Activities
Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is free to enter, with 22 galleries of art, history and nature to explore.
Riverside Museum is Glasgow's award-winning transport museum with collections of historic vehicles and state-of-the-art interactive displays.
Glasgow Science Centre is a visitor attraction located in the Clyde Waterfront Regeneration area on the south bank of the River Clyde in Glasgow, Scotland. There are interactive exhibits, workshops, shows, activities, a planetarium, and an IMAX cinema.
Deep-Sea World is Scotland’s national aquarium located in the village of North Queensferry, in Fife, Scotland. You can visit it to discover an exciting range of sea life. It is an hour drive away from Glasgow or 1 hour 50 minutes by train
Stirling and Edinburgh Castles are short train rides away or around 1-hour drive from Glasgow
St Andrews Golf Club, one of the oldest golf clubs in the world, beyond Edinburgh on the East Coast. It’s a beautiful wee city too, home to the oldest university in Scotland, founded in 1411 (just beating Glasgow, which was founded in 1451)
The railways – up both the West and East sides of the country – will take you to some spectacular walking routes, if you are a serious walker
The Road to the Isles has been rated as one of the top 3 drives in the world (ok, by a UK magazine!) – starts on the Great Western Road, just by our hotels, runs past Loch Lomond, up across Rannoch Moor and down Glencoe to Fort William, then north, nearing the southern tip of Loch Ness, before veering to the West to run down Glen Shiel with the Five Sisters of Kintail looking on – down to Loch Alsh, Eilean Donan Castle (used in so many movies) and then across to the Isle of Skye. It’s a spectacular driving road, for you petrol heads. Around 4-5 hours to get to Skye.
Alternatively, head north through the Cairngorms and Inverness, on to Ullapool and to Sutherland and the top of Scotland – Sutherland so-called because to the Norse invaders it was to their south, of course. Around 20 miles from the top, a four-mile walk takes you to Sandwood Bay – an idyllic and deserted golden beach.
Ardnamurchan is another other-worldly spot – the most westerly part of the mainland. Ancient oak forests, fabulous views, clear blue water in the lochs, very remote.
Driving from Glasgow to the top of Scotland takes around 6 hours – so in a whistlestop tour of 3-4 days, you’ll see a lot of great countrysides – and if you can extend that to a week, you’ll be able to pack in a load of activities too.
Island-hopping tour could be done by foot or by car – e.g. train from Glasgow to Oban on the west coast, then ferries and buses to the islands of Mull, Skye, Harris, Lewis, the Uists and so on. These are remote, other-worldly places. On Lewis and Harris, you will find neolithic standing stones that really do inspire awe – Callanish is the prime example. Or you could take a 40-mile speedboat ride out to St Kilda, a now uninhabited archipelago of towering cliffs and remote sea stacks, but which used to be home to a community of around 250 who lived on seabirds and fish alone. The old Main Street of traditional black houses, mostly now ruined, a few renovated, gives a sense of a remarkable lost way of life. If you go there, you’ll never stop talking about it, and always want to go back.
Questions? Please contact Quintin Cutts (School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Scotland).