Is this the scariest road in the UK? Terrifying video of cliffside drive leaves everyone saying the same thing
HOLIDAYMAKERS filmed themselves driving down what could be the UK’s scariest road – and others are saying the same thing.
Wendy Farrar and her husband Stephen, 55, were visiting the small Scottish fishing village of Gardenstown when they realised the narrow road to their holiday cottage was “not for the faint-hearted”.
The 51-year-old had already navigated a steep descent into the fishing port, near Banff in Aberdeenshire, but were met with having to deal with a tight one-track road to get to their destination.
To make things scarier, the road was on a cliff edge, hanging over the sea with crashing waves at its foot.
The terrifying footage shows the couple driving along the tiny road, before revealing the crashing waves had “splashed the side of the car” while they attempted to avoid plunging off the edge.
However, the hair-raising drive only added to the adventure and Wendy said the cottage they rented turned out to be the “best place they’d ever stayed.”
Wendy, from Ossett, West Yorkshire, told the Daily Record: “It’s definitely not for the faint-hearted. It’s the scariest drive we’ve done. It’s a standing joke with us that wherever we stay, it’s always either a tiny single-track road or there’s something about the drive itself.
“It was a really steep driveway down into the fishing port. As you go round, you drive round a tiny little harbour which is beautiful then we saw the road we had to go round. We thought ‘oh my god, that’s quite a drop’. It was amazing. We said it’s probably the best place we’d ever stayed.”
Instead of risking the precarious drive again, they opted to park by the harbour the following day, as Wendy had been forced to walk behind their car to make sure it didn’t go too close to the edge or face further scratches.
Wendy said: “My husband did the driving and he was like ‘I’ll just take it really slowly’. We put the mirrors in on the car just in case. When we got it down to the car park on the end, he said ‘I think tomorrow if we go out we’ll park by the harbour instead’.
“The following day I said I’d walk behind the car to see how close to the edge we were. It was pretty close. The drop was about eight to 10 ft.
“We go up to Scotland all the time and there’s always something that happens. We drove up to Glencoe the year before and there was a storm at the time. They said the gales were about 50mph and really heavy rain. That was scary.
“We’ve driven through really dense fog in the middle of the night driving up to Scotland, but this was probably the scariest drive so far. I think one or two cars have gone over [in the past]. We did come back in the dark a couple of evenings but on those evenings we parked round by the harbour.”
Wendy said the drive was worth the effort though as the views from the property were “absolutely stunning” and they even got to see the Aurora Borealis.
Wendy said: “I’ve got photographs from inside the cottage looking out. It was absolutely stunning. The residents of this village were some of the loveliest people we’ve met.
“We went towards the end of October and have since found out that Ainsley Harriott has stayed there for a programme he was doing. The bizarre thing is that one day we were sat in the living room. I said to my husband I was sure I could hear a truck and the next minute a truck drove past.
“It put its mirrors in and it had a passenger looking out the side. He must do that quite often but we couldn’t believe that. We thought ‘how the heck has he managed that’.”
Wendy and Stephen aren’t the only ones to be wary of the road.
One reviewer on TripAdvisor wrote: “We rented Gannet Cottage, half way along the narrow wall harbour road – 700 yards of serious concentration – 14 feet across, room for one car, harbour cottage walls on one side, a sheer drop to the sea on the other – turning circles at either end. This is the one small road where your lane discipline will be precise every time.”
