Scotland is small — you can drive from the border to the far north in a long day — and it contains an amount of empty, mountainous, weather-beaten landscape that is disproportionate to its size. The Highlands have a population density comparable to parts of the Sahara.
Edinburgh is excellent and is not why to come.
The right to roam, which changes everything
Scotland has among the most permissive access legislation in the world. The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003 gives a right of responsible access to almost all land and inland water, including for wild camping.
In practice: you may walk almost anywhere, and you may camp for a night or two in unenclosed land away from buildings and roads, provided you leave no trace.
The responsibilities are real — the Scottish Outdoor Access Code sets them out, and they include not camping in enclosed fields with livestock or crops, taking all litter, and burying human waste well away from water. Loch Lomond and the Trossachs has seasonal byelaws restricting lochside camping to permit areas after years of damage.
No other country in this part of Europe offers this, and it is the single best reason to bring a tent.
The Highlands
Glen Coe — a glacial valley of extraordinary drama, an hour from Fort William, with the Aonach Eagach ridge above it and a massacre in 1692 that Scotland has not forgotten.
Ben Nevis, the highest point in Britain at 1,345m, climbed by tens of thousands a year on the tourist path. It is a long walk rather than a climb, and it kills people most years because the summit plateau in cloud is genuinely disorienting and the weather changes fast.
Torridon and Assynt in the north-west — older, stranger mountains rising individually out of moorland, and the best of Scotland for most people who know it well.
Cairngorms National Park — the largest in Britain, a high sub-arctic plateau, with reindeer, ospreys and the country’s ski areas.
The West Highland Way, 96 miles from Glasgow to Fort William over about a week, is the best-known long-distance route and is comfortably done staying in bunkhouses and inns.
The islands
Skye is the famous one and is now dealing with more visitors than its single-track roads can absorb. The Quiraing, the Old Man of Storr and the Fairy Pools are all superb and all have parking problems and queues in summer. Go in May or October.
The Outer Hebrides — Lewis, Harris, the Uists, Barra — are the alternative and the better one. Harris has beaches that would be famous if they were fifteen degrees further south. Lewis has the Callanish standing stones, older than Stonehenge. Barra’s airport uses the beach as a runway and flights are timetabled around the tide.
Mull, Islay, Jura and Arran are more accessible from Glasgow. Islay is where the peated whisky comes from and has nine working distilleries on an island of three thousand people.
Orkney has Skara Brae, a Neolithic village older than the pyramids, and Maeshowe, a chambered tomb with Viking graffiti inside it.
Shetland is closer to Bergen than to Edinburgh and feels it.
CalMac ferries connect most of them, and booking a car space in summer is essential.
The North Coast 500
A 516-mile circular route around the northern Highlands from Inverness, marketed since 2015 and now very popular, which has been a mixed blessing for the communities on it.
It is genuinely spectacular. It is also a single-track road in long stretches, and the pressure has produced real friction — passing places used as viewpoints, overloaded facilities, wild camping in laybys rather than the hills.
If you drive it: go outside July and August, know how to use passing places (pull in, let following traffic past, do not park in them), book accommodation ahead, and use campsites rather than laybys.
The weather and the midges
The weather is the defining condition. Four seasons in a day is literal, and hill weather kills walkers most years. Waterproofs, a map and compass you can actually use, and a check of the Mountain Weather Information Service before any hill day.
Midges are a genuine consideration between roughly June and early September, worst in still, damp, overcast conditions at dawn and dusk in the west. They are not dangerous and they are capable of ending an evening. Repellent works partially; a head net works entirely and looks ridiculous.
Ticks are widespread and Lyme disease is present. Check yourself daily in summer.
Seasons
May and June are the best months: long days, before the midges peak, before the school holidays.
September and October for autumn colour, stags roaring, and no midges.
July and August are the busiest and the wettest in the west.
Winter is dark and dramatic, with genuine mountaineering conditions on the hills requiring axe and crampons, and a real chance of seeing the aurora in the far north.
Practical
Trains — the West Highland Line to Mallaig and the Far North Line to Thurso are among the great rail journeys in Britain, and both are ordinary scheduled services.
Buses reach most places eventually, slowly.
A car for the islands and the north-west. Book ferries early in summer.
Single-track road etiquette matters more here than any other driving skill.