Discover Scotland Issue 45

Page 220

Supernatural - Strange tales from Scotland’s thin places with…Tom Morton

Strange tales from Scotland’s thin places with...Thomas MacCalman Morton

Photo by Bewahrerderwerte CC BY-SA 4.0 A9 approaching Cromarty Bridge

T

Ghost car

he A9 is a road beset with tragedy. Battlefields, murders, the inevitable crashes. Blizzards which claimed the lives of stranded motorists, pedestrians run over... and past Inverness, as you head into the more remote north eastern corner of Scotland, towards Wick and Thurso, the road itself becomes treacherous,

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full of deceptive hairpin bends, climbs and downward spirals. Death and the risk of accident hovers over almost every mile of the route.

The Berriedale Braes in Caithness has been earmarked for improvement for generations. Now it has actually happened, with £9m spent on making

that desperate combination of corkscrewing bends and hair raisingly steep drops safer. The spectacularly scary hairpin has gone. Smooth curves and safe ascents and descents are the order of today. And I will never see the ghost car again. I hope. There are ghost cars in other parts of the country, most notably


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Discover Scotland Issue 45 by Discover Scotland - Issuu