I can tell you from first hand experience, since I’ve set what must be a national record. Apart from the water’s edge itself the most northerly point is the top car park at Dunnet Head in Caithness.
My unlikely record is for the most northerly AA callout, when my car refused to start there. With the mist closing in we began to be a bit concerned, but amazingly the AA arrived in half an hour! Talking about closing in brings me to the desirability of double summer time. We waste an awful lot of light in the early mornings for several months. It’s well known that natural light lifts one’s mood and the extra hour would bring benefits both to safety and power consumption. And, also topically, sport would benefit from the extended evenings. We should do this by not setting clocks back one October and still putting them forward at the end of March. We’d driven across the north coast of Scotland over the Kyle of Tongue starting from Lochinver (nice hotel) in Sutherland and on another day venturing up to Cape Wrath (you have to go by bus over unmade roads across a military range). Great views from the 800-foot cliffs but no toilets. Ladies can usually prevail on the lighthouse but gentlemen must beware sudden changes of wind direction. Getting back to points to the north. I’ll start with one of the most interesting countries, with a unique landscape - the land of fire and ice, Iceland.
Lying just south of the Arctic Circle, Iceland is not all that far north - but it can feel like a different world even before you arrive. If you go by sea you’ll past the new volcanic island of Surtsey.
Surtsey is a protected reserve and is closely studied as nature colonises it from scratch. It's just south of the Westman Islands, themselves just south of Iceland proper. If you arrive by air at Keflavik, the half-hour drive to the capital, Reykjavik, takes you past roadside volcanoes no less.
Reykjavik looks and feels like a frontier town. With no natural stone there’s a lot of imaginative use of concrete and metal in the buildings. The cathedral is an attractive and impressive concrete structure - it is really shows what can be done with imagination. Such buildings don’t all have to look like Birmingham’s Central Library! 
Back at home, Hall Green has the concrete built Church of St Peter, which is certainly striking and has some marvellous stained glass http://www.stpetershallgreen.org.uk/
Just outside Reykjavik’s cathedral is a statue to the discoverer of America who, as we all know, was in all probability, Leif Erikson, who pushed further west from settlements in Greenland (called green by the Viks possibly to entice further settlers but that’s another tale) calling the settlement Vinland. Columbus stumbled across the West Indies centuries later. We usually stay at the conveniently located Hotel Reykjavik which has all the hot water you’ll need (you soon get used to the smell of sulphur, although it would take the edge off a cup of tea). Food can be expensive and a little unusual especially at breakfast. But if you really like bananas you’ll be fine. Later in the day try the salmon - natural and superb.
A good time to visit Iceland is late May when the nights are light and there is still snow on the hills opposite the capital. Reykjavik is surprisingly relaxing, with the geothermally heated baths, the cathedral, the Pearl, the site of the Reagan - Gorbachev summit, the base for the best day tour (the Golden Circle at one point in which you can stand astride the join of tectonic plates with one foot in Europe and one in North America) and on clear days a view of the atmospheric Snaefells ice covered volcano across the bay. 
This, as fans of Jules Verne will know, was the point of descent in Journey to the Centre of the Earth - the first book I read as a child and which I’ve never forgotten - no comments however on either of the Hollywood screen versions.
At the north of the island, that much nearer to the Arctic, is the interesting northern town of Akureyri at the head of a long fjord, with a pleasant micro climate and which is the base for the main northern tour. Continuing literary allusions, as readers who grew up with Herge’s Adventures of Tintin, Akureyri was a port of call and the Golden Oil incident in The Shooting Star in which one of the ships was The Aurora. Incidentally, once Herge had settled on what Tintin was all about (please ignore Tintin in the Congo and the first half of Tintin in America) there is an admirable moral tone to the stories which can be helpful to parents struggling to encourage some older fashioned values such as truthfulness, courage, friendship, duty, loyalty etc. I suggest for starters King Othakkar’s Sceptre, Tintin in Tibet and The Calculus Affair. Incidentally, the English translations are more entertaining than the original French.
My next, brief stopping off point on this lightning composite tour is the Faeroe Islands. If on the basis of our recent experience you think you know what a wet summer is like - forget it. If you really love rain, then the Faeroes are the place for you. That said, they have a great deal of interest and it’s a great approach by ship. The capital, Torshavn, at 62 degrees north, is a friendly little place worth wandering round - and good for taking shelter. When in places such as this, I always mooch round the vicinity getting into side streets looking at people’s houses and gardens etc to pick up a hint of the flavour of what local life is like. While it is true that villages, as in Iceland, can redefine ‘quiet’ you could see some traditional green roofs. The Faeroes have a growing movement for full independence from Denmark - but, of course, a little care is needed in discussion on such subjects.
Steaming across now to Norway, towns like Bergen and Alesund are attractive, historic well worth looking round. And if you’re a fan of the Faroes you’ll like the Bergen weather too. But if you have a sensitive disposition avoid the market in case you come across whalemeat stalls. Alas, the Norwegian position on whaling besmirches an otherwise admirable and strongly environmental nation. If you get to Alesund, you’ll see some Art Nouveau architecture and there’s a park near the rocky hill with what is to me at least a very interesting statue. This is of 
Rollo the Viking (855-931), who brought his people from Norway to the northwest of France and whose descendants would call themselves Dukes of the new Duchy of Normandy. If you look closely at the picture of the statue of Rollo and then at my picture, you may see why! However, the sculptor is likely to have had to rely on his imagination!
The Norwegian fjords are justly popular, almost a travelling cliche. But one thing in favour of cliches is that they’re often true. All I’ll say here is that you may have to be part of a crowd at Geiranger Fjord, but when you get there you see why everyone else is there too. But I want to continue on further north. Warmed by the North Atlantic current (while this stays with us) the climate is still relatively mild as you cross the Arctic Circle (the Norwegians self deprecatingly call this the banana Arctic). If you’re going north by sea, and if like me you’re new best friend on board on rough days is the toilet bowl, you’ll want to take the inside passage between the Lofoten Islands and the mainland. If your captain is sufficiently skilled or reckless you might also get taken into one of the bays in the Lofotens without scraping the sides of the ship on the way up to Tromso.
At almost 70 degrees north, Tromso is rightly described at the Paris of the North with two months of continuous summer daylight and a lively population of 64,000 many of whom boast of enjoying a dip in the sea. Tromso was one of the settings for Clare Francis’ gripping espionage thriller Wolf Winter. On by ship from Tromso one passes Hammerfest which lays claim to being the world’s most northerly town and merited a full chapter in Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson as the place where Bill spent a dark fortnight (more entertaining for the reader than the writer) waiting for a display of the Northern Lights.
Hammerfest’s claim to the most northerly title depends not only on latitude but also on what you mean by a ‘town’ because further north still is Honningsvarg, which certainly looks and feels like a town and is the place from which you get to the North Cape. At the cape you need a bit of luck with the weather (tends to be misty) and we were lucky enough to get a warm day on our visit - so warm that the reindeer sought out patches of snow on which to stand to keep cool. 
Unexpectedly, there are some interesting modern sculptures too on the cape (not dissimilar in feel to the modern fountain in Birmingham’s Centenary Square) and there is a great atmosphere around midnight with people up on the cape and ships below it calling to each other and revelling in the midnight sun.
Progressing further north still, and half way between the cape and Spitsbergen the old Amber Spyglass comes in handy on the approach to Bear Island in the western part of the Barents Sea. Incidentally, if you like this kind of brass refracting telescope you can get one from Covent Garden or Spitalfields antiques market at a very reasonable price. Bear Island has an interesting wartime history on a key convoy route. It’s now a nature reserve with just a meteorolog
ical station. Views from the south are spectacular. A copy of Alistair MacLean’s novel Bear Island evokes something of its important wartime history.
As the latitude approaches the upper 70s, we approach what Norway calls the Svalbard Archipelago, the main island of which is Spitsbergen, as close to the North Pole as to Norway and of course an important setting in Philip Pullman’s fantasy novel Northern Lights (retitled The Golden Compass for the US and filmed under that name).
The main settlement on Spitsbergen, Longyearbyen, has a surprisingly large population of around 1500. Instead of cars at the front of peoples homes there are snowmobiles. Despite warning signs or Mr Pullman’s novel you’re not that likely to encounter a bear, but there is a strong feeling of reaching the edge of things and the temperatures, much moderated by the north Atlantic current are quite mild. What it must be like living there throughout the months of darkness is hard to envisage, but it is intriguing in the summer. The two other usual ports of call are Barentsburg and Ny Alesund.
Barentsburg is one of the oddest places I’ve ever visited. It is a Ukrainian/Russian mining town with a population of around 800. When we were there, there was still a statue of Lenin and Soviet style artwork and concerts (at 78 degrees North!) are given for visitors. When I asked, rather cheekily what life was like there, the answer I got was ‘Better than the Ukraine’! But this of course was before the Orange Revolution (lets hope there’s not another chapter to come written by Mr Putin). While in theory you could go overland from Longyearbyen to Barentsburg you’d definitely need both amber spyglass and rifle (for the bears, not, hopefully, for the Russians). We reach the last port of call at Ny Alesund, which at 78.5 degrees North, is the most northerly settlement in the world other than purely research or military stations although in reality its function is mostly research. You can still see the tower from which Amundsen started his polar airship flight.
Beyond this, cruises used to advertise getting in sight of the polar icecap. I don’t know if they still claim this, but you’re unlikely to see any ice with the rapid retreat of the polar ice due to global warming. Another telling sign of the times is that Spitsbergen is now the base for a doomsday seed bank which will contain examples of as many plants as possible in case of ecological or other disaster. If you do get taken a bit further north, you may get the privilege of seeing a Walrus colony, though whether you’ll be lucky enough to glimpse the Northern Lights for yourself may depend on making a return trip later in the year to Longyearbyen (weekly flights from Tromso) or spending a fortnight back in Hammerfest!
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