Great Driving Roads

PLEASE NOTE THIS SECTION IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
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Northumberland and the Scottish Borders

Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway

Great Driving Roads: Introduction
In this day and age it always seems to be a bit unfashionable to admit to liking cars or worse still to like driving. Mentioning your car, or the great drive you had last Sunday, is the quickest way to silence people at a party. Despite this, one look along any British street will tell us different. Secretly we love our cars, in particular the ones of the fast impractical variety. Take Subaru for example, since they bolted a four-wheel drive system to a Tokyo minicab and started winning rallies, the British haven’t been able to get enough of them. Subaru have sold thousands of cars in Britain in the last ten years on the basis of speed alone (except farmers who also know they are reliable). When Renault started to sell their already manic Clio 172 as a Clio Cup for a bit less money, minus its air con and ABS, they can’t have imagined the reception it would get. The British public was mad for it. Who needs to stop on a wet road anyway? Speaking of wet roads, and then of course rain, Britain seems cursed by it, yet the UK’s two-seater convertible roadster market is like no other on earth. The MGF, Toyota MR2, Mazda MX5, BMW Z3 and Mercedes SLK are now common on our roads. Indeed, when someone once said to me, “in London the Porsche Boxster has become the new Mondeo” I could see what he meant. And whilst cars like those listed above show that the British do indeed love their cars, the state of the British sports car industry shows that we love our driving as well. In 1996, when Lotus wheeled out their Elise, we didn’t care that it leaked, was totally impractical, and was, to put it politely, a touch unreliable. What mattered was that it went like stink, handled like a dream, and it made us feel like driving gods every time we got behind the wheel. Like the Peugeot 205gti generation before us, we fished our Elises out of Britain’s hedges, had them patched up, and simply carried on. In many circles, however, the Elise is still counted as being, well, a bit soft, a touch hairdresser. For these people cars have to be more extreme. The Lotus 7 is one such car, and one of the longest selling in UK history. It was first sold in 1957 and the original concept is still selling strong today. Indeed, cars designed purely for the enjoyment of driving are all over the place; the Citroen C2 GT, The Renault Clio V6, The Mazda RX8, The VX220 Turbo, The Mitsubishi EVO, The Ferrari 360CS: proof that the driver’s car is here to stay.

And as well as being a nation that own some of the best handling cars money can buy we also have some of the greatest roads on earth. The first reason is the countryside: we have plenty of hills and mountains in the UK, which means that as well as going from side to side, the roads often go up and down as well. These are the ingredients of the truly great roads, the ones that car magazines always seem to test their cars on, the ones that sports cars are designed for. People talk about British roads being one continuous traffic jam, or a series of speed cameras, but great roads do exist here: they live in quiet corners of the country. These are places where it is possible to take a sports car and use it properly, to justify the crazy insurance, the lack of rear seats, the noisy sports exhaust, the hours in the garage, and the reason you bought it. This is a guide to those places, a guide of what to see and where to visit, but most importantly a guide of the roads to drive and the routes to take: Enjoy.

Northumberland and the Scottish Borders


Ayrshire and Dumfries and Galloway