IT did not take long for motorists to appreciate what the Highlands had to offer. The western branch of the Scottish Automobile Club began to stage annual reliability trials, at first in the form of a non-stop run from Glasgow to London but then, in 1905, over a more testing route through the Cairngorms. Forty-four cars entered that year to display their endurance over a course of 595 miles in four days. In the first stage, the entrants set off from Blythswood Square in Glasgow at half-minute intervals and had to reach Dundee via Edinburgh, Stirling and Perth as quickly as they could within the allotted limit of 7 hours 20 minutes. Twenty-five cars managed to complete the non-stop drive, first place going to a 16 hp Albion Tonneau in six hours 17 minutes. Day two was more demanding of drivers and engines – over the Spittal of Glenshee and the Devil’s Elbow to Braemar and down Deeside to Aberdeen; on day three, the route ran west to Keith, up into the hills at Tomintoul, and then down Strathspey and over Drumochter to Pitlochry; and the fourth day saw the survivors roar through the Perthshire glens, via Aberfeldy and Crieff, west to Dalmally and south via Loch Lomondside to Glasgow. Two hill climbs were included – at the Devil’s Elbow and near Aberfeldy. Fifteen cars survived all four days. It was great fun, and the thrill can be felt in the words of the correspondent from the People’s Journal who rode as a passenger in one of the cars: “my face and hands still burn with the effects of sun and wind, the dust and grit of the road have not yet been thoroughly eradicated from the roots of my hair, and my whole frame has scarcely recovered its normal equilibrium. But I would willingly go through the same experience at a couple of hours’ notice.”

It would have been fairly reassuring for the early motorist to enter such an event with a team of mechanics and supporters as back-up. The individual driver required more courage but there were many who showed they had it, such was the lure of the open road, albeit a road potholed and dusty, where punctures were a fact of life. One man, remaining anonymous and again writing in the People’s Journal, which had a wide readership throughout the north, described in lyrical terms how he had seen more of his native land than ever before in a fortnight’s tour. With one companion, our hero drove first up the A9, though it was not yet so labelled, to Inverness. “We traversed roads good, bad and indifferent, never turning aside in face of danger,” he boasted, going on to taunt his readers with, “Ah but the scoffer knows not and, not knowing, cannot understand the harmony of a car’s whirl when it is averaging 20 miles an hour, and never giving its lucky driver cause for a moment’s anxiety.” Despite the loose gravel on patches of the road at Drumochter, the writer found “the Highland highway far ahead of many other Inverness-shire roads in construction”. It took courage to drive over the Lecht on a road the writer called a “fiendish sheep track”; the descent to Bridge of Brown was a “nightmare”, with brakes about to burst into flames and water boiling in the radiator. “I daresay it is a fine boast to say that you have taken your car over a road compared to which the Devil’s Elbow is child’s play, but I cannot imagine any normally constituted motorist repeating the experiment.”

THE weather was another thing. The travellers were caught in a torrential downpour between Fort Augustus and Banavie that found its way through their layers of clothing, “blinding the driver, and temporarily converting an ordinarily passable road into a mountain torrent of water, gravel and clay”. Beside Loch Lochy the swollen burns “foamed across the roadway, and in and out of their deep tracks we bounded, anxiously speculating as to when the end would come and we should have to swim clear of the water-logged remains of the car”. The end did not come but the experience had been alarming enough to keep the driver awake for a while that night, vowing to be considerate of his “faithful motor” in future and reaching for metaphor to convey his feelings: “No war lord ever acquired greater affection for his charger in the thick of battle than did the driver of my 7hp Swift through these perils of the North.”

The advent of the motorcar presented opportunities for local firms already in the business of transport. A prime example of this is the company still active today and known throughout the Highlands as Macrae & Dick. The founders, Roderick Macrae in Beauly and William George Dick from Redcastle on the Black Isle, formed a partnership in 1878 to set up a horse and carriage hire company in Inverness. Among their customers were the landowners who resorted to the glens every autumn to hunt, shoot and fish, a lucrative clientele for the Inverness firm that at one time had as many as 300 horses in their stable. It was natural to switch from running carriages to motor vehicles, and later to branch out into road haulage and tourism. This was a pattern of development replicated throughout the north, as smiddies became garages and filling stations, garden sheds grew into bicycle repair shops, and carters turned themselves into bus owners.