My son wanted to know if the toilet he had just been to – behind the Peerie cafe in Scrabster, Caithness, where you catch the boat for Orkney – was the northernmost one in Britain. I said that I didn't know for sure. It is pretty far north there, but Dunnet Head and Cape Wrath are more so, and anyway, Orkney and Shetland are part of Britain, too. At least until the fallout from 18 September, and until Orkney and Shetland decide to give up on Scotland and go their separate ways. Questions of what begins and ends where get fractal the more you look at them – much the same as happens with the land.
I had never been up that far, either, and I was astonished. I hadn't expected the NorthLink ferry to be so huge and looming. I hadn't expected to see the actual sides of Orkney, lovely juicy red flags of sandstone, only a hop and skip across the firth. It looked so close, I wanted to jump in and swim it; but we had promised to get to my mum's house in Aberdeen that evening, and to get her a scampi supper on the way. We paused only to read the tourist-information panels – "Scrabster, from the Norse Skarabolstadr, meaning standing on the edge" – and to buy a cake with white icing and sprinkles. Then we turned up Kraftwerk on the iPod and took the car back south.
Still, the Peerie cafe toilets are surely the northernmost on the A9, the longest road in Scotland, running 273 miles (439km) up the middle of the country, from the Cadgers Brae roundabout by Falkirk at the bottom to the Scrabster ferry terminal at the top. Scotland's spine, its fans like to call it – though in its lower reaches it is more like the service core to an enormous building, connecting up the back entrances of Glasgow and Fort William on the west coast, Edinburgh and Dundee and Aberdeen on the east. All three routes converge on Inverness, at the Raigmore interchange, but then two disappear. Only the A9 re-emerges to glide over the long, low bridges that cross the firths of Beauly and Cromarty and Dornoch, twisting and bucking between the Sutherland coast and mountains before the land goes flat again.
I grew up in Aberdeen. When I look at Scotland on maps, I see the John Tenniel picture of the Queen of Hearts in Alice In Wonderland, with Aberdeen as her bustle, and Argyll and Bute her pointing finger, shouting, "Off with their heads!" at the islands of Lewis and Harris. ("A sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion," Lewis Carroll wrote of the Queen of Hearts, "a blind and aimless Fury." Maybe he was thinking about Scotland, too.) For many people reading this, Aberdeen will seem unattainably far north, though when you live there it doesn't: we had C&A and Boots, and when the oil boom started in the 1970s, Spence-Rae's American Food Store, where you could buy corn syrup and artificial bacon long before they were stocked anywhere else.
As a child, I dreamed of the north far up beyond us. My father used to talk about the empty roads and broken shielings he knew from the days when motoring was a gentle pastime, before the roads got jammed with idiots who should never have been allowed to pass their test. I traced the routes in my father's maps and guidebooks: the Reader's Digest Book Of The Road, with its sophisticatedly silken built-in bookmark; W Douglas Simpson's 1969 Portrait Of The Highlands, in which the A9 is called the Great North Road. Even now, these places give me a thrill of loss and glamour, the childhood haunts that I never actually knew. Even now, I don't find them easy to get to, especially because I can't drive, so must always be waiting for trains and buses and somebody from whom I can cadge a lift.
The A9 is an odd road, both a major trunk route and a scenic byway, crammed with slow-moving lorries, coach tours and caravans. Some of it is dual-carriageway and some of it is single, and the changes between the systems are abrupt. Even in the 60s – a time otherwise recalled as a golden age for first-generation car lovers – my dad remembers there was something troubling about this. The angle of the bends wasn't right, or the camber of the surface, or maybe it was the staggering mountain views, but it always "felt squint", he says, like you never knew quite where you were. It underwent a decade of improvements in the 70s and early 80s, bypassing villages and diverting the course of the river Tay. Engineers improved sightlines by straightening kinks wherever rock and water let them, adding an extra lane where they didn't. But the improvements were almost immediately outstripped by the ever-lengthening lines of traffic surging north.
Last year, the road saw 166 accidents, 26 defined by police as serious, and nine fatal. According to the A9 Safety Group website, more than 40% of deaths in the past five years on single-carriageway sections involved attempts at overtaking, because drivers get so frustrated: commuters late for their shift, weekend climbers haring up from the cities, bored teens engaged in the Highland sport of car-hopping while simultaneously jeering at mates on the phone. Police patrol the road constantly, and an average-speed camera system is coming this autumn. The road will be dual-carriageway by 2025.
On the border of Sutherland and Caithness, in Helmsdale (46 miles from the northern end of the A9), stands the remarkable Timespan Museum. On its website there is a sort of mission statement, a quote from the Aberdeen historian Peter Davidson: "There are those who think that to live in a remote place in the north is to live inevitably with an absence, with starkness and dearth, with the want and lack of most of the things that give sustenance and pleasure. This can be disconcerting, but it can be more disconcerting still to be praised for endurances neither practised nor felt."
Helmsdale was a centre of the herring industry in the 19th century, when the Duke and Countess of Sutherland forced their tenants from the inland straths to the seashore, to clear the hills for sheep. The Sutherlands spent the wealth this generated on turrets, parterres and stuffed animal heads for the family seat of Dunrobin Castle and, later on, a train station. A statue of the duke looms on a hilltop by the village of Golspie. He is known locally as "the Mannie", and is a popular stopping-off point for people out with their dogs.
"The road is a lifeline to people up here," says the museum's heritage officer, Jacquie Aitken, who grew up in Brora down the road. "I see it in the boys and girls round here. They really feel they need to get a car." This summer, Aitken organised an event called Diefenbaker's North – a series of conversations inspired by a journey taken to Scotland in 1958 by Canada's then-prime minister, a descendant of crofters cleared from the Strath of Kildonan. The journey by road from Inverness to Helmsdale, Aitken says, was found to be no faster today than it was 50 years ago, what with the exponential increase in traffic. She was right enough: the dash on the car we hired for our journey showed an average speed of 40mph.
The A9's summit comes at the ancient pass of Drumochter, 1,516ft (462m) above sea level, an unwidenable pinch point between the Boar of Badenoch on the west side and the Cairngorm massif to the east. General Wade's military road from the 1700s, Telford's parliamentary turnpike a century later, the Glasgow-Inverness railway, all squeeze along it, as does the Beauly-Denny power line, transmitting electricity from the northern substations to the population centres of the south. Pylons have been here since the 50s, "striding along the skyline", as W Douglas Simpson wrote in my dad's guidebook. The old line carried 132,000 volts over 800 pylons, and is nearly dismantled. The new line will take 400,000 volts over around 600; two weeks ago, the last gap in it was waiting to be strung with cables.
The man at Scottish Southern Energy is wary when I call him, and if you look at a map of the project, it is easy to see why: the Drumochter area is already cross-hatched with a multicoloured tartan of designations: turquoise for a special area of conservation, green for a special protection area, mauve for a site of special scientific interest and pink for National Park. Then along comes a thick blue squiggle crashing alongside, the incoming invasion of martian pylons, bringing with them the proliferating wind turbines that are their noisome spawn. As part of the Beauly-Denny contract, SSE is committed to a programme of "wirescape mitigation", which means the lines go underground in places. Old pylons are felled, sawn to bits and flown away by helicopter to the great recycling centre in the sky.
But I found the wirescape very beautiful when we made the crossing of Drumochter at 7.30pm on a wet and windy August evening. The dull steel "towers" – the proper engineering term, I am told – stood flat and grey against the brownish heather. The wires ("conductors") slung between them had a fuzzy luminescence, like strings of fairy lights. Insulators, the round bits that join the conductors to the towers, are made of glass these days, and glowed like baubles. The line is live from Beauly to Fort Augustus; this next bit is due to be switched on soon.
When Simpson wrote his book in the late 60s, the big plan for the eastern Highlands was to develop "a vast industrial complex, forming a continuous linear city, with a total population of 300,000". The natural harbour on the Cromarty Firth from Nigg to Invergordon would be the centre for engineering projects, servicing the new North Sea gas and oil fields. Inverness would be "the commercial and cultural focus", with shopping centres, leisure centres and a new Highland University. The university got under way in the 90s, but the linear city never quite happened – though for a time Invergordon was like a displaced corner of Lanarkshire, as welders made redundant from the Clydeside shipyards travelled north and east to find work.
The yard at Nigg is in the hands of new owners, who have named it, as is the fashion, Nigg Energy Park. It still maintains and repairs rigs and pipelines, but is switching more of its work to the renewables sector, offshore turbines and the like. Being an Aberdonian, I both love and am disgusted by oil rigs, as you have to be by the enormous filthy things you've had to live with all your life. I saw one through the rain at Invergordon, closer than I've been before. It was huge and squat and orange and cuddlesome, like an unusually large and evil gonk.
It is a strange thing, Simpson noted, how so many of the tourists on the roads of Scotland are descendants of the same "landless ex-peasantry" that left the Highlands, for one reason or another, over the centuries, trading their "tangy rustic culture" for "urban barbarisation". Back they come, as Simpson says, "during the summer months, a converse explosion": Canadians, Americans, New Zealanders, lured by golf and clans and tartans. Back, at least until they ban the pound and bring in passports, come a few stray Londoners of Scottish origin or ethnicity, like me and my 10-year-old, London-born son.
Once we'd got to grandma's with the scampi supper, I asked him what he'd liked best about our road trip: the hills, the sea, the sight of Orkney, the gleaming sphere of the decommissioned nuclear reactor at Dounreay. He said it was probably the cake with sprinkles from Scrabster, and then he thought again.
He liked the Scottish koi carp show at the Klondyke garden centre by the Polmont interchange: vats and vats of glistening, somewhat flabby fish. And he liked a fridge magnet he had seen in the Legends gift shop at the National Wallace Monument near Stirling. "The first Scotsman", it said, next to a picture of a baboon, smirking, with a patch of Royal Stewart tartan on its bum.
