Chauffeur Services in Inverness

If one thing is worth knowing about leaving Inverness, it is how sharply your average speed drops the moment you come off the trunk roads. Traffic moves well enough on the A9 and A96. The A832, the A835 and everything heading out to the west coast are another story: single carriageway, single track with passing places for long stretches, and shared with caravans, livestock and delivery lorries. A hundred miles measured on a Highland map is three hours of driving, not ninety minutes, and any itinerary drawn up from mileage alone starts coming apart by mid-afternoon.

Choices narrow again once winter sets in. Two arteries carry the load: the A9 running south over Drumochter, and the A82 tracking Loch Ness towards Fort William. Snow shuts either one and there is no quick way around it. Average speed enforcement covers a good part of the A9, while the dualling programme keeps shifting contraflows about, so an honest figure for Edinburgh is three and a half hours or more, not the three a clear summer run might give you. Leaving early beats turning up with apologies.

On a long journey, Britain's weather does more damage than its traffic ever will. Winter afternoons close in early, and that matters a great deal when the final leg is a single-track road. Highland and moorland routes can run substantially longer than any summer estimate suggests. Those allowances go into the timings from the start, rather than being discovered together halfway up a glen. Where a departure hour makes the schedule uncomfortable, we propose a better one.

Demand tracks the calendar closely. Bank holiday weekends fill fast, so do the weeks either side of Christmas, the summer wedding season and those university terms that all begin and end together. The further from London a journey runs, the sooner a car wants committing to it. Midweek travel in the shoulder months, by contrast, is the easiest thing in the world to arrange.