Text 1: North on a battery, by Duncan Carmichael

An original contemporary blog.

I had owned my electric car for a month when my mother asked if I could drive her from Bristol to my aunt’s in Inverness. More than five hundred miles, I thought. How hard can it be?

The car’s range is about two hundred and sixty miles in summer. It was January, and cold weather cuts that by around a fifth, so I planned three charging stops. The first, at a motorway services near Birmingham, went perfectly: forty minutes, a coffee and a full battery.

The second did not. Of the six chargers at the services near Carlisle, two were broken and four had queues. We waited fifty minutes to plug in, and then the payment app refused my card. A lorry driver who had been watching me swear at my phone lent me his charging card and refused to take any money.

By the time we crossed into the Highlands it was dark, snowing and minus four, and I watched the range figure drop faster than the miles. We reached the last charger, in Aviemore, with eleven miles to spare. My mother had fallen asleep, which was probably for the best.

The journey took fourteen hours. The train takes nine. Next time, I suspect, we will be on the train.

Text 2: With the drove to England, by Ruairidh Munro

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1846, a young Highland farmer’s son tells his mother about the journey he made on foot with a drove of cattle from the north of Scotland to a cattle fair in Norfolk, a walk of more than seven weeks.

Dear Mother, The fair is done, seven weeks and three days after we crossed the bridge at Muir of Ord, and I have sold my share of the beasts for a better price than Uncle Aonghas hoped, so you need not fret.

I will not pretend it was easy. We walk the cattle no more than twelve miles in a day, for if they are hurried they lose flesh and are worth nothing at the end, and so the whole of Scotland and half of England went by at the pace of a cow. In the hills we slept out beside the drove in our plaids, and on the moor above Crieff the rain came through mine before midnight and did not stop for three days.

In England the trouble is money. Every field must be paid for, a halfpenny a head for a night’s grass, and the turnpike keepers would have charged us for every beast, so that Aonghas took us round the gates by the old green roads, though it cost us a day. Near Penrith a farmer set his dogs on us for straying onto his clover, and two of our bullocks went so lame on the hard roads that they had to be shod by a smith, which you will not believe, but it is true.

The worst was the river. At one ford in Yorkshire the water was up with the rain, and a young black stirk was swept down and drowned before Seumas could reach him with the crook. Aonghas said nothing, but he did not eat that night.

My boots are through at both soles, and I walked the last ten miles with rags about my feet. Kiss the girls for me. Your loving son, Ruairidh.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what problems the travellers faced on their long journeys.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.