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This past spring, when I pointed my car out of Inverness to begin a loop around Scotland’s craggy northern shoreline, I was expecting trouble ahead. A decade ago, when the North Highland Initiative — a development charity set up under then-Prince Charles — renamed the circuit the North Coast 500 and started promoting the drive to tourists, I had been unconvinced it would work. I approved of any initiative aimed at drawing more visitors to a neglected part of my homeland, but recasting the ramshackle roads of the North Highlands as a desirable destination seemed like a stretch.
Back then, the thought of the drive evoked memories from half a century before — of me and my nauseated siblings squashed inside a rusty Ford station wagon as it rolled through mile after mile of monotonous moorland. Also dampening my enthusiasm were recollections of the food endured in my 20s when introducing my girlfriend of the time to the region. She came up from England expecting langoustines leaping out of creels and venison from stags gralloched, or disembowelled, where they fell on a nearby bed of purple heather. More often than not, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she had to settle for deep-fried scampi and frozen peas, garnished with a smear of tartare sauce squeezed from a plastic sachet.
Yet the idea of making these overfamiliar highways and hostelries the theater for epic road trips worked. As a promotional move, the North Coast 500 was a masterstroke — too much of one, by most accounts. Thanks to the alchemy of marketing and social media, the 516-mile (830-kilometer) circuit, which starts and finishes in Inverness, became an irresistible, Instagram-friendly pilgrimage for people around the world, overwhelming the ability of the aging and underpopulated region, and its roads, to handle the pilgrims.
Locals began losing patience with what happened next: Nose-to-tail motorhomes on single-track roads, grill dads scorching seafront meadows with disposable barbecues, everywhere becoming an open-air toilet. A decade after its launch, the NC500 is now seen as a textbook case of overtourism. At the end of last year, Fodor’s Travel added the NC500 to its 2025 “No List” of destinations it recommends avoiding, on the grounds that the route’s popularity had made it a threat to the natural environment and a “nuisance” to roadside communities.
