Leading article: Northern exposure

It is with mixed feelings that we report a multi-million pound "master plan" to bring tourist-friendliness to John O'Groats. The notoriously lacklustre village, with its boarded up hotel and a sign that gets packed away at closing time to prevent vandalism, is in line for a revamp that could include new hotels, shops and restaurants.

Consultants have been enlisted to advise how the end of the road north can become a destination for the 145,000 visitors each year whose average stay currently lasts barely 10 minutes.

Yet the end of the road is the end of the road. Extremities of land ought to be desolate; their very attraction resides in the lack of anywhere else to go. Nor is it as though Land's End offers much by way of competition. Get the litter collected, by all means; smarten up the ice-cream vans, and vandal-proof the sign. What you want from John O'Groats is what anyone wants from the road less travelled: to be alone with the sea and the sky.