As an example, today after lunch, I drove to Glen Etive which is about 130 miles from my home. Got there about 3:00pm and photographed until it was almost dark at about 5:45pm. Took 120 exposures with the 14-24mm f/2.8 on my Nikon D800E and the 70-200mm f/2.8 on the D800. Apart from general landscape, there was plenty of "special interest" such as icicles, frozen streams, red deer stags and hinds, farm and forestry buildings, muirburn, etc. Not much of a sunset today I'm afraid.
But the point is that the Glen Etive road - from the Glencoe road to the Loch Etive sea loch - is less than 10 miles and I could easily have spent 10 times as long as I did and still not explored it comprehensively.
So I think that what several of us are saying is that on a very short visit to Scotland - especially one with some games of "gowf" arranged - you will either have to take a scattergun approach and just scratch the surface of maybe 30-40 different locations carefully selected to form a logical circuit (and taking account of the golf courses) or, alternatively, concentrate on maybe 4 or 5 locations and do them in a bit more depth.
Either way, a suggested route, taking Stirling as a starting point, would be up the A85 to Fort William, the Road to the Isles to Mallaig, over on the ferry to Skye, back off Skye by the Skye Bridge, back down to the Caledonian Canal and up the Great Glen towards Beauly, across to Cromarty then back to Inverness and along the Moray coast. Then down to Grantown on Spey and down the A9 to Perth. That could be done in a week (although 6 months would be better) and it will give you a range of mountains, glens, rivers, lochs, islands, several castles, seaside, etc. It does miss out the northern third of the country and also the southern and south-western parts. But, hey, you have to leave something for your next trip!
