North Coast 500 – the tourist route to a PhD

MOST students spend their studies confined to libraries and lecture halls.

But now university bosses are offering one of them the chance to swap stuffy seminars for the open road.

The University of the Highlands and Islands wants a student to document the history found scattered along the North Coast 500 tourist road route as part of a PhD programme. During the three-year, fully funded qualification, the student will develop a digital app for tourists to learn more about their surroundings, while travelling the roads across the Black Isle, Caithness, Sutherland and Wester Ross.

The rebranding of the route, known as the NC500, has increased visitor numbers by tens of thousands and added millions of pounds to the region’s economy in the three years since it was launched in 2015.

It has reinvented a driving holiday in the Highlands as a motoring odyssey to rival the likes of America’s Route 66.

Now the people behind the road trip want to develop the experience of the coastal jaunt further.

Working out of the North Coast 500 office, in Inverness, the successful PhD student will document stories and information about the castles, working distilleries, towns, villages and unspoiled beaches that can be seen along the coastal route. This information will be used to develop a multimedia app for tourists in order to plug ‘a largely unfulfilled desire for knowledge of Highland history and heritage’, say university bosses.

NC500 managing director Tom Campbell will supervise the student with Dr Iain Robertson from the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Centre for History.

Mr Campbell said: ‘The North Coast 500 is so much more than a touring route. It’s about our communities, culture, heritage, landscapes and seascapes.’