Road trip South West Coastal 300

DRIVE

MARK PORTER

AT passport control in Portsmouth they asked for our documents. Boris, who was busy licking the window, got huffy and muttered a gravelly imprecation. He’s a fully integrated Schengen hound and had never before been asked for dogumentation. “Get used to it, Boris,” I said. “You’re in Britain now.”

There was freezing sleet. This was no night to hang around, and in a couple of hours the Volvo V60 Polestar had whooshed us to our first pitstop. Over the previous couple of days we’d driven due west from Cannes across France, all the way to the surf haven of Biarritz, before hanging a left into Spain for the Brittany Ferries crossing to the UK from Santander.

I was transporting a noble Pyrenean mountain dog from a failed career as a guard dog on the Côte d’Azur to future career tending sheep in Scotland, as I chronicled here three weeks ago.

We’d had a splendid crossing and the drive had been a doddle. We had set off in a different Volvo, the XC90 Cross Country T6, a powerful bruiser-cruiser of a hybrid grand touring off-roader. The motorway had blurred pleasingly by, come rain or shine, and the fiddly winding bits had been sheer fun for me, though I suspect less so for my big passenger. But at Portsmouth we had changed car, to the aforementioned Polestar.

We’d whooped it up in Toulouse and the Pyrenees in great style and comfort, but now we were in something else altogether – the fastest production car Volvo has made to date. The dazzling Polestar, with its “twincharged” (turbo and supercharged) had us up to 60 in 4.5 seconds, and ploughed through the mucky December conditions effortlessly, all the way to the West Midlands.

In Walsall that night, my young American nephews Albert and Jonny were waiting to ambush us with Christmas cake and party balloons. Dogs tend to either love kids or hate them. Fortunately for my nephews, Boris, who is the size of a small fridge turned on its side, loved them.

Alas, we had to tear ourselves away the following morning for the drive up to The coastal town of Portpatrick at sunset, above. Mark Porter with the very rapid V60 Polestar, the fastest production car to date from Volvo, below Scotland because I had been invited to take a look at the South West Coastal 300, a new circular drive that aims to do for south west Scotland what the North Coast 500 has done for some of the most remote outposts of the Highlands.

It takes in the Solway Firth, the Mull of Galloway, which boasts the largest forest park in Britain, and some rugged and remote interiors, including Scotland’s highest village, Wanlockhead.

We blasted down through Dumfries and Castle Douglas and followed the coastal road through that artists’ haven of Kirkudbright, then Creetown and up past Stranraer, Auchencrosh and Ballantrae, before arriving, in the fading light, at our stylish destination, Glenapp Castle. We made our faltering way up the castle’s long drive through some thick and rather scary foliage, for it lies in splendid isolation in a forest estate with giant redwoods.

But before describing the splendours of staying in an empty Downton Abbey, just down the coast from Glasgow, let me say a little about the car.

The Polestar does not look like a speed machine. Its design is admirably restrained. A sculpted and low-slung grille gives a hint of the grunt under the bonnet and the racy wheels and prominent braking discs suggest that a rapid deceleration facility is an imperative rather than an option. But other than that, there is little idea that this family estate will run neck and neck with all but the fastest supercars that cost tens of

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