Sutherland

There aren’t many roads in Britain where you can pull over to cook breakfast and finish it without seeing a single car. While my friend Ben got the stove going, I wandered around the ruins of Dun Dornaigil, an iron age broch (stone roundhouse) more than 2,000 years old. Above us, low cloud drifted across the dark cliffs of Ben Hope. This was exactly the kind of lost lane we’d come to Sutherland to ride.

Our journey had begun the day before, in Lairg – the traditional “crossroads of the north”. With its Spar shop, hotel, train station and a population of about 800, Lairg is the largest inland settlement in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Europe. Sutherland – literally, the “southern land” of the Vikings, who held sway over the far north of Scotland from their stronghold on Orkney – tests life to its limits: bare mountains, impassable peat bogs and one of Britain’s wildest coastlines.

Today, the region’s biggest draw isn’t a particular place but a route. The North Coast 500 is regularly ranked among the world’s greatest road trips – and has been dubbed the “Instagram highway”. Over the past decade, its runaway success has doubled the traffic on its roads. Plenty of cyclists do ride the 516-mile (830km) circuit, or parts of it, but we had not come to this far-flung corner of Scotland to spend our time amid a procession of motorbikes, sports cars and campervans.

Heading west from Lairg, we turned into Glen Cassley. On the map, it’s a dead-end lane that dwindles to a rough 4×4 track. After a couple of miles bumping along the gravel, a ribbon of silky-smooth tarmac appears as if by magic (it is, in fact, a service road for a dam and a small hydroelectric generator). It led us up a steep climb over the top to Loch Shin.

From here, the only way across the next range of hills was an old drovers’ road over the Bealach nam Meirleach – or Thief’s Pass – a name hinting at earlier use by cattle rustlers. Thanks to Scotland’s enlightened access laws, we were free to give it a go. The only question was whether our fully laden touring bikes would be up to it. Though boneshaking at times, it was a thrilling 8-mile ride over genuinely remote hill country, passing a string of lochans (small lochs) flanked by huge, glacier-scoured cliffs. Descending into Strathmore, we found the perfect wild-camp spot by the river. Perfect, that is, until the midges appeared, forcing us to don our slightly absurd nylon head nets to keep them at bay.

The next day, after our roadside breakfast by the broch, we continued on a narrow road from Strathmore to the tiny hamlet of Altnaharra. The very name has a romance to it, and I’d heard it now and again on weather bulletins in the depths of winter (the weather station here jointly holds the record for Britain’s coldest recorded temperature: –27.2C in December 1995). A small hotel, originally a 17th-century drovers’ inn but reopened in the 1820s to bring anglers and deer stalkers to the area, is open from March to October. With the sun blazing in a cloudless sky and the land so lush and green, it was impossible to imagine the long, dark winters where heavy snow can leave the handful of local people cut off for weeks.

Downstream of the hotel is a three-arch stone bridge built by Thomas Telford, wittily dubbed the Scottish “colossus of roads”, who gave Sutherland its first proper highways. We set off on his road to the coast. It crosses the western edge of the Flow Country, a seemingly infinite expanse of mountain and blanket bog. Walter Scott described this far north of Scotland as the “immeasurable wilds” and the distant, never-changing horizons can be disorientating. As the miles ticked by, my eye was drawn instead to the microcosm at the roadside: verges dotted with delicate flowers, mosses and lichens; dark, still pools of water ringed with reeds and tufts of pure white cotton grass.

Eventually, we reached the coast and the village of Tongue. As we freewheeled down the hill, a sea eagle picked us out and glided overhead, matching our speed, as if lazily sizing us up for its next meal before deciding we weren’t worth the bother. We stopped for our lunch on the sunny terrace of the Tongue hotel, a former hunting lodge furnished in the Highland style – all dark wood, polished brass, tartan and antlers. Tongue overlooks a shallow sea loch where whales, dolphins, seals and otters are regularly spotted. In the 1970s, a causeway and road bridge were built across the mouth of the Kyle of Tongue, replacing a ferry crossing. Almost no one drives the narrow old road around the loch. It’s a genuine lost lane, with views across the turquoise waters of the loch and inland to the shapely granite peaks of Ben Loyal.

On the far side of the loch is the Moine, for centuries another impassable morass of blanket bog. To cross it, we had no choice but to join the stream of traffic on the fast and wide A838, which forms part of the North Coast 500. A closer inspection of the map revealed a few fragments of the original road, now abandoned. Some sections were a muddy quagmire, but others were surprisingly intact. Along the way, we stopped in at the roofless ruin of a small house where travellers once took refuge from storms.

Across the Moine, we reached the northern tip of Loch Hope, where the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen has just opened what may be the country’s most expensive hotel: rooms at Hope Lodge cost upward of £1,550 a night. Povlsen is a paradoxical figure. Scotland’s biggest private landowner, his fortune was made from fast fashion, an industry widely criticised for its record on the environment and on labour. Yet, as well as running a handful of luxury retreats, his company WildLand has made ambitious commitments to nature conservation and rewilding on his vast estates. After pondering what comforts lay behind the metal gates of Hope Lodge, we set off down a narrow lane along the shore of the loch, where we spotted two campers quietly rewilding themselves for free.

We soon discovered this was a gem of a lane, with its thick sward of grass up the middle, winding its way past drifts of heather and eucalyptus-scented bog myrtle, and through sun-dappled glades of downy birch and sessile oak. Stopping in a narrow ravine, we drank deeply of the cool, peaty water that spilled down in a cascade. On this 20-mile stretch, we passed just two farmsteads. The emptiness of places like Strathmore is the legacy of the notorious early 18th-century Sutherland clearances in which thousands of farming families were evicted, often violently, to make way for commercial sheep grazing.

Returning to the crossroads at Altnaharra, it was time to turn south on to the road to Lairg. Our destination for the night was the Crask Inn, a historic drovers’ haunt that offers cyclists free camping in the garden. We pitched next to a lone German who was closing in on John o’Groats, the end of a ride that had begun a fortnight earlier at Land’s End. Our tour of just three days had covered 130 miles. We had travelled along lonesome highways, forgotten byways and the remotest of hill tracks. In setting out to avoid the North Coast 500, we had ended up riding where no campervan could go.

Jack Thurston’s new book, Lost Lanes Scotland, is out now (Wild Things Publishing, £18.99). This tour combines two rides from the book