Sir Walter Scott called it the “…longest, loneliest and loveliest glen in Scotland…”, but to me, our all-too-brief foray into the outer reaches of Glen Lyon was pure frustration. It has absolutely everything you could possibly imagine or want in a Scottish glen… It also has a road just wide enough for a car in places, there are few places to stop and we had no time in which to explore. Even so, and with the little we were able to see, it is utterly breathtaking in its beauty.

Stuart has become a dab hand at drive-by shooting when there is nowhere to stop for pictures, but even he was unable to capture the scale of the land or the expanse of clear blue arcing above the valley. Trees and lack of a safe parking space prevented us from getting a shot of the white water in the valley as we turned into the glen. With all that road and silence, still inconvenient cars stopped us from stopping where we would have liked and we knew full well that the ancient shrine at the head of the glen was well out of our reach.

Unlike many of these valleys, Glen Lyon is not somewhere you can simply drive through on your way to somewhere else. You need to go on purpose, or perhaps with purpose. It seems to demand a dedication, a commitment from those it draws into its embrace. Later research revealed there are alternative routes out of the glen…one single track road that climbs eighteen hundred feet over Ben Lawers and another, crumbling memory of a track that is almost impassable. Whatever we did, we would have to turn around and go back the way we came. No-one in their right mind would attempt to take my little car up roads like those…would they?

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