Glen Etive

Where it sits. Glen Etive runs south-west from the old Kings House Hotel at the head of Glen Coe for roughly eighteen kilometres to the head of Loch Etive, a sea loch that reaches all the way to Connel and the Firth of Lorn. A single-track road with passing places leaves the A82 just south of the Kings House and follows the River Etive the whole way, ending at a turning circle and slipway at Gualachulain with nothing beyond it but water and hills. The two "Herdsmen of Etive" stand over the head of the glen: Buachaille Etive Mòr on the east side and the smaller Buachaille Etive Beag to the west, separated by the deep trough of Lairig Gartain. Further down, Ben Starav rises 1,078 metres almost straight out of the loch, and the granite of Beinn Trilleachan forms the Etive Slabs, a sweep of low-angle rock that has been a rock climbers' proving ground since the 1950s.

The river. The Etive gathers on the flanks of Rannoch Moor and runs fast over bedrock rather than gravel, which is why it has become one of the best-known whitewater runs in Britain. The upper section is a sequence of grade four drops with names that tell their own story — Allt a' Chaorainn, Right-Angled Falls, Crack of Doom, Triple Falls — most of them clean pool-drop rapids visible from the road, so it is one of the few Scottish rivers where you can watch a serious paddling descent without leaving the tarmac. It needs rain to work, which in this glen is rarely a problem. Red deer graze the roadside grazings and are so used to cars that stopping to photograph them is discouraged, since roadside feeding has made several of them dangerously bold.

On screen. Skyfall is the reason a good part of the traffic on this road exists. The stretch of the film in which Bond takes M north in the 1964 Aston Martin DB5 was assembled from the A82 across Rannoch Moor and from the Glen Etive road itself, and the composition that ended up on the poster and in a thousand imitations — the silver car pulled over on a bend, the glen dropping away behind — was made a short distance down from the A82 junction, looking south towards the Buachailles. Glen Etive also stood in for medieval Scotland in Braveheart and appears in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. What the film does not show is how narrow and hemmed in the road is: on screen it reads as an open highway, while in reality it is a single lane of patched tarmac with blind crests, occasional deer on the carriageway and no verge to speak of.

What the surge did. The visitor numbers that followed Skyfall landed on a glen with no infrastructure at all — no shops, no fuel, no public toilets, one phone signal blackspot after another. Informal camping and fly-tipping around the lower laybys became bad enough that Forestry and Land Scotland and the local community council introduced managed parking, camping restrictions in the worst-hit sections and a small number of formal bays. The etiquette that follows is simple and worth knowing before setting off: park only in marked passing places when they are not needed for passing, take everything away, use the toilets at the Glencoe visitor centre or the Kings House before turning in, and give way downhill on the single track.

What you actually see today. The head of the glen is high, open moorland with the Buachailles dominating; the middle section closes in with birch, alder and bracken along the river; and the last few kilometres open again onto the tidal flats at Gualachulain, where the loch is often glassy at first light and the peaks of the Ben Starav group reflect in it. Walkers use the glen as the back door onto several Munros, including Stob na Bròige at the far end of the Buachaille Etive Mòr ridge and Ben Starav from the bridge at Coileitir. There is a bothy at Cadderlie on the north-east shore of the loch, reached on foot. In Irish legend the glen is where Deirdre and Naoise settled after fleeing Ulster, and the story is still attached to specific spots along the river.

Getting there and timing. The turn-off is about 90 minutes from Fort William and rather over two hours from Glasgow, and there is no bus down the glen; walkers are dropped at the A82 junction by Citylink coaches and walk in. Allow forty minutes each way for the drive itself and expect to reverse. Late spring gives snow on the tops with a full river and manageable insects, autumn brings the rut and gold bracken, and winter can close the road with ice for days at a time.