies around the next bend.
Leave Inverness anticlockwise and the journey begins gently. The roads are familiar, the white centre line remains alongside you and there is time to settle into the vehicle. Continue across the north and towards the west, however, and the character begins to change. The road narrows, the centre line disappears and passing places become part of the system. Rock, water and blind bends shorten the view ahead, while beaches, mountains and sea cliffs compete for the driver’s attention. None of this makes the road unmanageable. It simply asks you to look farther ahead, allow more time and understand what other road users may need from you."
The most famous road is not necessarily the one that demands the most sustained concentration. Bealach na Bà looks formidable in photographs, but it is one clearly defined climb that can be considered in advance. Assynt asks different questions over a much greater distance. Its roads wind between rock and water, and the narrow B869 between Kylesku and Lochinver, commonly called the Wee Mad Road, is one of its most demanding sections. Direction matters too, not because clockwise or anticlockwise is universally correct, but because it changes how quickly you reach the narrower roads and how the journey unfolds. Each subject deserves its own article rather than a hurried explanation here.
This is therefore a starting point, not an authoritative manual. The detailed guides that follow will look at direction of travel, single-track roads and passing places, driving through Assynt and the Wee Mad Road, and tackling Bealach na Bà. For now, do not allow other people’s anxiety to become your own. Know which roads lie ahead, choose those that suit you, and leave enough time to stop when the weather changes or the landscape demands your attention. The purpose is not to prove that you can complete the NC500. It is to return home feeling that you have actually experienced the North Highlands.
To leave the driving to someone else, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.