Before Prime Minister David Cameron led his team to Aberdeen on Monday, there had been only two meetings of the cabinet north of the Border.

Gordon Brown took his Labour cabinet to Glasgow in 2009.

But Inverness Town House was the setting of the very first cabinet meeting held outside London in 1921.

David Lloyd George, then Prime Minister, was on holiday at Gairloch when he discovered that Ireland was turning its back on king and empire.

He called the cabinet at Inverness, as other ministers were in the Highlands and King George V was at Moy Hall, home of the Mackintosh clan chief some 12 miles south of Inverness.

"The Inverness Formula" agreed at this historic meeting in the Highland capital on September 7 paved the way for the treaty founding the Irish Free State.

What is less well known is that, early that morning, Lloyd George had gone down to Moy for a breakfast meeting to brief the king before the cabinet gathered.

On his way back, he was held up because a steam road roller had broken down on the road.

Was this the earliest appearance of the Traffic Delays on A9 headline with which we have become so familiar?

After all, the old A9 used to go round by Moy.

Although it is now the B9154, this was the same road on which Lloyd George was delayed.

So, 93 years later and with the cabinet back in the north of Scotland, the A9 continues to cause problems to ministers on both sides of the Border.

The latest is about average speed cameras that the Scottish Government plans to introduce in an attempt to reduce the number of accidents on this main road artery, pending its upgrade to dual carriageway status. The work is due to be completed by a 2025 target date .

However, there is concern the cameras will make the journeys longer.

Indeed, the Federation of Small Businesses and the Scottish Council for Development and Industry have warned that the cameras will "reinforce the image of the road as slow and dangerous" and put people off travelling north.

Why this should be so legally is not immediately clear.

The plan is to link the cameras with a speed limit rise for HGVs from 40 to 50mph on the 80 miles of single carriage of the 113 miles between Perth and Inverness. There will be no cameras on the dual carriageways.

The road continues to make headlines almost weekly and a special BBC Scotland one-hour documentary on the A9 airs on Tuesday next week.

There is a limit to the historical connection, however.

The A9 wasn't called the A9 when Lloyd George was stuck behind the steam road roller. Although work on road classification had apparently begun in 1912, it was interrupted by the First World War and the definitive list of roads wasn't published until 1922.

There is also evidence classifying Scottish roads didn't even startuntil a few weeks before the steam road roller developed its mechanical problems.