Driving Kintyre 66 Scotland

Explore one of Scotland’s most scenic regions on Kintyre 66, a new short driving route on the breathtaking Kintyre peninsula.

Blue sailboat moored near Bellanoch Swing Bridge at Crinan Canal connecting Crinan with Ardrishaig in Kintyre peninsula, Argyll and Bute, Scotland, UK

There’s a place on the Mull of Kintyre, that dangling limb shielding Scotland’s Firth of Clyde from wild Atlantic weather, where it comes over all Game of Thrones. A tunnel of overarching trees descends to an ancient gateway, behind which rises a forbidding tower castle built by a powerful 16th-century bishop.

Out on the foreshore, looking across the Kilbrannan Sound where the Viking invader Magnus Barelegs once sailed, stands a solitary metal man by Antony Gormley. This is Saddell Bay, the beach where Paul McCartney’s Mull of Kintyre video was filmed, with the Kintyre bagpipe band marching along the sands. McCartney and his wife Linda bought a farm not far away and came here regularly with their children. On this afternoon, however, there is just me on that beach, plus McCartney’s earworm of a tune, and a great deal of beauty all around.

I’ve come to the Mull to try out the Kintyre 66, a new driving route that is a lot more compact and sustainable, in these days of sky-high petrol prices, than traipsing north to the far more distant and lengthy, not to mention crowded, North Coast 500.

Argyll, Scotland. Picture: Unsplash

The peninsulas of Argyll, where Scotland waggles its bony fingers in the Atlantic, wouldn’t normally be my stomping ground. My mother is from the Isle of Skye, so I usually go roaring past, but my habitual place to stay on the island isn’t available, with surveys suggesting the popular parts of Scotland are having a bumper year. So after spending a day making necessary family visits, I head south towards Kintyre, allowing myself a few Argyll diversions in transit.

In the ferry port of Oban I stop long enough to have an excellent freshly dressed crab on the quay at the shack-like Seafood Hut, which is doing a roaring trade with French and German visitors waiting to head out to the isles. Forty-five minutes south and I am making my own, much easier island crossing, courtesy of the so-called Bridge over the Atlantic, an elegant 18th-century humpback number that connects the mainland to the island of Seil across a thin thread of water.

Here I do what most people do: park and return to the bridge to stand astride the Atlantic. The tide is running high through the gap, and I know from my Skye experiences what that means. So does the little head I see bobbing up intermittently by a distant rock.

“Otter,” I mutter to an onlooker standing beside me. “Feeding on sea trout coming through.” She calls her friends, but try as they might they can’t spot a thing. I can tell they don’t believe me.

That night I find a room on Craignish, the next peninsula south. Here the Galley of Lorne Inn, in the village of Ardfern, seems almost indecently well equipped given its location and price, with Netflix and Alexa in the rooms. The hotel’s up-market dining options are clearly aimed at the large numbers of yachtsmen riding at anchor in the sheltered waters beyond its windows.

Also catering to the well heeled is Lucy’s sunlight-filled cafe across the road, which opened just before the pandemic, serving excellent coffee and lovely fish tacos.

Next day after breakfast I walk up to the highest knuckle of the Craignish peninsula’s pointy finger to watch some of the Ardfern yachtsmen continue their journeys. It is a ravishing morning, the skies stitched with wildfowl and the water so clear it is a giant windscreen for fish. The reward for my short hike is a fabulous 360-degree view over bays, creeks and beaches; an intricate tessellation of water and land. Out in the firths are a couple of scudding sails and, beyond, the two distant silhouettes of Jura and Islay, the whirlpool of Corryvreckan lying in wait between.

Davaar island lighthouse and cottages in Campbeltown, Scotland.

By the afternoon I’ve percolated south to another key bit of interplay between water and land, the Crinan Canal. This man-made shortcut from the Atlantic to the Clyde saves small boats a long and potentially perilous journey around the southern tip of the Mull of Kintyre. After watching boats lock through from sea to canal, swapping choppy waves for limpid green waters, I resume my drive south to finally engage with the Kintyre 66.

This 66-mile (106km) road trip is the newest of five driving routes in Scotland, only dreamt up last year. It’s the shortest of these, no more than a weekend’s journey of discovery, throwing a neat loop around one of the country’s more off-the-beaten-track limbs of land.

At its northern tip, in Tarbert, I refuel at Starfish, a restaurant with light-blue shutters and window boxes seemingly borrowed from a Greek taverna. That said, my tangy peat-smoked haddock with black-pudding mash (£17, or about $29) is unlike anything you’d find in the Mediterranean.

Then I drive down the Mull’s main road, along its wind-blasted west side, with views to the Isle of Gigha and even Northern Ireland. In less than an hour I’m in Campbeltown, the main settlement, with handsome architecture suggesting previous prosperity.

At its peak, during Victorian times, there were an astonishing 30 distilleries in Campbeltown, and it was known as the whisky capital of the world. Today there are just two, Springbank and Glen Scotia, but it so happens that I have arrived on the weekend of their annual festival, and the footpaths are busy with superfans.

There is a bagpipe band playing in the courtyard at Glen Scotia distillery, and I ascertain that the queues are of club members lining up to buy a £60 special edition that can’t be purchased by ordinary mortals. Apparently many have flown in from all over the world for that bizarre privilege.

Still slightly mystified by whisky cults, I leave town to continue along the Kintyre 66, this time back in a northerly direction up the peninsula’s east coast, where the route becomes a single-track road. It is along here, after the revelation of Saddell Bay and the Gormley statue, that I find another great place to stay; a luxuriously converted Victorian manse in Carradale, a small village with a smattering of langoustine trawlers against a tiny curl of a jetty.

I enjoy a high tea of homemade quiche with Maurice Whelan, who runs Carradales Luxury Guest House with his partner, Steve Reed. Maurice tells me that my remaining bit of the Kintyre loop has a lyrical significance I hadn’t previously realised. It is the “long and winding road” that McCartney sang about.

The next morning I complete this last section, grateful not to be in a hurry, for the road is long and winding – lonely, too, and remote. The mist is rolling in, and the distant bulk of Arran is only part-visible across Kilbrannan Sound. In short, it’s a rollercoaster of a ride. I can see why McCartney thought it worthy of a song.

Andrew Eames was a guest of Visit Scotland.

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