Be not deceived by the beauty in the photograph above, the roads in the north of Scotland (or Ireland for that matter) are astronomically narrow, absurdly tiny.
Some are lined on both sides by stone walls built hundreds of years before the United States was even a country, some are shoulder-less or at least the depth of the potholes render them as useless. Some are less than the width of a single highway lane in America, some even smaller than what we call a bike path, yet remain two lanes by some display of absolute lunacy. Some are filled with sheep, others drop offs that will plummet you to the sea, or down a massive cliff face. Narrow as understatement, narrow as optimistic if you’ve ever driven them, especially once you learn the speed limit is still somehow around 60mph.
Halfway down the 18km single half track road from Dunvegan to Neist Point, the furthest West you can travel on the Isle of Skye, Sarah and I both began to question every tiny decision that day that led us to that precise point. Truthfully, by that point in the trip I think we’d felt overwhelmed and overstimulated more times than we can count. (I actually wrote a whole article about it, click the thing below to read it if you missed it)
There’s a rule to driving over there, on roads like that, and it’s a simple one. Passing places exist every so often, little jut-outs where one car can pull into to allow the other car to sneak by, often by inches, always to the tune of Sarah squeezing her eyes shut in terror until the inevitability of a screeeeech down the rental car door she perceives, finally passes uneventfully. It’s such an unspoken and sophisticated system that there even exists a headlight flash signal the person closest to the passing place uses to alert the other driver that they are free to keep driving, that they’ll stay until they go past. A courtesy. A gesture.
16 Years Of Travel Taught Me This | 3.8.26
Scotland is solace, and always has been. At least for us, at least this time around.
Something happened to that gesture over the years, something shifted. We started noticing it after on our first trip back after the long hiatus of Covid. We kept looking for the courtesy, for the little bits of unannounced kindness, kept offering them up even though they weren’t being offered. They didn’t come, they just stopped arriving. Gone were the gestures, and in their place a strange sense of entitlement from so many our wandering feet crossed paths with.
The roads may have stayed the same, hell they actually got a lot worse in the years between our very first visit in 2018 to our most recent in September of 2025. The potholes deeper, the little repair jobs already showing their decay, and the sheer volume of cars on them multiplied exponentially. It wasn’t this though that alarmed us, it was what wasn’t there. It was the lack.
More times than we could have counted on those half-track stunning roads in the middle of nowhere, we encountered a complete lack of the gesture that once warmed the places we traveled to. The courtesies that were commonplace, that made you almost feel like a local when you flashed those headlights at the right person with license plates that showed they actually lived there and they gave you the tiny wave and nod of appreciation as they tootled past you, that you did it properly right, those had become rare, those had become almost extinct.
Something was spreading, we decided, some isolating sense that what others were doing, where they were going, what they were wanting or needing, mattered more than anyone else. Even more nefariously, it was ambivalence to the tune of them not even bothering to notice they were doing it, that they weren’t maliciously trying to be road hogs that barreled their way straight at you with no passing place for you to try to huddle into, but something worse. That you weren’t even a whisper of a thought in their minds, that you were less than an obstacle, you were nothing at all.
Same roads, only narrower now.
We brought it home with us, this noticing, and it’s only grown wider since. It covers so many things I don’t know if we ever paid attention to, not really. People on the trails behind our home, mountain bikers who fly past us going 40mph on a tiny little mountain trail that force us to jump off into the trees to avoid getting run over, people in airports walking quickly whilst staring at their phones and slamming their shoulder into yours. I’m sure it’s been here all along, but maybe Scotland just helped open our eyes a bit wider to it. Maybe we just forgot.
What happens when no one flashes their headlights anymore? Not on the miniscule roads of Skye, not in the winding stone-walled lanes of Ireland, not anywhere? What happens when everyone collectively and quietly just decides, even without malice, that the other cars just aren’t worth the bother?
What becomes of us when we lose sight of what those tiny roads were built for in the first place? That they were originally built with a completely different understanding of space, that it belongs to everyone, and so sometimes it has to belong to someone else first. Before you. We’re forgetting that, not just on the bike path sized roads of the Isle of Skye, but in grocery store aisles and on mountain trails, in airports or lines for tickets or entry to a concert. Everywhere. Every lane we seem to occupy.
The great and awful narrowing when no one allows others to move first, when no one concedes. All that is lost when we stop yielding, on roads, in friendships, in life.
What becomes of a world that loses its courtesy? To a civilization that forgets the gesture?
Halfway back from Neist Point, an hour or two after Sarah and I had been so lucky to see two of the rarest and most sought-after orcas in the entire Atlantic Ocean make a surprise appearance and play on the coastline for almost a half an hour, on that same stretch of insanely tiny and nearly crumbled road, we came upon another car heading to where we’d just left. We saw them coming, imagined the excitement they were surely feeling driving to where we’d just spent a few hours exploring, and we understood.
Even though it wasn’t our passing place, even though it wasn’t our turn to pull over and signal them, we stopped well before we needed to, scooted our car as far over into the little cutout part of broken road, and waited for them to crest the little hill.
Then, in the middle of absolutely nowhere, we flashed our headlights.
I love you all.
Be good.
We forget others,
put ourselves before the rest.
Every road narrows.
