Hankley Common

Where it sits. Hankley Common is 560 hectares of lowland heath and pine on the greensand between Elstead, Thursley and Tilford in west Surrey, roughly ten kilometres south-west of Guildford and an easy hour from central London. It forms part of the Thursley, Hankley and Frensham Commons Special Area of Conservation and Site of Special Scientific Interest, a patchwork of heather, gorse, birch scrub and bare sand that is far rarer in Europe than the woodland around it. The land belongs to the Ministry of Defence and is worked as a training area, so the same square kilometre may hold nightjars churring at dusk, a section of infantry moving through the gorse, and a film unit's generator trucks. Public access is permitted but conditional: red flags and lamps mark live training, and the byelaws are enforced.

Why film crews keep coming back. Three things make this common one of the most heavily filmed pieces of ground in Britain. It is treeless enough to read as open country and undulating enough to hide a camera position. It is thirty-five minutes from Pinewood, Shepperton and Longcross studios. And because the MoD controls it, a production can close the whole site, build a large structure, blow it up and take it away again — a combination almost impossible to arrange on National Trust or private farmland. The result is a filmography with no aesthetic logic at all: a French battlefield, a Colombian training camp, the American West, the landscape of Hell, and the moors of Macbeth have all been staged on the same heath.

On screen — the Bond years. Hankley has served three separate Bond productions. For The World Is Not Enough (1999) the crew built the Caspian Sea pipeline setting where Bond is attacked by helicopters carrying tree-felling saws. For Die Another Day (2002) the heath doubled for the Korean Demilitarized Zone in the hovercraft chase of the pre-title sequence. Its most consequential appearance is Skyfall (2012): the ancestral Scottish house that gives the film its name — Skyfall Lodge — was not a Scottish house at all but a full-scale shell of plywood and plaster built here in Surrey, along with the chapel that appears in the final scenes with Judi Dench's M. The gateposts of that set were copied from Duntrune Castle in Argyll, and the driving footage that gets Bond and M there was shot on the A82 in Glen Coe, so the film's Scottish finale is an assembly of three places, only one of which is in Scotland. Nothing of the set remains; the ground was reinstated after filming, as the licence required.

On screen — everything else. 1917 built a French battlefield here in spring 2019, with trench systems dug into the sand. Black Widow shot on the common for three months in the summer of 2019, staging a multi-vehicle chase and a helicopter wreck that needed its own planning permission. The King's Man, Justin Kurzel's Macbeth with Michael Fassbender, Ridley Scott's Napoleon in April 2022, the first season of The Sandman, the BBC drama Landscapers and the Wicked films have all used it, and the site's television history reaches back to Doctor Who and the Silurians and Blackadder Back & Forth.

The Atlantic Wall. The common's most striking structure has nothing to do with film. In 1943, in a hollow known as the Lion's Mouth, Canadian engineers built a full-scale replica of a section of the German Atlantic Wall so that assault techniques could be rehearsed before the Normandy landings. It is about 100 metres long, three metres high and three and a half metres thick, cast in reinforced concrete with rebar between 10 and 20 millimetres, and it still carries two breaches blown by demolition devices, including one made by the Churchill-based "Double Onion" charge-layer. Dragon's teeth and lengths of railway track set in concrete lie nearby. Because the concrete is alkaline in a landscape that is otherwise acid heath, the wall has grown its own community of lime-loving lichens, mosses and ferns found nowhere else on the site — an accidental nature reserve inside a demolition range.

What you actually see today, and how to visit. Sandy tracks, big skies, silver birch, heather that turns the whole plateau purple in late August, and adders basking on the paths in spring. Dartford warblers and nightjars breed here, which is why dogs must be on leads and walkers on paths from March to August. Hankley Common Golf Club, laid out with nine holes in 1897 and extended to eighteen in 1922, occupies the northern edge. Park at Elstead or at the Thursley end and walk in; there are no toilets, cafés or waymarked trails of the usual kind, and phone reception is patchy. Fires in July 2022 burned close to 70 hectares, so any open flame is prohibited outright. The common is also the setting of the 1942 "Wigwam Murder", the killing of nineteen-year-old Joan Pearl Wolfe, a case that helped establish forensic pathology in British courts.