Blog, December 2025, Catriona Waddington

SCOTO’s visitor-facing website www.belocal.scot invites us to be “Temporary Locals” in Scotland. So in August/September this year, I thought I’d give it a try - you can follow my documented trip on Facebook under “SCOTO Adventures with a Bus Pass”.

The idea of being a “Temporary Local” is about embracing the local community spirit and visiting in a way that brings something positive to the community, as well as to yourself.

How to be a temporary local?
There are no hard and fast rules about how to be a Temporary Local, but I set myself some loose guidelines:

- Travel by public transport where possible and walk a lot. The transport was nearly always buses in my case, as I have a Scotland-wide free bus pass.
- Make an effort to strike up conversations.
- Ask for suggestions about what to do, accept invitations (even if it’s not really “your thing”) and look for events on noticeboards and local online forums.
- Spend money, where possible, in local social enterprises and small businesses.
- Don’t stay in remotely-managed self-catering units.

These were only my guidelines, and I certainly didn’t always follow them, but they were an attempt to capture the concept of “Temporary Localness”. I really wasn’t sure what to expect – some of this way of travelling was not really in my comfort zone – shared accommodation, starting conversations with strangers, travelling alone and going to events or classes simply for the pleasure of joining in.

Connections and Conversations

I had a brilliant month! First and foremost, the trip was about interesting conversations – in hostels, cafes, heritage centres, Visitor Information Centres, buses and many other locations. People love to talk about their home area and what they do. Thanks to the Dutch woman wild-camping on the Southern Upland Way; my Buddhist Monastery room-mate doing a week’s tai chi course to stretch both her body and mind; the Galloway campaigner for better buses who wouldn’t put his petition online because “anyone might sign it”; the Latvian Munro-bagger; the artist with a geodome for accommodation and a hot-tub in his garden; and the Thurso resident who sat next to me on the bus and explained how the new Ember electric bus schedules were making her travels to health care appointments much easier. And fond memories of the group of Edinburgh friends at Portsoy Hostel who left me their giant jar of luxury olives and the dear woman who used her bus pass for company and didn’t deserve to be lonely.

I could have kept going for a lot longer than a month, but I had to head home. Scotland has so many beautiful places and interesting things to do. Many towns have a heritage trail and there is information about numerous walks; small heritage centres can be a delight. We all know about the tourist big-hitters – Edinburgh and Stirling castles, Loch Ness, the Glenfinnan Viaduct – but there are so many places to visit that don’t get as much publicity. Whithorn comes to mind – the Priory and the replica Iron Age Roundhouse are world-class attractions, but it was quiet in late August, with accommodation providers, cafes and attractions wanting more visitors.

I did so many varied activities, all at the suggestion of local people – a paso doble class in Peebles; a talk about the St Monan’s Camera Museum; a local slide show in Girvan where the audience gasped in delight at every local slide from the 1950s; communal litter-picking; pickleball in Colmonell; and my first every ride on an electric bike in Nairn.

Toilet Talk

If you’re on the road, and not all buses have toilets, loos become very important! The many years of Austerity Britain are reflected in our so-called “public conveniences” – too few of them, and often ghastly. Community-run toilets are a wonderful, generous phenomenon, and I certainly didn’t begrudge paying to use clean, convenient loos often decorated with flowers and posters. But we need to keep exploring innovative, fair ways of ensuring that toilets are appropriately located, clean and welcoming.

Sleep, Eat & Soup

Much of what we spend on holiday is on accommodation and food. It was interesting to find out about social-oriented hostels and cafes, and it felt good to know that the money I spent benefited the local area, rather than a far-flung corporation. I’m not trying to be too virtuous here - not all my spending worked in this way, but it’s fun to try. Many places in Scotland don’t have accommodation run by social enterprises. Despite my trepidation, my stays in hostels were all enjoyable, even in the mixed sex dorms that I had been unsure about. It was quite hard to eat healthily at community cafes, which tended to focus on cakes and toasties. But I learnt that soup is the varied, nutritious friend of the Temporary Local!

The Volunteer Army
As well as conversations, the highlight of the month was meeting so many volunteers – an army of kind, interesting, hard-working, skilled individuals. Some pretty complex outfits, such as the Linlithgow Union Canal Society, are entirely volunteer run. Volunteers run Visitor Information Centres in several locations for the entire summer season, helping numerous visitors to get more out of their stay.

One incident stays in my mind as encapsulating my month as a Temporary Local. As I walked into the Buckie and District Fishing Heritage Centre I was greeted with “Is there anything particular you would like to talk about today?”Not a request for money, or a rehearsed spiel about the contents of the centre, but an interest in why I was there and how he, a volunteer, could make my visit better. We chatted for a good hour.

Be A Temporary Local

Being a Temporary Local is one way of travelling. It’s different from other forms of tourism, such as visiting major attractions or a beach holiday. Try it sometime. There are many Scottish community tourism ventures that will thank you for it.

Inspiration

Looking at the Be Local and SCOTO websites always makes me want to start travelling, to get out on the road and meet people who care about the place they call home and who contribute to making it an even better place. When you scan through both websites there are so many services and experiences provided by communities  museums without walls, heritage centres, guided walks, walled gardens and growing spaces, bike hires, community pubs and cinemas, music cafes, bunk houses, pods and campsites….and plenty of community toilets to ease the journeys.

National Bus Pass

I am one of 2.3 million Scots who has a national bus pass. Between us we go on 170 million bus-pass rides a year. Those journeys are worth over £400 million and of course a good deal more is spent as the pass-holders visit attractions and explore new places. So the idea came
to combine the delights of community tourism, the beauty of Scotland and free bus travel – “SCOTO Adventures with a Bus pass” was born.

The main reason for doing this is to have a fun and interesting time, but there are also some serious points. We are in a climate emergency and bus travel is greener than using a car. Attracting bus pass users makes good business sense for many Community-led Tourism outfits; and these Community-led Tourism enterprises have important things to say about pride of place and the centrality of communities. Using rural buses helps to support a vital (and sometimes threatened) local service – bus companies are recompensed for transporting bus-pass holders.

We know that not all our communities are well served by public transport and often the final mile is the biggest challenge. Those communities that are well served can reach out to this market with suggested itineraries for different interests – walkers, history buffs and foodies are examples. And I hope to demonstrate that even some places that aren’t particularly well served by public transport can be visited with a bit of time and effort.

Travelling Recommendations

As inspiration, back in February SCOTO’s friends Anne Sofie and Eirik from Bolder did a similar thing. They were coming to our conference in Angus and decided to come a week early with their young son and to try out the idea of being temporary locals. Their only plan was to pick up a hire car from Aberdeen Airport and then follow advice and recommendations from the SCOTO Network. Their journey took them north through Aberdeenshire, then Moray before heading across to Ullapool in Wester Ross and back via Loch Ness and Perthshire before arriving in Montrose. Their over-riding feedback was that they saw so much more by being guided by locals and felt very welcome.

And I’m now going to see how this could pan out with just me, my bus pass, some time and the advice of the SCOTO Network. I’m already learning that relying on buses forces you to slow down – many places don’t have buses on Sundays for example, so you just have to wait until Monday.

My journey begins on 18 August and I am already planning the first stages in the Borders and Dumfries and Galloway, having initially reached out to our SCOTO network on WhatsApp. The warmth of the invitations has been really touching. My challenge for now is to make sure that I travel light – apparently there is such a thing as “odour-free clothes” and years of travel in the tropics mean that I am a dab hand at using a kitenge (like a sarong) as nightwear, a towel, a pillow, a sheet and a shawl. I’m starting in Edinburgh after a few days at the Fringe, and have to end up in Aberdeen to board the ferry to Lerwick in Shetland, where I catch the bus to take me north back home to the island of Unst.

Travel Time

I have the time to do this because two things have happened recently – Wild Skies Shetland, which I chair, now has a Project Development Worker which frees up a lot of time, and my professional life of international development has been so ravaged by Musk, Trumpism and UK budget cuts that I have decided to fully retire from that world.

The Plan

So how will it work? Through social media and WhatsApp I will let folk in the SCOTO network know in advance about my broad whereabouts and direction of travel. And then we’ll take it from there, based on what people suggest. The thing I’m most looking forward to is the conversations – community tourism is rooted in a love of people and place, no matter what the current challenges we face.

Does anyone have any suggestions of where I should go? The first few stages have been mapped out, starting in Edinburgh, to Galashiels, Peebles, Eskdalemuir and Langholm. Then westwards towards and beyond Dumfries, where they are no specific plans as yet.

Suggestions most welcome!

Wild Skies Shetland and SCOTO Director, Catriona Waddington

You can follow Catriona's story on her SCOTO Adventures with a Bus pass Facebook Page.  Or read below for her latest blog on her trip.