Free Motorcycle Touring Routes – Scotland on a Motorcycle

If I’d been asked two years ago how many times I expected to be touring Scotland on a motorcycle, I wouldn’t have expected the number to be so high.

For motorcyclists living south of the border, riding amongst the amazing Scottish scenery is on most riders’ bucket lists. Even if you are not in the UK, to be honest, you should add Scotland on a motorcycle to your list of things to achieve.

My first tour of Scotland was a lesson in Avoiding Camper Vans on the North Coast 500. Whereas the NC500 is a delightful tour, there are so many other great roads to ride on a motorcycle that you don’t need to spend it stuck in traffic. You can explore the road less travelled, enjoy less traffic and generally get away from the tourists, even though technically, that is precisely what I was.

Avoiding Camper Vans on the NC500 was so enjoyable that a group of us returned later that year, having tweaked the route a little in places.

Going back for the third time, we opted to ride on only roads we hadn’t explored before, and once again, Touring Scotland on a Motorcycle delivered stunning scenery and excellent roads.

Our list of trips and roads to ride in Scotland seems never to end. We are heading back again, and after a lot of talking about which roads we wanted to ride, we decided on all of them and set ourselves the challenge of combining all of the great Scottish Motorcycling roads into one complete Scottish Motorcycle Tour.

Now … before everyone starts commenting that we missed out their favourite section of road, we wanted to deliver a single motorcycle route around Scotland without having to double back. We got close, but there were two places – Isle of Skye and Mallaig – where the route uses the same road twice, albeit in the opposite direction. We could have solved the double backs with a ferry crossing, but we would have had to leave out another road that was too good to miss.

The next question will be why Applecross is not on the route, and this is because it is Applecross, and nearly all motorcyclists heading for Scotland know of it.

The southerly road to Applecross through Bealach na Ba, which incidentally translates to Pass of the Cattle, is one of the highest roads in Britain, reaching 2,053 ft, and it will invigorate your senses. The northern road is the easier of the two, but it will be a stop-start journey at best and even more frustrating if the sun is shining.

Dividing up the route was another topic we debated. Do we split the route based on our experiences or leave it as a single trip to be divided up as you wish? Eventually, the continuous loop argument won.

As with all of our free motorcycle touring routes, the file is in GPX format and will import to most online route planners. I’m a fan of MyRouteApp for route planning, and despite using a Garmin Zumo XT as a GPS, I do my planning using TomTom maps.

We have stayed in hotels, Premier Inns, and good and not-so-good B&Bs, and there is even the possibility we’ll be camping the next time we Tour Scotland on a Motorcycle.

Of all the places we have stayed, the WhiteHouse B&B in Dingwell (Inverness) is the standout B&B and is well worth including on your list of places to stop.

And, there you have it, 1,500 miles Touring Scotland on a Motorcycle. One continual loop that starts and ends at Scotch Corner on the A1, which ironically is in England.