DO you suffer from bingo wings, crepey flesh and poor muscle tone in your arms?

There’s no need to spend hours pumping iron in some expensive gym under the gimlet eye of some martinet who was thrown out of the Gestapo for cruelty.

All that is required is to take the car on a leisurely drive from Lairg up to Durness in the far north west of Scotland. You have no choice in the matter of the drive being leisurely - for while the journey is entirely on A roads, the road is a single track thoroughfare, with passing places, throughout its length of something like 150 miles.

And that means that the entire journey is spent dawdling along at little more than walking pace, zig-zagging in and out of passing places to allow traffic coming towards you to proceed in an orderly manner.

And every time you let someone through, they wave in a most grateful manner, and you wave back in graceful acknowledgement with a serene nod.

By the end of the day, your arms ache intolerably and feel as though they have been involved in a never-ending arm-waving accompanying Sweet Caroline. It’s a tremendous workout, and the soaring peaks, tumbling waterfalls and glittering lochs and lochans are infinitely preferable to the steamy walls of a gym.

Holiday rivers are not usually known for their courtesy, but good manners are compulsory on these twisting roads, which often have grass growing up the middle, and are populated by suicidal sheep and the occasional red deer.

Waves can be anything from a regal circle as practised by the Queen, to a military salute or the merest twitch of the driver’s little finger on what can be something of a white knuckle ride.

It can be something akin to the Great Britain team pursuit tactics, as three or four cars often travel together, bonnet to bumper, weaving in and out of passing places in perfect union, all members of the quartet waving to every driver coming in the opposite direction.

You sometimes see a tourist bus or a wagon coming thundering towards you on a road which would barely accommodate a lone cyclist, but co-operation is the name of the game, and everybody squeezes through with minimal inconvenience,

People who don’t wave are treated with undisguised sneers of contempt, as are those dunderheads to whom passing places are an alien concept, to be treated as handy little lay-bays in which to get out the deck chairs and folding table, before pulling out the flask and starting to open Tupperware containers filled with cucumber sandwiches and boiled eggs oblivious to the chaos they have caused.

The biggest testers of patience are those towing caravans, whose purpose in life seems to be to cause as much disruption as possible. The road is littered with signs urging the amblers to pull into passing places to allow overtaking, and the rule is generally impeccably observed - except for caravanners, who arrogantly ignore the tailback they have caused, and refuse to let anyone past their tin tent.

While getting there can be fraught, the journey to Durness is well worthwhile, as this Northern outpost is littered with pristine beaches of Caribbean splendour.

Once you have sated yourself on sand and surf, at least you don’t have to retrace your steps to get back to base - there’s an alternative route south. Alas it’s also single track and your waving arm will once again be given a thorough workout as you pass through Altnaharra, the little village where Britain’s lowest ever temperature of -27.2C was recorded a decade ago.

And once back on roads without passing places, you would be foolish to return home without a visit to the magnificent Dunrobin Castle on the east coast. The castle itself is worth a look but what makes it special to those not of nervous disposition is the museum tucked away in the ornate gardens.

It is dedicated to the big game hunting exploits of the Dukes and Earls of Sutherland, whose thundering guns would surely seen them locked up forever today. They must have employed an entire army of taxidermists to stuff and mount every creature that fell under the hail of aristocratic bullets, from buffalo, crocodile and elephant to the tiniest birds and antelope smaller than a rabbit.

The heads of hundreds of creatures stare glassily from the walls, and it is certainly the only place I have seen the mounted head and neck of a giraffe on display!