G2 uses a local mountain-bike company (info@bikehirescotland.co.uk) to deliver bikes to your accommodation, with repair kit, for £15 a day. Other new operators include Wild Adventures (01479 851374, www.wild-adventures.co.uk), based in Aviemore, offering camping, walking and cycling holidays across Scotland.

Details: Speyside Wildlife (01479 812498, www.speysidewildlife.co.uk) operates themed holidays, such as a Speyside Autumn eight-day holiday from £595pp.

Where to stay: Aviemore Highland Resort (0870 1244124, www.aviemorehighlandresort.com) is operated by Macdonald Hotels, which opened two hotels and a leisure centre this summer. This month, the first batch of three-bedroom lodges built in pine forest will open and, next summer, a third hotel and championship golf course.

Each room has an entertainment centre offering films and CDs to download (or play your own), and a laptop point with hyperspeed connection.

Whale-watching

ON Mull, whale-watching is a scientific business. Sea Life Surveys has been collating information on whales, porpoises and dolphins for 15 years and takes visitors out on its boats. The trips run into October and help to pay for ongoing research.

“This morning the engines weren’t even warm when we saw our first whale,” Jim, a zoology graduate working his first season, enthused on my visit a fortnight ago. The wind was blowing force 4, and the 11 passengers, me included, were kitted out in bright orange flotation suits. Jim explained that we might see harbour porpoises, minke whales and three types of dolphin.

He broke off as a flock of gannets hit the water off the bow. The birds hunt mackerel, which feed off smaller fish, as do minkes. We scanned the water for gannets, ergo whales (“a Snickers bar for the first sighting”); we also watched manx shearwaters and guillemots gliding over the whitecap waters.

Two porpoises popped up 100m (330ft) away, and we had two brief sightings of minkes. Brennan Fairbairns, the skipper, then saw a porpoise “at 3 o’clock” and with everyone looking the right way, a 10m (33ft) minke whale obligingly made a huge “lunge feed”, leaping out of water like a cat pouncing on a moth, to hoover up a tight ball of fish below. The seal colony off Tobermory was an unexpected bonus. Fellow passengers Ali and Julian Foxon and their seven-year-old son Jack had returned to the area from Bath for a second holiday. Jack enthused: “I saw lots of animals — and more seals than I see at Salcombe.”

My trip was set up by McKinlay Kidd, a husband-and-wife team of Robert Kidd, a former travel rep, and his Edinburgh-born wife, Heather, who set up this year to tailor-make trips around Scotland. Their firm can pre-book various activities, such as whale-watching off Mull, a classic-car break with a lochside hotel or a day’s wildlife safari.

Where to stay: McKinlay Kidd (0870 7606027, www.mckinlaykidd.co.uk) offers three nights’ B&B in the Tobermory Hotel, a half-day whale-watching trip with Sea Life Surveys and return ferry travel to Mull from Oban for £225pp.

Other hotel options include the renovated Caledonian Hotel, Oban (0871 2223415, www.freedomglen.co.uk), or, 30 minutes’ drive from Oban, the Pierhouse Hotel in Port Appin (01631 730302, www.pierhousehotel.co.uk), with its fantastic setting on Loch Linnhe and good seafood restaurant.

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