Glencoe is a deep, U-shaped pass through the Scottish Highlands, walled by some of the steepest mountains in Britain. The sharp pyramid of Buachaille Etive Mòr stands at the eastern mouth of the glen. Further in, the great buttresses known as the Three Sisters rise on the flanks of Bidean nam Bian, at 1,150 metres the highest mountain in Argyll. Ice-age glaciers cut this trench out of the wreck of a supervolcano that erupted here about 420 million years ago. The glen carries a dark history too. On a February night in 1692, soldiers who had been quartered here as guests for twelve days turned on their MacDonald hosts and killed thirty-eight of them, and dozens more died of cold after fleeing into the snow. Scotland still remembers it as a murder under trust.
What you notice first, though, is the weather. Few corners of Britain are wetter or more changeable. A slope goes black under a squall, then sunlight breaks through and the heather turns gold; mist rises and falls, and whole mountains disappear and come back within the hour. The A82 runs along the floor of the pass, and every bend opens a new waterfall or a view of Loch Achtriochtan. That constantly changing light is why film-makers keep coming here, from Monty Python to Skyfall. To see the glen properly you have to leave the car. A steep scramble beside the Three Sisters climbs into Coire Gabhail, a hanging valley hidden from the road, where the MacDonalds once drove stolen cattle out of sight. Red deer graze the lower slopes, spring fills the corries with green, and by October the bracken has turned bronze. All that rain is why the glen looks the way it does: it keeps the waterfalls running and the slopes deep green.