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Glen Etive · The Scottish Highlands
The road to Skyfall is a dead end
In 2012 James Bond parked an Aston Martin on a single-track road in the Highlands and looked at the weather. The house he was driving to was plywood, in Surrey. The road is real, and it stops at a pier.
- Where
- Off the A82, beside Glencoe
- The road
- About 20 km of single track
- Ends at
- A pier on Loch Etive
- On film
- Skyfall, 2012
- Rain
- About 3,300 mm a year
A man, a car and the weather
On February 9, 2012, a film crew closed a stretch of single-track road in Glen Etive, parked a silver Aston Martin DB5 on it and stood Daniel Craig and Judi Dench beside the car. They look down the glen. It is cold and misty. That is the scene.
It is one of the best-known shots in any Bond film, and almost nothing happens in it.
The road leaves the A82 beside the Kingshouse Hotel, under Buachaille Etive Mòr, and the place they stopped is about six kilometres along. The two mountains at the head of the glen are called the herdsmen of Etive, the big one and the little one.
That October, the day before the film opened, a property manager and a ranger from the National Trust for Scotland recreated the pose for the newspapers. They used a Land Rover.
The year after, visits to Glencoe went up by 41.7 percent. Scottish Natural Heritage put some of that down to good weather and some of it down to Bond.
Fleming knew the road
Ian Fleming did not have to imagine this place. His family owned it. His grandfather Robert Fleming, a financier from Dundee, bought the Black Mount estate next door in the 1920s, and the lodge at Dalness, halfway down Glen Etive, was a family house that Ian knew before the war.
For most of the books Bond had no particular origin. Then Sean Connery was cast, Fleming came round to him, and in the early 1960s Bond acquired a Scottish father. Andrew Bond, of Glencoe.
So when the film-makers needed a family seat for Skyfall, they came here. They looked at Dalness Lodge itself and decided against it. The house in the film was built of plywood and plaster on an army training ground in Surrey, and at the end of the shoot they blew it up.
The glen was on screen for a few minutes and has been the family home ever since.
The house in the film was plywood, in Surrey, and they blew it up.
Glen Midden
The trouble with a famous dead end is that everybody has to drive back out.
After the film, the road filled with people who wanted to stand where Daniel Craig stood, and with people who had come to camp beside their cars. Some of them left everything behind. Tents, bottles, barbecues and worse, in the passing places.
Two residents, Mark and Phillipa Shone, started a page called Glen Etive: The Dirty Truth and posted photographs of it. One newspaper renamed the place Glen Midden. There had been no ranger in the glen for about ten years.
Things have been done since. The National Trust for Scotland has enlarged and surfaced the lay-by at the Skyfall spot, so that the queue to be James Bond no longer blocks the road. In 2019, over more than 650 objections, the council approved seven small hydro schemes on the burns that run into the river, and their access tracks are now part of the view.
None of this has spoiled the drive, and the glen asks very little. Use the passing places for passing. Take everything home.
The trouble with a famous dead end is that everybody has to drive back out.
What is actually there
A river, mostly. The Etive comes down the glen over a string of falls and deep green pools, and kayakers travel a long way to go over them on purpose. Right Angle Falls is a six-metre drop.
Red deer stand in the road and regard your car without interest. Please do not feed them.
At the bottom is Loch Etive, which is the sea, thirty kilometres from open water. The name is said to mean the little fierce one, after the goddess of the loch. In the old Irish story, Deirdre of the Sorrows ran away to this glen with her lover and was happy here, which in those stories is always a bad sign.
It rains on more days than it doesn’t, about 3,300 millimetres a year. From late May to September there are midges. There is no shop, no toilet, no fuel and no phone signal.
There is a pier. You look at the loch for a while, and then you drive back.
If you go
- Getting there
- About two hours from Glasgow on the A82. The Glen Etive road turns off beside the Kingshouse Hotel, where Rannoch Moor ends and Glencoe begins.
- Driving it
- About 20 km of single track each way. Allow 40 minutes down and the same back. Pull in to let people past, and never park in a passing place.
- When
- May and October have the colour and fewer midges. Summer weekends are busy. In winter, read the forecast first.
- Sleeping
- The Kingshouse Hotel is at the top of the road and Glencoe village is about 20 minutes away. Scotland’s access code allows camping away from the road if you leave nothing. A tent beside a car beside the road is not what it means.
- Bring
- Everything. Fuel, food, a midge net and a bag for your rubbish.
