47 Ronin|The Quiraing — a landslip that rides like feudal Japan

The Quiraing is still moving. The Trotternish ridge is the largest landslip in Britain, and the single-track road that crosses it from Staffin to Uig has to be patched every few years because the ground beneath it keeps travelling downhill. That instability is why the place looks the way it does: a wall of green pinnacles, hidden terraces, the leaning column called the Needle, and the flat plateau called the Table where crofters once hid cattle from raiders.

For 47 Ronin the landscape was ridden across rather than built upon. Horses and sword-carrying riders were brought up here in the autumn of 2012, when the film needed a country big enough to carry its central journey and Hungarian sound stages could not supply one. Computer-generated peaks and a carved colossus were laid over the skyline later. The rock, the light and the weather are Skye's own.

Start from the car park on the pass. The first stretch of path runs almost level, easy in trainers, with the drop on your right opening out to Staffin Bay and the Torridon hills beyond it. Then the ground tilts and the terraces begin. Sheep hold the ledges. Rain comes sideways with no warning at all. What the film borrowed and what you get standing there are the same thing: the scale of an old country, with not one building anywhere in the frame.

Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, freely licensed: "Quiraing Isle of Skye Pano.jpg".