Ten days in Scotland: two great cities, then the road runs out

Start high. The crag at the east end of Princes Street is ten minutes up from the station and lays the whole city out for you: the castle on its rock, the ridge of the old town, the Georgian grid to the north and the Firth of Forth behind it. The unfinished classical wreck on the summit was meant to copy the Parthenon as a memorial to the Napoleonic dead; the money ran out after twelve columns in 1829 and it has stood like that ever since.

Come down and walk west along Princes Street to the blackened Gothic spike at the far end of the gardens, which commemorates Walter Scott, the novelist who more or less invented the tartan version of Scotland you will be sold for the next ten days.

Then eat in the old town and go to bed early, because tomorrow starts at the castle gate.

The castle opens at half past nine and the first hour is the quiet one. It is not one building but a walled town on a volcanic plug: the Scottish crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny, a great hall, a war museum, and a chapel from about 1130 that is the oldest surviving building in the city. Book a timed ticket before you come, because it sells out on the day in summer.

At one o'clock a gun is fired from the north battery, as it has been every day but Sunday since 1861. Then walk downhill: the Royal Mile runs in a straight line from the castle gate towards the palace, and the crowned spire halfway down belongs to the High Kirk, which everybody calls the cathedral and which technically is not one.

Turn off at the bridges for the national museum, which is free, enormous and has a roof terrace looking straight back at the castle.

The other end of the Mile is the royal one. The palace is largely a rebuild of the 1670s on a much older abbey site, and the room everybody wants is the small turret chamber where Mary Queen of Scots was at supper in 1566 when her husband's men dragged her secretary out and stabbed him on the floor outside. The roofless abbey behind it is the better half.

Across the road stands the Parliament, finished in 2004 by a Catalan architect who died before it opened, three years late and ten times over budget, and argued about ever since. It is free, and the chamber can be seen without a ticket on days when it is not sitting.

Then climb the volcano behind both of them. An hour up through gorse and rock to 251 metres, with the city, the firth and the hills of Fife below, and a wind at the top that is there even in June.

Trains to Glasgow leave Waverley every fifteen minutes and take fifty. You are in the second city before eleven with a whole afternoon in hand, and the left luggage at Queen Street solves the bags.

Go straight up the High Street to the medieval quarter, which is all that is left of the town before the money arrived. The cathedral is the one on the Scottish mainland that came through the Reformation more or less intact, and the lower church built over St Mungo's tomb is the best interior in the city.

Cross the bridge behind it into the cemetery on the ridge, where fifty thousand Victorians are buried under about three and a half thousand monuments, arranged so their owners could go on outranking each other after death. Then come down into town and take late tea in a room Charles Rennie Mackintosh designed in 1903, down to the cutlery.

The west end holds the two museums worth crossing the country for, and both are free. The art gallery opened in 1901 in red sandstone the colour of a flowerpot, with a hall big enough to hang a Spitfire in and an organ played every day at one. Twenty two galleries: Egypt, armour, natural history, the Glasgow Boys, and Dali's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, bought by the city in 1952 for eight thousand pounds against considerable public grumbling.

Down at the river, the transport museum is a zigzag of zinc by Zaha Hadid, opened in 2011, holding locomotives, trams, a wall of cars three high, a recreated subway platform and a street of shops from about 1900. It is much better than the subject sounds.

The three masted barque moored outside is a separate ticket. Built on the Clyde in 1896, sold to the Spanish navy, and towed home in 1993 with holes in her hull.

The train from Queen Street takes about three hours and twenty minutes through Stirling and Perth, then climbs into the Cairngorms and runs over the highest main line pass in Britain at Drumochter. Sit on the left going north. This is the leg where the country changes from farmland to moor and everybody stops reading.

Inverness is small and you can walk out of the station into the middle of it in five minutes. Start on the castle hill for the view along the river: the medieval castle here was blown up in 1746 by its own Jacobite garrison so the government could not use it, and its Victorian replacement spent most of its life as the sheriff court before opening to visitors at the end of 2025.

In the evening find the music. Several pubs within two streets have a free traditional session most nights, starting around nine, and it is the best hour in town. Pick up the hire car this evening or first thing tomorrow.

Twenty minutes east of town, a flat stretch of moor settled how Scotland would be governed for two centuries. On 16 April 1746 the Jacobite army, exhausted after a failed night march and drawn up on ground that suited only the enemy, charged into grapeshot and musket fire. It was over in about an hour, two thousand clansmen were dead, and the reprisals that followed broke the clan system, the tartan and the language. The visitor centre is excellent and the field itself, with its clan headstones, is the thing.

Ten minutes away, in a stand of old trees, three burial cairns and their standing stones have sat since about 2000 BC, aligned so that the midwinter sun goes down the passage into the tombs. Free, unstaffed and usually empty.

Then drive west to the loch. Twenty three miles of black water along the fault line, and halfway down the west shore a ruined castle on a point that everyone in Scotland with an army fought over for four hundred years, until the government garrison left in 1695 and blew it up behind them. Get there after four if you can, when the coaches have gone.

Three hours west, and the best drive of the trip. The road runs down the length of Loch Ness, turns west at Invermoriston and climbs through Glen Shiel, where the mountains come down to the verge on both sides and a chain of five peaks runs along the south ridge. Stop at the loch with the little castle on an island, which is the most photographed castle in Scotland and worth the twenty minutes.

Over the bridge and up the east coast to Portree, a harbour of painted houses under a wooded hill, and the island's only town of any size. Park once and leave it.

Walk out around the headland above the harbour for the view back at the town and north to the cliffs you will be standing on tomorrow, then eat early, because kitchens here fill up and stop serving sooner than you expect.

One loop round the northern peninsula covers everything Skye is famous for. Start early at the Storr, ten minutes north of Portree: the car park charges, fills by mid morning in summer and backs up onto the road by eleven. An hour of steady climbing on a rebuilt path brings you level with a fifty metre finger of rock standing clear of the cliff behind it, part of the biggest landslip in Britain.

North again to the viewpoint above Kilt Rock, where vertical basalt columns over horizontal beds really do look like pleated cloth and a burn drops straight off the cliff into the sea. Five minutes at the railing.

Then the Quiraing, up a single track road that climbs in hairpins to a pass. This is the part of the landslip that is still moving, which is why the road below needs repairing most years, and the path out along the face is one of the great walks in Scotland. Go as far as the light and your boots allow, then turn round.

One last walk on the way out. A track goes up Glen Brittle beside a burn that steps down through one clear pool after another under the black Cuillin ridge, forty minutes up and forty back on a path that is stony and often a stream. People swim. The water is about ten degrees in August.

From there it is an hour and a half back to the bridge, three hours to Inverness and the airport, or five to Glasgow.

Whichever way you go, the road out is the road in reversed, and it looks completely different in the other direction.