My winter campervan adventure in the Cairngorms, Scotland | Highlands holidays

The road north takes us through a landscape muted by frost, the hills hazy beneath the milky winter sun. My friend Anna and I are heading for the Cairngorms in a red campervan called Rowan, which we picked up from Big Sky Campers, just across the Forth from Edinburgh. It’s an appropriate name, for we see the red berries of rowan trees everywhere we go, shining so brightly it’s as though someone’s strung tiny clusters of baubles on the silver-barked branches.

At 1,748 square miles, the Cairngorms is the UK’s largest national park, stretching from Perthshire in the south to Moray in the north; mountains rear up just after we pass the riverside village of Dunkeld, armed with pastries from Aran Bakery. When I’ve been up here before, I’ve only skirted the edge of the park, sticking close to the hiking-shop-crammed town of Aviemore and seeing the hills – cloaked in snow at Easter and resplendent in purple heather in summer – from afar.

Determined to get right into the mountains, winter feels like the perfect time for a road trip – with few other tourists and the landscape arguably at its most dramatic. Our journey will take us north along the A9 before heading south from Grantown-on-Spey on what Visit Cairngorms calls the Snow Roads. A 90-mile route that includes the highest public roads in Britain, the Snow Roads wind south through mountain passes to Blairgowrie, just outside the national park. Our plan is to drive its entirety over a couple of days, then loop back into the park near the village of Blair Atholl.

With the short days, it feels like we’re chasing a sun that only just makes it above the hills. The light is already fading when we arrive at RSPB Insh Marshes after a two-hour drive, silhouetting the leafless trees against the cotton-wool sky. The path – we have only enough daylight left for the one-mile track – winds through purple-tinged birch, frost crunching underfoot. Mountains, dusted with snow like icing-sugared cakes, loom in the distance, and honking gaggles of greylag geese stripe the sky in Vs.

Our campsite for the night, Dalraddy Holiday Park, was set up on Alvie Estate in the late 1960s by the current laird’s father to cater for skiers. Today, it’s a sprawling but quiet site, handily open all year, with expansive mountain views and more secluded spots hidden among the trees. Rowan has two beds – one in the roof tent and the other on the…