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Up for a drive? Wanna feel the wind in your hair as you pass gorgeous landscapes at 60mph? Sounds like you want a road trip. You could attempt a road trip through an entire country, but that could take a while and you definitely won’t be able to cover it all. Instead, consider taking a car around an island small enough to complete in a week.
Europe is home to some magnificent little isles and now, car rental company Avis has put together a list of the 10 most picturesque of them all. To figure out which European island offers the most scenic road trip, Avis looked into terrain, landmarks, max elevation, the time it takes to circumnavigate, tourist density and online buzz.
There was only one British island on the list and that was the Isle of Skye, which landed in seventh place.
Skye is the largest and northernmost island in the Inner Hebrides – if you were to drive around the whole thing in one go, it would take around six and a half hours. So, if you’re there with a car for the week, that’s more than enough time to cover it all. It’s also very accessible from mainland Britain, with a bridge crossing from Kyle of Lochalsh to Kyleakin that’s completely toll-free.
As it happens, Time Out UK’s editor Joe Mackertich recently went on a road trip across the Highlands and the Isle of Skye himself and wrote all about it. He said of the island: ‘The sheer brutality and sparseness of the landscapes, the lack of human influence, brings to mind not lairds and castles, but barbarous ancient history. The starkness – detectable in every gun-metal grey body of water or vast and looming crag – is overwhelming.’
On top of simply being beautiful to look at, Skye is also a foodie paradise. Joe stopped by roadside diner Café Cùil for brunch, giving a special shoutout to its rarebit with beef brisket and Orkney cheddar sauce and its Scotch pancakes with ‘electrifying Highlands rhubarb’. There’s also the highly acclaimed restaurant-with-rooms, the Three Chimneys – ‘fine dining, but with a friendly and accessible face’ and the legendary Talisker whisky headquarters.
When you need to stretch your legs a little, park up below the Quiraing and take on the 6.8km loop around its rock formations (a loop we recently named one of the best hikes in the UK). There’s also the spectacularly turquoise waters are Coral Beach, the ethereal Fairy Pools and Dunvegan Castle, Scotland’s oldest continuously inhabited castle.
Read more about Avis’ ranking of the best islands in Europe for road trips here.
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