And how dense England is - I'm from Leicester and one hours drive (give or take) I can reach Nottingham, Derby, Coventry, Birmingham, Sheffield, Northampton, Lincoln. Two and a half hours drive and it's London, Manchester, Liverpool, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford....

Plenty of decent sized towns in that 1hr radius too. A town like Peterborough is big enough to be a US state capital.

And if you’re a tourist, add even more time because you’ll stop every 20 miles for a stunning view, castle, or picturesque village. ;)

Driving time in Scotland is largely due to road size/design, not absolute distance. Once you get north of the Glasgow/Sterling/Edinburgh zone, you have a few “major” dual carriage ways and a lot of smaller roads. And the Highlands and Hebrides have single track, so if you’re going to a small coastal village or similar, you might be stopping every few miles to let somebody by in the other direction.

And if you're not a tourist, you'll be somewhere in the mile-long queue of cars stuck behind them, pottering along at 25mph gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles like they've just lapped the Nurburgring in a Veyron and panic-braking every time they see a sheep within 200m of the road.

Or worse, tourist in a caravan. Most terrifying part about driving in Skye is oncoming caravans with no sense of their own width.