47 Ronin|The Old Man of Storr — the pinnacle that stood in for a warrior's country

Everyone on Skye knows the shape. A fifty-metre finger of basalt leaning out from the broken cliff of the Storr, with a scatter of lesser pinnacles around it, the whole thing left behind when the ridge slumped seawards after the last ice. From the road below Loch Leathan it looks like a figure walking away.

47 Ronin came to the Trotternish peninsula in the autumn of 2012, chasing landscape the film did not have. The brief was simple: an epic journey through eighteenth-century Japan, riders crossing high country in winter, and nowhere in the Hungarian studio complex that could give it to them. The Storr gives it to anyone who climbs the path. Digital mountains and a vast carved figure were added afterwards, which is why fans often watch the finished film without recognising the ground they walked on.

The walk from the car park is short and unforgiving — an hour of steady rising through what used to be a conifer plantation, now largely felled and replanted, then out onto open grass among the rocks. Go early. By ten the path carries a queue, and by afternoon the summit cloud usually sits on the ridge. What you want is a clear morning with the light coming off the Sound of Raasay behind you, so the Old Man throws a shadow across the pinnacles at his feet. Half a minute of that is worth the whole climb.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed: "Old Man of Storr, Isle of Skye, Scotland - Diliff.jpg".