IT WAS a rusty nail that brought home to me the remoteness of Scotland’s far north. I was on a whirlwind car tour of the Highlands with my mate Jerry and we hadn’t seen a house for miles. In fact, we hadn’t seen anything that was ever likely to have been attached to a nail. Yet there it lay waiting like a sinister compass needle warning us back to where we came from. We ignored its message and it embedded itself in one of our tyres.

Things had started well enough. We had set off from Edinburgh a couple of days earlier, two Kiwis determined to fly. We had given ourselves four days to “do” Scotland and launched ourselves like Braveheart into battle. We had raced past ruins, glided through glens and careered past castles. We discovered glassy lochs, lost fishing villages and beaches worthy of Bali, but barely stopped for a photo. We were seeing Scotland through the rear-view mirror, in a wake of rippling heather.

But now we found ourselves at a standstill, watching helplessly at our deflating tyre: “Pffffffft,” the tyre offered indifferently. Jerry and I were less restrained. We had discovered that our friends at “No Frills Car Hire” had sent us off without a spare and were cursing wildly.

It would have been easy to blame Jerry. He seems to attract this sort of predicament. A few days earlier he’d rung me at home in Edinburgh to say he had arrived in town and could I meet him at the station. It turned out that while it was true he was in town and at the station, he was actually in Birmingham.

As we circled the car in agitation, the stark, rustic beauty of our surroundings was almost completely lost on us. But gradually a remoteness we hadn’t thought existed in the UK began to impress itself upon us. If nowhere was a place, we were in the middle of it.

Actually, we were in the county of Caithness, the northernmost part of mainland Britain, but the distinction was barely discernible.

Had mountains been people, we would have been in fine company. Nearby Ben Hope and Ben Loyal sounded like lifelong friends. And there were always the Munros, as climbers refer to the bigger ones. But mountains are not people and I had to go for help.

We hadn’t seen a car for almost 20 minutes, but one soon pulled up driven by a pair of elderly holidaymakers keen to help. They took me several miles to a B&B where I would ring the Automobile Association.

Although I had an overwhelming desire for a midday drinking binge which I found vaguely disturbing, I decided AA could best attend to my immediate woes.

“Where are you calling from?” the helpful operator called Alice asked, not unreasonably. “Somewhere between Inverness and the high Arctic,” I quipped.“But I’ll need to know the nearest highway junction,” she persisted without a hint of irony.

Through a quirk of AA administration, my call for help was being fielded by an operator in England, meaning she was culturally more ill-equipped to judge my location than I was.

“Highway junction?” I repeated. We’d been travelling on single-track roads for most of the day. But after painstakingly tracing our journey on my road atlas I was confident I had found myself, though certainly not in a spiritual sense.

I talked Alice through a careful description involving well known references like Edinburgh, Inverness and the Highlands before zeroing in on my suspected location by naming the route we were on. This final detail clinched it.

“Ah, so you’re in Scotland, then,” she proclaimed. “I should have picked the accent.” Alice was clearly in Wonderland.
She quickly moved on to more familiar ground. “We need to know the make and model of your car and the name of the rental company,” she prompted. “And the registration number.”

This last request took me by surprise. While the other details were inscribed on the keyring in my hand, the number was on the number plates — attached to the car several miles away. Alice insisted she could not send help without the number, so I would have to return to the car. Fortunately, the elderly couple were still parked outside and kindly agreed to take me back to our vehicle. I took careful note of the number, then caught my ride back to the B&B to phone the AA.

This time I got a new operator named John. He ran through the questions I had just answered for Alice. Like Alice, he was friendly and efficient. And like Alice, he had a nasty surprise for me: “If we’re going to bring you a spare, we need to know the wheel size,” he said.

“You don’t need to know that,”
I insisted. “Alice said someone would come and tow us?”
“Alice? Who’s Alice?” he said. Suddenly my suspicions about Wonderland were confirmed.

John did need to know about the wheel and my elderly saviours had departed. For this reason I found myself peddling along on the B&B hostess’ tiny gypsy bicycle. She sent me off with fruit and cookies in the straw basket in front of me and I pedalled away with my knees flailing mantis-like over the handlebars.

The going was awkward. But as I crawled along in isolation I couldn’t help feeling peaceful. I marvelled at the soaring brown slopes and big blue sky. Even the air smelt sweet. A herd of Highland cattle — a cuddly toy-maker’s dream — looked up drowsily as I approached. Their dopey faces and shaggy coats made me laugh. I hadn’t even noticed them from the car.

As the silence of the countryside took hold, the cares of the world seemed far away. I imagined myself retreating to some ancient highland village with a nice stone cottage and a section out the back. The AA did reach us in the end. A guy rolled up in a tow truck and took us to a garage. My cycling had been pointless.

But we didn’t regret the day’s experiences. As we lumbered along in the tow truck, leaving the scene behind, we had a new appreciation of the beauty of Scotland.