47 Ronin|Harlosh Point — a low headland doing the work of a whole coastline

Harlosh Point is a thin green promontory pushing south into Loch Bracadale, five miles from Dunvegan down a road that ends at a scatter of crofts. There is no attraction here in the usual sense. There is a fence, a track through grazing, sea on three sides, and a view out to Harlosh Island, Tarner and the flat-topped stacks of MacLeod's Maidens beyond.

Skye's headlands were exactly what 47 Ronin needed when the film came back to Scotland in 2012 for reshoots. Editors had assembled the picture and found the long journey at its centre had no country to cross. Harlosh gave them a coast that reads as somewhere far older and far east of here — sea light, cropped turf, no telegraph poles in the frame if you point the camera the right way.

Walk out to the tip on a rising tide. The basalt shelves at the end are slippery where the weed sits, and the wind funnels between the point and the island so that even a calm day has a draught in it. Otters work this shoreline; so do seals, which will follow a walker along the water without much shyness. Come at dusk in June, when the light on Loch Bracadale goes copper and the Cuillin ridge across the water turns to a black cut-out, and you will see why a production with a Hollywood budget drove out here rather than build it.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed: "Promontory west of Harlosh - geograph.org.uk - 1733317.jpg" (Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0).