Britain’s most scenic drives: The Road to the Isles, Scotland

Aerial view from drone of Silver Sands of Morar on the River Morar and Morar Bay at Morar west of Scotland, UK

(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

published 1 January 2022

Not only does the Road to the Isles sound like something from a fairy tale, it looks like it, too.

Picturesque Scottish beach - The Silver Sands of Morar on the North West coast close to Fort William

If a dragon appeared in a bruised Highland sky, clouds aflame in the setting sun, and swooped low to glide over a smooth mountain loch, perhaps admiring its reflection, it would seem both fitting and proper.

The Jacobite steam train from Fort William to Mallaig in Scotland crosses the Glenfinnan viaduct?

This 46-mile historic route between Fort William and the fishing port of Mallaig in Lochaber (the A830 on modern maps) seems to have it all: rocky mountains, inaccessible lochs, the sandy beaches of Morar, atmospheric ruins, vistas of the Isles of Rum, Muck, Eigg and Canna and a mythological beast’s-eye view of the Glenfinnan Viaduct and Loch Shiel.

The 'Silver Sands of Morar' is the Scottish Highlands is on the North West Coast between Fort William and Mallaig

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Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.

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