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U.S. Travel Time vs. Scottish Travel Time

Americans traveling in Scotland by car need to ask a local Scotsman for an ETA. Reading a map and using USA experience to estimate how long it will take you to get from Point A to Point B is a surefire recipe for arriving at Castle ---- a whopping 40 minutes before closing time. I should know, as Bruce and I stubbornly hung onto our Yank methodology for longer than I’m going to admit before we finally humbled ourselves and just asked.

Before our first trip in 1999, we did our homework – or so we thought. “Whoohoo! It’s about the size of my home state – Indiana,” I yelled from my seat at the computer. Yanks will know Indiana ranks as one of the smallest (38^th) of the States. I remembered how quickly my family could get around in my flat-farmland home state, so traveling to just about anyplace in Scotland should be a quick trip, I reasoned.

Wrong. So very wrong. Scots who are reading this are LOL. Yanks who have traveled in Scotland are doing the same. If you’re neither of these, but planning on traveling to Scotland soon – or later – here’s some free advice: ask a local.

Much of Scotland’s 30,420 square mileage is taken up by the wild and wooly Highlands, where the Highland Clearances decimated the population in the late 1700s (shortly after the Battle of Culloden). Mountainous, with such a disproportionately small percentage of the country’s population, this area has no need for lots of four-lane highways. Getting to tourist sites in this area is a round-about effort, at best. Let me be quick to say that anything you see will be worth the effort; it just may take a little more effort and considerably more time than you thought!

Very few major (depending on what you call major) industries have sprung up in the Highlands since The Clearances, so the majority of Scots have worked and lived in the central area around Glasgow and Edinburgh. This area, as well as the Borders (the area between the Edinburgh-Glasgow belt and England’s northern border), is the prime tourist area simply because this is where most of the Scottish civilization has been crammed for so long. There’s a lot to see. You could spend weeks in this area and never see it all.

One village is just three or four miles from the next, often connected by A or B roads. You travel 45-50 mph for three minutes, slow down to 30 mph to go through one village, travel 45-50 mph for five minutes, slow down to 30 mph for the next village, and so on. If you’re from the East Coast, you’re thinking, “And your point would be . . . ?” If you’re from the American Midwest – where things are a bit more spread out – you’ve already figured out that you’re in trouble. The way you’re accustomed to computing travel time (according to distance) just won’t work for most of Scotland.

Scotland does have dual carriageways (its version of our interstate highways), but not many. Chances are, the places you want to see will involve a short time on a dual carriageway and a lot of time on an A or B road (described above). 

Bottom line: ask a local how long it takes. Don’t even try to work it out yourself.

Teresa Bennett
©2008 (posted 09/09/08)

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