The G&P road trip

Day three dawned murkily: from my bedroom window Fort William town was lost in mist and it had obviously rained very heavily during the night.  After a second epic breakfast (this one ended up lasting us most of the day!) we set off to retrace our steps through Glen Coe which was looking much more characteristically gloomy.  It was like driving into a Tolkien novel.



Looking back towards Fort William
 

It was much colder than it had been all week - the temperature here was only 9 degrees C and we'd got used to temperatures well up in the twenties this summer.  There were lots of hardy souls setting off into the smirr, but we decided hills looked better from the bottom! Back down to Tyndrum and then off for the final leg of the trip - the part I'd sneakily planned! I'd realised, when we started planning the trip, that we could come back via Loch Earn, which I've wanted to visit for a long time.ages.  As I've said before, Hamish can't live in a real place - it wouldn't feel right - but I did want to ground his made-up glen in reality.  After a bit of research last year, I discovered that Loch Earn seemed to tick the most boxes as a possible inspiration: it is in the right sort of location - on the very edge of the Trossachs - and it has a good mix of landscapes as well as being reasonably small: I needed a loch the characters could see across without too much difficulty!  I've taken lots of liberties with the details and some of the locations I'm using aren't anywhere near Loch Earn at all but the view, generally, would look something like this:

 

It's rather bonnie, isn't it? (The building you can see the roof of in the centre of the picture above is actually the police station and the vehicle parked on the road is a police car!)  It was quite a strange experience visiting somewhere that looks a lot like the place I've spent the summer describing.  I found locations for most of the loch-side events of the story so far and took a lot of pictures for reference - a tip I picked up from Elizabeth George's book.  We only stopped there for about fifteen minutes or so before heading off to Crieff for coffee, but it was enough to soak up the atmosphere - and to seriously envy Partridge and Marmalade their new home!

 

Author pic for my Amazon page. 
If it really existed, you could see P & M's cottage from here!

We drove on through Comrie (where, with hindsight, we probably should have stopped - it has a Macintosh building which we drove past!) and then onto Crieff.  I remember Crieff from my teenage years as a bustling busy market town but the high street recession seems to have hit it hard and there are nowhere near as many independent shops - or interesting shops - as there used to be.  After an embarrassing scrabble for car park change  (we had exactly the right money but the machine didn't like one of our 20ps!) we visited the excellent tourist information and then went to Delivino on King Street for coffee and some scrumptious cake (www.delivino.co.uk):

The aromas of lunch were fabulous but we were still stuffed from breakfast and so cappuchino and carrot cake was all I could manage - huge portions and absolutely delicious!  After a slight detour (caused by a serious lack of road signage!) we headed back south, cutting past Stirling and then Edinburgh, impressed that both iconic castles were clearly visible from the road.  The landscape became much more 'lowland' than 'highland' as we moved onwards, past all the roads that wanted us to head back to Edinburgh (the Botanic Gardens! the festival! the castle! the Royal Yacht! the Zoo!) and on, eventually to Coldstream.

 

Coldstream has never really appealed to me much - I had a bad experience with an unpleasant sausage roll there aged seven which has lingered long in the memory even though the shop that sold it is long gone.  When we arrived there, it seemed just as grey and inhospitable as I remembered it and the local 'jobsworth' official (complete with hi-vis jacket!) was locking up the public toilets for the day - at half past three in the afternoon!  However, we'd passed a sign for a craft and tea shop just on the outskirts of Coldstream, so we retraced our steps and found ourselves in a gorgeous parkland estate - The Hirsel - which belongs to the family of  Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Here the toilets, cafe and little independent craft shops stayed open till five and we were entertained by another family of baby swallows!  It really redeemed Coldstream and we intend to return in rhododendron season!

 

Back on the road again and we slipped over the river and into Northumbria without any fanfare at all.  England seemed somewhat - dull - by comparison and were home within two hours.  A magical three days - we'd covered about 650 miles all told - restorative and soothing.  I love Scotland, quite ridiculously!