Road Runners

In July 1974, a friend borrowed her mum’s Austin Vanden Plas Princess 1100, and off we went to Scotland. The car didn’t seem to be that special, although I think the glove compartment had a polished wood frontage. It got as far as Kendal before blowing a gasket. We had not been away for more than an hour and a half.

When we reached Duncansby Head at the far north-east tip of Scotland some days later, the near-side passenger door nearly blew off its hinges in a particularly strong gust of wind. Looking back, it seems strange to have made a supposedly luxurious version of a car that otherwise seemed so ordinary.

That was our third visit to Scotland in three years. We had youth hostelled part of the way up the west coast in April 1972, in Ian’s VW dormobile. It had behaved impeccably except when the combined weight got too much for it on a steep climb near Ratagan YH. Once we had all piled out, it breasted the summit with ease, whereupon, we all jumped back on board. They don’t make them quite like that anymore.

Scotland was magic. We played football against Celtic supporters in Killin. We swam in the sea and watched salmon leaping at Pitlochry. We climbed Ben Nevis. We picked up an over-ambitious kittiwake that had left its cliff-face ledge a little prematurely. It was the whitest of whites, comparable to that of adult gannets, which always seem to stand out from the gulls and terns at whatever distance from the land. We were getting a taste for the Highlands and Islands that would stay with us.

I took these few railway pictures - type 2s at Mallaig, Fort William and Kyle of Lochalsh and a Deltic in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens.