Woke to the arousing sound of geese flying overhead coupled with an early-morning tennis player arriving at 9am, so quickly dressed and set off back towards our previous pitch on Burbo Bank for a tea-and-porridge breakfast followed by a final pre-departure check before turning our backs on the shoreline; a lone and uncommunicative fishermen and a trio of presumed film students busily making up for a shoot on the sand.

At Thornton we stopped for an Aldi (ha-ha, spellcheck just converted that to “Oldie”!) grocery shop, loading-up with basics and a few treats to fill the store cupboards on arrival home.

An uneventful journey got us home to Lichfield mid-afternoon where we disembarked, leaving the majority of the van-sorting for the following day. Mileages were checked to find we’d covered 1800 miles in the 18 days since we set off on our Scottish Odyssey, each one of which was thoroughly enjoyed, especially as the van had performed faultlessly throughout.

Thank you, Scotland. You’ve been an enormously endearing surprise; hugely generous with your weather and astonishing with the enormous, unspoilt scale and beauty of your scenery, which just kept on giving, mile after glorious mile. We’ve both been taken by surprise that such scenic splendour existed within driving distance – and we’ll look forward to another trip to explore and discover the bits-we-missed another time.