From Eilean Donan Castle to the passes of Glencoe, the Scottish Highlands have been one of cinema's great open-air studios for nearly a century. And as a guest of The Lovat, you're staying right at the heart of it.
There's a moment, usually somewhere along the shore of Loch Ness or on the approach to Glencoe, when even the most seasoned traveller stops talking. The landscape simply takes over. Directors have been chasing that feeling for decades — the sense that no studio set, no matter how elaborate, could quite replicate what nature has been building here for ten thousand years. The result is a stretch of the Scottish Highlands that has stood in for medieval Scotland, the world of James Bond, the realm of immortals, and the distant planet of a wizard's school.
Here, from the waters of Loch Ness outward, is a guide to the films and shows that have been made in the landscape on your doorstep.
The Loch (ITV, 2017)
Start with home. ITV's six-part crime thriller used Fort Augustus itself — renamed the fictional Lochnafoy — as its central setting, with major scenes filmed in the streets and around the locks and canal bridges that define the heart of the village. The plot follows detective Annie Redford investigating a series of deaths on the shores of Scotland's most famous loch, and the brooding expanse of Loch Ness provides exactly the atmosphere its writers needed.
If you've watched the series and wondered whether Lochnafoy exists, you can walk its streets from our front door. The canal-side buildings, the lock gates, the views across the water — they're all here, largely unchanged.
Braveheart (1995)
Mel Gibson's Oscar-winning epic about William Wallace is, in many ways, the film that introduced a generation of international audiences to the Highland landscape. Glen Nevis, at the foot of Ben Nevis just 32 miles from The Lovat, was where the village of Lanark was constructed — the car park built to service the film set still bears the name Braveheart Car Park today. Glencoe and the surrounding mountains provided the sweeping vistas of Wallace's journey, and the Mamores range appears in one of the film's most memorable scenes as his army crosses the mountains.
The battle scenes were actually filmed on a golf course in Ireland, but the landscape that defines Braveheart in the imagination — those great glacial valleys, those sky-filling ridgelines — is unmistakably here.
Rob Roy (1995)
The same summer that Braveheart was shooting in Glen Nevis, Liam Neeson was down the road filming Rob Roy, the story of Highland folk hero Rob Roy MacGregor. Shot almost entirely on location in Scotland, with Glencoe providing much of its dramatic scenery, the two productions overlapped enough that the locals became quite accustomed to Hollywood stars in their midst. Rob Roy is the quieter, more intimate of the two Scottish epics of that era — and arguably the more accurate — but the landscape it inhabits is the same one that surrounds you.
James Bond: Skyfall (2012)
When the filmmakers decided that the 23rd Bond film needed to send 007 home to Scotland, there was really only one place for the climactic stretch: the Highlands. Daniel Craig and Judi Dench drive the twisting single-track road through Glen Etive — just off the main Glencoe route, about 70 miles south of Fort Augustus — in Bond's classic Aston Martin DB5, stopping to take in a view that has since become one of the most visited spots in the glen.
The Skyfall Lodge itself was a set constructed in Surrey and subsequently burned to the ground for the film's finale, but the landscape it sits within is real — and the Dalness Estate through which Bond and M drive was once owned by the family of Ian Fleming himself, the creator of James Bond. Life and art, neatly intertwined.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
When director Alfonso Cuarón wanted to establish the wilder, more atmospheric tone of the third Harry Potter film, he brought the production to Scotland. Hagrid's Hut was constructed on the slopes above the Clachaig Inn in Glencoe — the mountains visible behind it are among the most dramatic in Britain. The covered bridge, standing stones, and pumpkin patch were all built in the same valley, all removed once filming was complete, and all recognisable to anyone who has stopped at the Three Sisters car park on the A82.
Meanwhile, 45 miles from Fort Augustus, the Glenfinnan Viaduct was already becoming one of the most recognised structures in Scotland thanks to the Hogwarts Express. The Jacobite Steam Train still crosses the viaduct today — if you want to ride the same route as the Express, we can point you in the right direction.
Staying at The Lovat, you're ideally placed to explore the film landscape of the Scottish Highlands. Whether you're chasing Bond through Glen Etive, following the Hogwarts Express to Glenfinnan, or simply standing where Clan MacLeod gathered before the mountains of Glencoe, we'll help point you in the right direction. Just ask one of our team at reception.
