MOTORHOME AND CARAVAN DRIVERS

The difficulty with a motorhome or a towed caravan is not the driving. Most people adapt to the length, the width and the slower responses within a few miles. The difficulty is that the navigation device almost certainly does not know about any of it. Unless it has been told otherwise, it is planning for a car, and it will send a car-shaped route to a vehicle that is nothing of the kind.

That is how holidays end up with a caravan reversed half a mile back down a single-track lane, or a motorhome stopped at a bridge with a queue building behind it. The route was not wrong for a car. It was simply never a route for this vehicle, and nothing in the journey asked whether it was.

Many navigation systems and applications allow a vehicle profile to be entered. If yours does, set it, and then check the setting has actually stuck — profiles have a habit of resetting after an update or when a different device takes over the screen. A system that knows the shape of your vehicle can steer you away from a good deal of trouble.

But treat that as help rather than a guarantee. Mapping data on narrow lanes, low bridges and restricted access is incomplete in places, and it dates. The signs on the road are the authority, and they always outrank the screen. This site does not offer vehicle-specific legal routing, and neither the book nor these articles are a substitute for a specialist system built for larger vehicles, or for the official signage you meet along the way.

The check that saves the most trouble takes a few minutes on a map before you leave. Follow the route through and look for the places where it leaves the main roads: the shortcut across country, the last few miles into a village, the approach to the site itself. Those are where a car route and a suitable route part company.

Look at the destination properly, too. Where is the entrance, how tight is the turn into it, and is there anywhere to wait if the gate is shut when you arrive? Think about the journey in between — where you can stop, where you can turn round if you have to, and where you would rather not attempt either.

Then keep the judgement for yourself. If a lane ahead looks wrong for the vehicle, it is wrong for the vehicle, whatever the device says. Stopping safely to reconsider is always available, and it is always cheaper than the alternative.