28 Years Later | Church of St Mary and St Finnan, Glenfinnan — A Preacher's View Down Loch Shiel

The church sits on a shelf of hillside above Glenfinnan with the whole length of Loch Shiel opening below it, water running away south-west between steep flanks until the far end disappears into weather. Built in the 1870s for a Catholic community that had held on through the penal years, it stands alone — no village around it, just the road, the graveyard and the loch.

28 Years Later uses that exterior for the church of the preacher, and the geography does the acting. A building this isolated, facing that much empty water, looks like the last inhabited thing for miles even when it isn't. The interiors for those scenes were shot elsewhere, in a parish church in North Yorkshire.

It is a working church and usually open to visitors. The Glenfinnan Monument and the railway viaduct are ten minutes down the hill, so most people drive past without turning up the track.

Park, walk up, and step round to the loch side of the building before you go in. That view is the shot, unedited.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons (geograph.org.uk, CC BY-SA 2.0).