# Perthshire, Perth and Kinross

URL: https://performanceandprestige.co.uk/car-hire/perthshire

Performance & Prestige has no depot, branch or rental counter in Perthshire and holds no premises there. Every lease is delivered to an address you choose and collected from it afterwards.

Perthshire is estate country with a motorway-grade spine running through the middle of it, which makes it one of the easier parts of Scotland to serve and one of the more particular to get right. We deliver to Auchterarder and the houses around Gleneagles, to Crieff, Comrie, Dunkeld, Birnam, Blairgowrie, Kinross and Bridge of Earn, and up into Highland Perthshire at Aberfeldy, Killiecrankie and Pitlochry. Most of those addresses are reached by a private drive rather than a kerb, and the drive is the part worth discussing beforehand. Over a three-month term the car spends far more time on a gravel apron than it does on a public road, which is a real consideration here rather than a detail. There are no premises of ours anywhere in Scotland, so nothing about this involves you fetching anything.

Typical delivery: Access decides this more than mileage does. A gated drive needs a code or a name lodged with someone, a cattle grid and a long unlit approach need establishing in advance, and an estate with several entrances needs the right one named. The A9 sets the rest: it is the way in from both directions and it carries weather at Drumochter that the glens below do not see. The window is worked out against those facts, put to you by the person handling the booking, and fixed only once you have agreed it.

The recurring physical problems here are gravel, grids and geometry. Estate gravel is laid deep and loose, and a wide low car pushes it into heaps rather than rolling over it, throwing stones at its own paint on the way. Cattle grids sit at field boundaries and are usually crossed square and slowly. Stone gateposts were set at the width of a farm cart and have not moved since. A long drive with nowhere to turn means reversing the whole way back out to a lane with a tractor behind you. Send the gate arrangement, the surface and a photograph of the entrance and none of that turns into a problem on the day.

Postcode areas covered: PH, KY.

## What is the A9 actually like to drive?

It is transport rather than sport, and it is best approached that way. The Perth to Inverness section is monitored by average-speed cameras along its length, it alternates between dual carriageway and single with overtaking sections, and it carries a heavy volume of lorries and coaches between them. Frustration on that road is where most trouble on a Highland trip starts. The sensible plan is to treat it as the corridor that takes you to the good roads rather than as one of them, and to come off it as early as the route allows.

## Which Perthshire roads are worth the detour?

The A822 and A826 through the Sma' Glen are the closest good half hour to Crieff, narrow in places and empty on a weekday. The A85 west along Loch Earn towards Crianlarich is quick and scenic in equal measure. The A827 along Loch Tay and the single-track climb past Schiehallion are slower and better for it. North, the A93 over the Cairnwell towards Braemar is one of the highest stretches of A road in the country, spectacular in clear weather and entirely at the mercy of it otherwise. All four start within a short run of the main towns.

## How does an estate address change the handover?

It usually improves it, because the whole thing happens inside your own boundary rather than at a kerb with the village watching. What it adds is preparation. We want the name the gate expects, which entrance to use, whether there is a grid on the way in, and what the surface does after rain. Several of these drives run a long way from the road with no lighting and no passing point, so timing in winter matters more than it does elsewhere. Where the apron at the gate is steep enough to ground a low nose, we set the car down on the road and walk it in.

## Do golf weeks and the shooting season change the plan?

They change the timing rather than the answer. A championship week around Gleneagles fills the hotels, the A9 junctions and the local roads together, and the approach stays slow for most of the day rather than for an hour. From the middle of August the estates are busy, which puts slow-moving vehicles and a good deal of mud on narrow roads, and some tracks are in use for the day. Weddings at the estate venues are date-fixed by definition. Any of those means settling the arrangement early, because the constraint is which car is free rather than whether we can reach you.

## Is Perthshire a practical base for the rest of Scotland?

It is arguably the best one in the country. Edinburgh and Glasgow are both an easy run south, the Cairngorms and Deeside sit to the north, Fife and the east coast to the south-east, and the Angus glens and Loch Lomond are a morning away in opposite directions. That matters on a longer agreement, because the same car does the school run on a Tuesday and Glen Coe on a Saturday without either feeling like a stretch. Delivery here and collection somewhere else entirely is one arrangement, quoted against the two addresses you actually give us.

## What does winter here actually involve?

Snow gates on the high roads, ski traffic on the A93, and ice that sits in the shade of a glen until mid-afternoon. Estate drives are the part people forget: an unsalted gravel drive with a slope on it is more likely to catch you out than any public road. Performance tyres are near useless below about seven degrees, and a car left outside for a winter term takes road salt every time it goes out. If there is a garage or a covered bay at the address, say so when we agree the dates, because it changes what we would put on your drive.

*Pre-launch note: the driver criteria, deposits, excesses and mileage allowances quoted here are read from Performance & Prestige's own catalogue data, which is still being confirmed with the owner and the insurer. Read them as the shape of the figures rather than as a quotation. What binds is your written quote and your agreement.*