Highlands man completes challenge to visit 'everywhere in Scotland'

Chalenge: Bill Taylor wanted to complete the challenge by his 60th birthday.

It began as an eccentric challenge to set foot across the entire map of Scotland after a conversation with a friend and 20 years later Bill Taylor has finally completed the task.

He has travelled from the far north of Shetland, to the Mull of Kintyre in the south, from St Kilda in the west, to the Aberdeenshire coast in the east and everywhere else in between.

It is the unique, if somewhat bizarre challenge, which Bill Taylor from the Black Isle set himself.

Mr Taylor said: “I’d remembered when I was a student we had a big quarter inch map of Scotland on our wall in a flat and it had all these squares on it and these were all 10km squares.

“I started looking at them and I realised that by that stage I’d already been on about 80% of all the squares. There’s a 1080 of them and I thought ‘well one day wouldn’t it be nice to have visited them all’ and I could say ‘I’ve been everywhere in Scotland’.”

This was the inspiration for his self confessed "daft idea" to set foot across all of Scotland.

He set his own rules - the squares had to have at least one person living there and flying over or sailing did not count.

He added: “Some people say no you haven’t because there’s some places you haven’t been but you get people who just climb hills [and] get people who just go to islands, I even know people who just visit trig points which is even more eccentric than me.

“Foula was great, south of Sanday on Orkney [there is] astonishing sand dune scenery there and some bits of far west coast of Lewis, I had to go visit a tiny wee bit of a square that I’d missed which a friend of mine identified.”

He recently completed his last square in Easter Ross after giving himself his 60th birthday as a deadline.

Mr Taylor added: “It is a bit eccentric but I was driven by fact I love Scotland and I just wanted to say I'd been everywhere.

“I suspect I’m the only person ever to have done it or daft enough to have done it. If somebody wants to come along and say they been even more everywhere than me I don’t care I’m quite happy for them to say so.”