Long days in the Highlands: riding the North Coast 500

The North Coast 500 was invented in 2015 as a tourism route, which is worth saying plainly because it explains both what is good about it and what is annoying about it. Somebody drew a line joining roads that already existed, gave it a name and a number, and the number turned out to be extremely good marketing.

The roads were always there. What changed is that now everybody knows.

What the loop is

It starts and finishes at Inverness Castle and goes anticlockwise or clockwise depending on whose advice you took. Call it 830 kilometres. The commonly quoted figure is 516 miles, which is where the 500 comes from, and like most round numbers attached to routes it is approximately true.

The climbing is the part people underestimate. There is no single mountain pass that defines the loop — no Ventoux, no Stelvio. What there is instead is a relentless supply of two- and three-hundred-metre climbs, most of them steeper than they look on an elevation profile, strung together for a week. Estimates for the total vary between about 8,000 and 10,000 metres depending on which line you take and whose GPS you believe. Either way it is a lot, and none of it arrives in a form you can pace.

How people break it up

Five to seven days is the usual range for someone riding it as a trip rather than a challenge.

- Five days means averaging 165 kilometres a day with the climbing on top. It is a reasonable target for someone who rides a lot and does not want to look at anything. - Seven days is the version most people enjoy. Around 120 kilometres a day, time to stop, and enough slack that one bad weather day does not wreck the plan. - Three days is done. It is an event rather than a trip, and the people doing it are not reading this.

The single most useful piece of planning advice is unglamorous: book accommodation before you go. The north and west coasts have very little of it, the season is short, and the gap between places that will feed you can be sixty kilometres. This is not a route where you improvise the evening.

The bit that is genuinely hard

The west coast between Applecross and Ullapool is where the loop stops being a scenic drive and starts being a ride. The road is narrow, the climbs come one after another, and the wind off the Atlantic has nothing to slow it down between Newfoundland and your front wheel.

Bealach na Bà sits on this stretch, and it is optional — there is a coastal road round to Applecross that avoids it. A meaningful number of people take the coastal road. There is no shame in it and the views are arguably better.

Traffic, and being honest about it

The route's success has made it busy. In high summer the camper van traffic on single-track sections is a real consideration, not an internet complaint. The passing places were built for a volume of traffic that no longer matches reality.

Riding it in May or September solves most of this. So does starting early: the roads are close to empty before nine in the morning, and the light at that hour is the reason anyone photographs this part of the world.

Why the loop draws well

A closed loop is a better motif than an out-and-back, and a closed loop with genuinely irregular edges is better still. The North Coast 500 has both: the outline is unmistakably a coastline, with the sea lochs biting into the west side and the north coast running comparatively straight.

You do not need the labels to know which way round you went. The shape does that on its own — which is more than can be said for most 800-kilometre weeks.