When travellers were met by impassable streams, formidable hills and treacherous swamps
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At this time of year you're liable to hear complaints about tourists in fast cars treating the North Coast 500 as a racetrack, while on some of the inland routes there are multiple potholes to watch out for. But, imperfect as it is, at least we do have a network of roads to connect our communities.
A few centuries ago, anyone trying to make their way across the north Highlands would have been met by impassable streams, formidable hills and even treacherous swamps. A large chunk of this rugged landscape was practically a no-go zone for visitors from the south.
Alastair Mitchell looks at the experiences of the early travellers, mapmakers and road-builders, at a time when getting from place to place was verging on the impossible, in his new book The Immeasurable Wilds: Travellers to the Far North of Scotland, 1600-1900, from Caithness-based Whittles Publishing.
Born in Kent, Mitchell has had a connection to north Sutherland since first visiting the Melness area as a child in the 1960s.
He notes that in the years after the Battle of Culloden a trip to the Highlands would have been a distinctly unappealing prospect for outsiders.
“To many, it was frightening: not just the terrain, the high mountains, the lack of roads and maps, and the reputed weather, but also the people, with their distinctive garb, their foreign language, and alien customs.”
Getting to Thurso from the south was not only difficult but was fraught with danger, according to an account by Robert Forbes, Episcopal bishop of Ross and Caithness, of an expedition he made in 1762. Confronted by the Ord, he was proud to report that he "rode up every inch of it, a thing rarely done by any persons".
The bishop opted to take the direct route to Thurso, known then and now as the Causewaymire, requiring a guide for this leg of the journey. "Why it is called such a name I could not conceive, as the smallest vestige of a causeway we could not discover in the whole," he observed.
There was a risk that the horses would be sucked into the mire if they didn't move quickly enough. Forbes noted that "if they make the least halt, or too leisurely a step, down they must sink".
In a similar vein, the Rev Charles Cordiner told in 1780 how he and his travelling party struggled to make their way along the north Sutherland coast after leaving Caithness. They had to exchange their horses for the smaller local breed, or "the hardy ponies of the country".
Cordiner wrote about "the exceeding roughness of the rocky heaths" as well as "the difficulty of the paths among the hills, where climbing is often necessary, and the dangerous nature of the swamps and morassy grounds".
Enter the "Colossus of Roads", the great civil engineer Thomas Telford, and the surveys he carried out in the early 19th century under a government initiative. Over a 17-year period, Mitchell points out, 892 miles of road and 1300 bridges would be constructed along with harbours, churches and the "hugely ambitious" Caledonian Canal, "all in some of the most difficult terrain in the British Isles".
Mitchell notes: "The far north remained comparatively unexplored by tourists throughout the 19th century, but over the rest of Scotland, the infrastructure was at last in place to welcome the new leisure classes. Up they came, armed with their shotguns and fishing rods, [and] their travellers' guides."
And so the area gradually opened up to the forerunners of today's NC500 drivers and other visitors who are able to explore Caithness and north Sutherland in relative comfort – without feeling they have defied the odds by making it over the Ord, and without the risk of disappearing into a bog thereafter.
- The Immeasurable Wilds: Travellers to the Far North of Scotland, 1600-1900, by Alastair Mitchell, is published by Whittles Publishing (£18.99, softback, 224 pages including 200 illustrations).
