Glencoe

Where it sits. Glen Coe cuts west for about twelve and a half kilometres from the edge of Rannoch Moor down to the sea at Loch Leven, and the A82 runs its whole length. The floor of the glen is less than 700 metres wide in places and narrows hard at the Pass of Glen Coe, where the River Coe drops over a series of falls before slackening into little Loch Achtriochtan. The south wall is a run of separate peaks: Buachaille Etive Beag at the eastern end, then the Three Sisters — Beinn Fhada, Gearr Aonach and Aonach Dubh — which are the northern spurs of the Bidean nam Bian massif, at 1,150 metres the highest ground in the old county of Argyll. The north wall is one continuous barrier, the Aonach Eagach, whose crest is the narrowest mainland ridge in Britain. The glen ends at Glencoe village, with Ballachulish and its old slate quarries two kilometres further on.

What the rock is doing. The scenery here is the wreckage of a supervolcano. Around 420 million years ago, in the Silurian, a circular fault let a block of crust sink into its own magma chamber while lava was forced up around the rim. Glen Coe is the place where geologists first described that process, and cauldron subsidence was named from work done on these hillsides by the Geological Survey in the early twentieth century. The consequence for walkers is a visible layer cake: andesites and rhyolites preserved on Bidean nam Bian and Sgorr nam Fiannaidh that would long since have eroded away had they not dropped into the caldera. Ice did the rest. The last glaciers left roughly 10,000 years ago, and the classic U-profile, the truncated spurs and the hanging corries all date from that final scouring.

The massacre. On 13 February 1692 government soldiers who had been quartered with the MacDonalds of Glencoe for nearly a fortnight turned on their hosts. Roughly thirty-eight men were killed outright, and others died of exposure in the hills afterwards; the pretext was that the chief had been late swearing allegiance to William and Mary after the Jacobite rising of 1689. The killing broke the Highland convention of hospitality, and that is why it is remembered when larger clan battles are not. A Celtic cross was raised at Carnoch in 1883 by a MacDonald descendant, and there is a wreath-laying there every anniversary. Most of the glen has belonged to the National Trust for Scotland since 1935, bought with money that came, quietly, from the mountaineer Percy Unna, who attached conditions about leaving the land wild that still shape how it is managed.

On screen. Glen Coe reads as shorthand for the Highlands, and productions have used it that way for fifty years. The Pass supplied the Bridge of Death and the Gorge of Eternal Peril in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Sets for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban went up near the foot of Clachaig Gully, and aerial plates of the glen were reused in two later films of that series. The Bond connection is Skyfall (2012): the sequence in which Bond drives M north in the DB5 was shot on the A82 in and around the glen, with Buachaille Etive Mòr and Beinn a'Chrulaiste filling the windscreen. It is worth being clear about what was not filmed here. Skyfall Lodge, the ruined family house that gives the film its title, was a plywood and plaster shell built on Hankley Common in Surrey, and Sam Mendes had originally planned the finale for Duntrune Castle in Argyll before switching the location to Glencoe shortly after shooting began.

What you actually see today. The Trust's visitor centre stands off the A82 west of the Pass and includes a reconstructed turf house of the kind excavated at Achtriochtan. The standard short walk is into Coire Gabhail, the Lost Valley, where the MacDonalds pastured cattle out of sight behind a rockfall — a steep, rooty hour up from the second Three Sisters car park, with a river crossing that can be impassable after rain. Signal Rock and the An Torr woods give an easy low-level loop from the Clachaig Inn. At the eastern end, the Devil's Staircase carries the West Highland Way up to 548 metres from Altnafeadh, and Glencoe Mountain Resort on Meall a' Bhùiridh has been running lifts since 1956, making it the oldest ski area in Scotland.

Getting there and timing. Glasgow is a little over two hours south on the A82; Fort William is 25 kilometres north, and Citylink coaches stop at Glencoe village and the Kings House. Rain is the default — the glen catches well over two metres a year — and midges rule the still evenings from June to August. Winter turns the corries into serious avalanche terrain, and the Scottish Avalanche Information Service publishes a daily forecast for the area. Parking at the Three Sisters and Lost Valley laybys fills by mid-morning in summer.