Go west for the best of Scotland’s food and culture

HISTORY and heritage, cliffs and craggy coves, rolling hills and bustling towns, big and small.

This slice of Scotland has all that – and more. Whether you want our national drink or our national poet, this is the place to come.

Islay is like a whisky galore island. With eight active distilleries, if you set out to visit one a day you’d need to ensure you stay well in to a second week.

As far as the bard is concerned, aficionados of Robert Burns have so many temptations it can be hard to know where to start.

Well, it would be if pretty little Alloway didn’t seem to have it all with one good stretch of the legs along the main street.

It really is so wonderfully unchanged in so many ways.

Burns Cottage draws visitors from every corner of the globe.

But as it’s – as estate agents would say – a little on the comfortably cosy side, there is much else on a larger scale.

The airy and striking Burns Museum, just a short walk along Poet’s Path, has space aplenty to see his world opened up.

Books, artworks and a main exhibition tell the story in a modern, hands-on fashion.

But you feel closest, somehow, on the original, surprisingly-steep, Brig o’ Doon over which Tam o’ Shanter fled on horseback.

Get it to yourself and you really can take a mental trip back in time.

The coastline becomes ever more rugged as you head south, with Culzean and Dunure castles just two of the great vantage points to appreciate the majesty.

The high-speed west coast railway line and the thunderingly-fast M74 mean that Dumfries and Galloway is a region many of us shoot past in the blink of an eye. And that, frankly, is a crying shame.

Gretna is the nation’s love heart, with young runaways tying the knot in their romantic hordes and Portpatrick in the sunshine, pictured right, is a sight to see.

But the area was an essential part of the First World War effort with munitions by the million churning off a production line the scale of which was simply astonishing.

It’s all so hard to imagine these days – even more so if you pay a so, so quiet visit to Europe’s first Dark Sky Park. Fitting, really. There are stars everywhere in this mild, wild west.