47 Ronin|Glenbrittle Beach — black sand under the Cuillin

The road into Glen Brittle drops for seven miles with the Black Cuillin filling the windscreen, and it ends on a beach of dark volcanic sand where the river meets Loch Brittle. Climbers have used this glen for a century; the campsite behind the dunes is where most of them start. It is also where the sea, the mountains and open ground all meet within a hundred metres of each other, which is why a film crew came looking.

47 Ronin shot on Skye during its 2012 reshoots, when the production needed the scale of a journey it had not managed to capture on the sound stages of Budapest and Shepperton. Glenbrittle offered a shoreline framed by the highest, blackest ridge in Britain, with no modern building in the sightline. The finished film buried the location under digital weather and invented peaks, so the sand is unlikely to look familiar. Standing on it, the reason for the choice is obvious in about four seconds.

Go at low tide, when the beach widens and the rock pools open up along the eastern edge. The sand is gabbro-dark and squeaks under a boot. Behind you Sgùrr Dearg and the Inaccessible Pinnacle carry cloud almost every day of the year, and the water off the point is cold enough to take your breath in August. Sit until the tide turns. Nothing in the film's two hours of computer-built Japan holds its ground like this does.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed: "View from Glen Brittle beach across Loch Brittle - geograph.org.uk - 1469114.jpg" (Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0).