TRAVEL - THE ISLE OF SKYE - SKYE'S THE LIMIT

Swap the stress of urban life for the space, freedom and tranquillity of Scotland For the cost of a good night out!The Motor 'N' Rail brochure sounded appealing. And hadn't Katie, little Caris and I done enough to deserve a short break? It took a second to decide: we would go.

'Motor 'N' Rail' was not, as I had expected, a traditional Motorail service where you drive on one station and drive off at another. “That finished years ago,” a bored looking station attendant told me “when they privatised everything. They charged the earth and no-one was using it”. Don't fall into the trap of remembering nationalised rail travel with rose tinted memories; it wasn't like that, truly it wasn't.

I wouldn't try and pretend that the Scotrail service that I used from London to Inverness was perfect (it left an hour late for a start), but I was agreeably surprised, as someone who uses trains as a necessary inconvenience, by how comfortable and convenient it was.



'Motor 'N' Rail', it turned out, was a deal whereby, at the time of writing, you could get a two birth sleeper cabin from as little as £99 return. That gets you to Glasgow or Edinburgh. If, as I did, you want to go to the Highlands (Inverness, Fort William or Aberdeen), you'll pay a little bit more. The 'motor' bit comes when you arrive. Wherever you turn up, Arnold Clerk rentals will give you a 20% discount on car hire. No wonder the Motorail went out of business.



The sleeper service, as I've said, is a surprisingly agreeable one - at least if you use the Highland services; they give you enough travelling time to get a decent night's sleep. In my case, that meant leaving London at 8.30pm and arriving at 8.30am the next morning.



The plan was to head off to the Isle of Skye, but before doing so, we took the opportunity to spend a day in Inverness, cap...