Roger Cox: Fair weather tourism will only give you so much pleasure – bring on the rain and suffering

Today and tomorrow, two middle-aged men, an Australian and a Spaniard, will definitely be doing... something, somewhere in Scotland. Scottish”.

I know this because a couple of weeks ago the Australian emailed me asking for advice. He and his Spanish buddy were planning to meet up in Edinburgh to catch the tail end of the Festival, he explained, and then, at the weekend, they wanted to leave the hubbub of the city behind and see “something Scottish”

“It could be anything,” went the email, “a loch, the Grampians, Roman ruins, a vat of whisky. Anyway, you kindly offered advice – got any suggestions?”

Ah yes, suggestions. I did offer suggestions, didn’t I? Well, that was a mistake – a mistake on so many levels. For a start, I don’t really know the Australian very well and I don’t know his friend at all, so I had no idea what they might be into. The list of things they vaguely had in mind – lochs, whisky, Heeland coos – sounded as if they had simply written down all the stuff they could see on the front cover of their Lonely Planet Guide to Scotland. Of course, I should have emailed back and asked for more specific instructions, but I was in a hurry, so I rattled off a quick list of the first few things that popped into my head and hit “send”.

Now, I’m not going to tell you what I put on that list, because I don’t want to kick off a big debate about what kind of activities might be best-suited to middle-aged Australian and Spanish gents with a couple of days to kill and the whole of Scotland to go at. But what I can tell you is that all my suggestions involved spending time outdoors – lots of time outdoors – and it’s this that’s been keeping me awake at night ever since.

Being from Australia and Spain respectively, I imagine these two men will be used to encountering endless hours of uninterrupted sunshine whenever they venture out of their futuristic, solar-powered homes. All my suggestions will work brilliantly if the weather cooperates; however, if it’s raining heavily today and tomorrow, and the Australian and the Spaniard have decided to follow my advice, I’m afraid they will end up having a truly miserable time, no matter which option they pick.

So guys – if you’re reading this in a remote bus shelter somewhere in the Highlands following an aborted attempt to climb a hill during which you were first soaked to the skin and then chilled to the bone: I’m sorry. It rains quite a lot over here – I should probably have made that clearer in my email. But the amount of miserable weather we get makes the good days even more special. What can I say? Maybe try coming for a longer holiday next time and you’ll see what I mean.

The fact is, the longer you spend in a place, the more you get out of it. That’s a very unfashionable way of looking at things, I know – this is supposed to be the era of mass tourism, after all, the age of the fleeting visit – but it’s true, and the point is neatly illustrated by the contrast between two books that have recently passed across my desk.

The first is called Isles at the Edge of the Sea (Sandstone, £8.99). Written by journalist-turned-teacher Jonny Muir, it’s a very readable account of a rain-sodden camping trip the author took around the Hebrides last summer. However, the expression “whistle-stop” hardly does it justice. Muir’s journey takes him from Arran to St Kilda via almost all of the Inner and Outer Hebrides, yet he never seems to spend more than a few days on any one island. Tiree gets 11 pages, Mull gets a paltry eight-and-a-half and, on his way from Barra to Berneray, the author doesn’t appear to spend any time at all on the islands of Eriskay, South Uist, Benbecula, Grimsay and North Uist, passing through the whole lot in a single bus journey and reducing them in his account to “an ever-changing panorama of machair and peat, loch and sea.” Compare this to Chris Townsend’s new book, A Year in the Life of the Cairngorms (Frances Lincoln, £16.99). Townsend has lived in these hills for 20 years, walking up them in summer, skiing over them in winter, and experiencing them in fair weather and foul. His majestic photographs – telling the story of a single year, but doubtless assembled over many – represent the kind of riches that no amount of budget flights to exotic locations could ever buy.