Scotland's North Coast 500 has become one of the country's tourism success stories, generating an estimated 11.4 billion pounds for the Scottish economy. Yet as camper vans head north each summer, the popular route is also bringing a growing sense of dread to some of the communities along it. Residents say the facilities have fallen far behind the steady rise in visitors.
For campaigners, the problem has become impossible to ignore. One over-tourism campaigner described a relentless flow of visitors pressing on small communities and their beauty spots. The pressure, he said, is felt most acutely in the places least equipped to handle it.
The scale of the issue is striking in some spots. By one account, a single beach on the route was drawing up to 5,000 people a month camping there, served by just one small car park and no toilets. The surrounding area, locals said, had effectively been turned into an open sewer.
Further south in Tyndrum, the gateway to Glencoe in the Highlands, a cafe owner named Sarah Heward has taken matters into her own hands. She organises litter picks to clean up after irresponsible motorists, and argues that if the money generated by tourism were spent by the communities and stakeholders themselves, the conversation would look very different.
For her, the answer lies in ambition rather than small fixes. She called for bold thinking instead of tinkering around the edges, suggesting that a new parliament offers a chance to reshape how the route is managed in a more radical way.
The politics of the route are shifting too. Around 90 percent of the North Coast 500 runs through Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, Scotland's largest constituency, where the Liberal Democrats recently unseated the SNP. The newly elected David Green has called on the Scottish government to formally recognise the route as a national priority.
Green struck a careful balance, insisting that the Highlands remains a welcoming place and that the North Coast 500 has been a success for the whole of Scotland. Even so, he said central government needs to treat it as a priority and back a stronger public awareness campaign about how visitors should behave. Locals, for their part, would rather see the pain points addressed now, before the situation begins to echo the anti-tourism protests seen elsewhere in Europe.