I’ll take the High Road ...if you’ll kindly use the passing places...

IT was one of those melodramatic days for Highland travel Saturday last – the sort of weather the Irish teasingly describe as ‘soft’. It was moist: mizzle, drizzle and, now and then, torrential showers, rain hammering like stair rods.

Mountain tops vanished into clouds, streams and rivers surged in creamy torrents – but occasionally the sun made itself known in gentle shafts of light.

By Drumnadrochit and Loch Ness-side, Glen Moriston and Glenshiel and Glenelg, I had abundant time to admire my surroundings, as I found myself time and time again, on a road with a 60mph speed limit, trapped behind a car or camper van doddering along under 40, as its rubber-necked passengers drank in the Wagnerian landscape.

I fretted keenly, for I had a ferry to catch and time was tight, and with so many bends and with entire caravans of caravans in the opposite lane overtaking was seldom an option.

Moments when one slo-mo wagon turned left at Invermoriston, or right at Shiel Bridge, were worthy of celebration in verse – at least till I found myself climbing Mam Ratagan behind a Ford Escort driven by someone as timid as if bandits with Kalashnikovs might fall upon him round the next corner.

Oh, passing places – there are very many on the road down to Glenelg and up from Kylerhea, and few tourists have the faintest grasp of the rules.

That you give way to any vehicle up hill, and always to a bus or a postman’s van. That, if the passing place be on the opposite side of the road, you stop opposite it, not wheech dramatically into it.

AND that when the humble Highlander is graciously reversing back towards one because you shot past one closer to you, it is faintly rude to keep moving aggressively forward as a MacLeod of MacLeods is keeping a nervy eye on the ditch.

But there was a darkly funny moment descending Druim na Cloiche, a sweeping chicane of a road through the Red Hills towards Sconser on Skye. Suddenly I paled. There was a great straggle of vehicles below. Was there a roadblock? A landslip, or some terrible accident?

In fact, they were all parked off the road – a few in a layby, but most on badly churned verge – and their occupants were outside, waving cameras and evidently most excited. It took a moment before I spotted what it was – a vast, lugubrious and undeniably photogenic Highland cow.

Over the past decade, Highland tourism has reached staggering proportions. When the Hebrides Celtic Festival is held each July in Lewis, there is not a bed to be had in Stornoway.

I deliberately took an unusual route north last week after hearing that for most of the day, this month, it would take you an hour and half to drive (or, more accurately, fume) through Fort William.

Even so, on the A9, traffic was too much for the Perth bypass to bear and it took half an incandescent hour to shunt two miles… and then an hour or two had deliberately to be killed exploring the countryside east of Culloden before, at last, one could brave post rush hour Inverness.

Inverness and Fort William badly need new bypass roads. Work has begun on one south of the Highland capital. Meanwhile, every summer and in much of the region, life for locals grinds almost to a standstill as tens of thousands of tourist vehicles pile into countryside where, the odd big bridge apart, the infrastructure has not seen significant improvement since the 1960s.

Then there are all the camper vans. The ferry arriving at Uig from North Uist on Saturday evening seemed to disgorge nothing else and when we made Tarbert in Harris, there were dozens more queued up for passage back.

Most notoriously, visitor numbers are now the stuff of annual crisis on Skye. The island’s population is just north of 10,000; right now, 60,000 people turn in for the night every Skye evening.

Car parks are overwhelmed, many irresponsibly leave their vehicles in passing places or on private lawns, and the pressure is such that a fortnight ago police begged the public not to hit the island unless they had a room booked for the night.

Skye used to enjoy a degree of filtering because, until late 1995, it could only be reached by ferry (and for a decade thereafter by costly toll bridge). Now you can visit the island for nothing and this year has seen an exceptional number of people from overseas, spectacular Skye landscapes having featured not just in such recent movies as The BFG, or the Outlander TV series, but in hit pop videos by Kanye West and Harry Styles.

‘Stay-cationing’ generally has boomed in these years of austerity, the more so since the Brexit vote has weakened the pound and made continental holidays more expensive.

THERE has also been a striking change in tourist culture. People used to sail over the sea to Skye and explore it in a leisurely way and for themselves. Many of the loveliest corners are nowhere near any of its famous sites.

But 2017 is the age of TripAdvisor and the ‘bucket list’. Folk increasingly pile onto the island to tick off just a handful of vaunted places – Kilt Rock, the Quiraing, the Fairy Glen, Dunvegan Castle – and there are simply not the space or the facilities to accommodate the numbers now appearing.

‘This is causing massive strain on these particular sites,’ sighs local photographer Gordon Willoughby, ‘creating unprecedented erosion both to the landscape and the verges.’

There is, of course, some economic benefit from all those visitors. But it should not be exaggerated. Tour buses spending but an afternoon on Skye contribute hardly anything. Those driving camper vans to the Hebrides tend to stock up with provisions at the mainland ports.

The biggest change in tourist culture has been a steady shift away, over the last two decades, from bed-and-breakfast overnighters to a week in selfcatering accommodation.

These properties are frequently owned by people who do not live on the island at all; they sit cold, unlit and derelict throughout the winter – and demand for houses for such buy-to-let wheezes has driven prices beyond the reach of most young local couples desperate for their first home.

We are apt, too, to behave differently on vacation – to live more loosely, be a bit more careless, to assume that local rules do not apply to us.

Just the other afternoon, visiting one glorious Lewis beach, I tugged my dogs through the kissing-gate, noting the polite sign reminding visitors these were common grazings and dogs must be on the lead at all times. There were fat weaned lambs moving nervously about the machair – and, on the beach, scattered with visitors, a dozen unleashed pooches bounced about at will.

The holiday spirit is exuberant but it is often foolish and not necessarily benevolent.