Robert Roy MacGregor ran cattle on the banks of Loch Lomond and lies buried at Balquhidder, 29 km apart in the southern Highlands. The film put his house 107 km north-west of the grave, on a pebble beach at the end of a dead-end road, and gave him a different loch to look at. The furthest east of the places on this page is a ruined castle 210 km from that beach, outside Edinburgh.
11
places on the route
Four clusters, about 210 km from west to east — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
The film was shot entirely on location and there was no studio work. Some of the ground the unit worked on could only be reached by helicopter.
The opening has Rob and his men above the water at the eastern end of this sea loch.
The village at the head of it is younger than almost anything else the camera points at. Kinlochleven was laid out in 1909 as a company village for an aluminium smelter, and it had electric street lighting before most of Britain, because the works made more power than it could use and the surplus was free. The smelter closed in 2000. A climbing centre, a brewery and a bunkhouse stand on the site now.
The West Highland Way comes into the village along the military road that Major William Caulfeild drove across Rannoch Moor in 1752, and that road followed an older drove road. Cattle really were walked through here.
Most of the open country in the film is this glen. It is a National Nature Reserve looked after by the National Trust for Scotland, and the A82 runs the length of it.
It has kept working. Braveheart came out the same year and Glen Coe is on that map too, as is Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Bond drives up the A82 towards his family house in Skyfall. Outlaw King and Mary Queen of Scots both used the glen in 2018.
The glen under Britain's highest mountain, inside the Ben Nevis and Glen Coe National Scenic Area. A public road runs 10 km up it and goes single track after the first seven. Beyond the road end, a walk through a gorge reaches Steall Falls, among the three highest waterfalls in Scotland.
Braveheart built its village of Lanark here and took it away again, and the car park lower down the glen has been called Braveheart ever since. Two films of 1995 used the same glen and only one of them got a car park.
The ride between Rob Roy and the Duke of Argyll. Most of the film was shot in Glen Coe.
Coire an Iubhair, Glen Tarbert
Coire an Iubhair under Garbh Bheinn, where a set was put up
A set went up in this corrie in Ardgour, on the A861, 24 km west of Glen Coe. Garbh Bheinn stands over it. The floor is bog and the walls are bare rock. There is no village in the glen and nothing built along it but the road.
The MacGregor house and the settlement round it were built on a pebble beach at the end of the single-track road along the north shore, near Bracorina, and cleared away afterwards.
In the film this water is Loch Lomond, 109 km to the south-east. Loch Morar is the deepest fresh water in the British Isles, 310 m down at the deepest sounding, and the road along the north side stops at the shore with nothing beyond it but a footpath.
The beach and the little wooded promontory beside it are still there, at the end of a road that goes nowhere else.
The Duke of Argyll's estate in the film, 21 km south of the Morar beach, on a tidal island in the mouth of Loch Moidart.
The castle is the old seat of Clanranald. In the rising of 1715, Allan Macdonald of Clanranald retook it and set it on fire himself so that Hanoverian troops could not hold it, and it has been a ruin since. Anta Estates bought it in 1997 and proposed to rebuild. Highland Council granted planning consent, Historic Scotland refused scheduled monument consent, and a public inquiry upheld the refusal.
You can walk out across the causeway when the tide is down. There is no way into the interior, because masonry falls.
Perthshire
Drummond Castle Gardens, Muthill
The parterre from the top terrace, the view the film uses
The gardens of the Marquess of Montrose, the man who ruins MacGregor over a debt of a thousand pounds.
The castle went up on a rock outcrop around 1490 for John, 1st Lord Drummond. The 2nd Earl remade the gardens between 1630 and 1636 and set the sundial that still stands at the crossing of the paths. The terraces were rebuilt in the 19th century and the planting renewed in the 1950s. There are eleven miles of box hedging in the parterre, ancient yews, and a beech planted for Queen Victoria after her visit in 1842.
The gardens open from 1 May to 31 October. The castle does not open at all, though the gardens look straight up at it.
The same parterre plays the gardens of Versailles in the second season of Outlander. The Bruce was here in 1996 and Man to Man in 2005.
Forty kilometres east of Drummond, the village scenes were shot in the courtyard here in 1994, with two-legged and four-legged extras off the estate.
A tower and fortalice were standing at Megginch by 1460, and the first document that names the place is from 1560. John and Jean Drummond bought it in 1661 and moved their household from Lennoch near Crieff by ox cart; their descendants are still in the house. Four heavy clumps of yew are said to mark the corners of a monastic garden that was here before the tower. The beech avenue was planted as a memorial to the dead of Culloden. The gardens first opened to the public in 1855, to raise money for a school in Errol.
It is a family home and now a wedding venue, so there is no general admission. The castellated gatehouse stands on the main road and is visible from it.
The one place on this page a long way from the Highlands, 154 km from Glen Coe, on a terrace above the River Tyne. Several location guides put the final duel in this courtyard. None of them names a source, and the film itself never says where the fight happens.
John de Crichton built the tower at the east end. His son William was made Chancellor of Scotland in 1439 and added a great hall and a kitchen around a new courtyard. In 1488 the castle passed to the Hepburns, earls of Bothwell; Mary Queen of Scots came in 1562 for the wedding of Bothwell's sister Janet. Around 1580 Francis Stewart, the 5th Earl, built the north lodging, and faced the courtyard side of it with hundreds of projecting stone diamonds. He also put up a stables block with an overlight cut in the shape of a horseshoe. Bats from the valley roost in those stables.
The castle is closed and fenced for conservation work. The grounds around it stay open, and the walk to them is a quiet one.
The duel
Reviewing the film in April 1995, Roger Ebert wrote that the sword fighting sequence, staged by William Hobbs, was the best of its sort ever done, and that it was one of the great action sequences in movie history. What he pointed at was what the scene leaves out. The two men tire. They are both wounded. The fight keeps stopping, and the pauses get longer. Cunningham takes a rapier, MacGregor a broadsword.
Hobbs co-founded the Society of British Fight Directors and had narrowly missed selection for the fencing at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne. He said a fight had to grow out of character rather than spectacle, and that having been an actor was his advantage. The fight director Tony Wolf, writing after Hobbs died in 2018, called this duel probably the most famous of his career and described the method behind it: fighters shown as fallible people, scrambling to recover from mistakes, exhausted or enraged, slipping in the mud.
The American rating card gives four reasons for the film's R certificate. The sword fight is the first of them.
Balquhidder, where he is buried
Rob Roy MacGregor died in 1734 and was buried beside the old kirk at Balquhidder with his wife and two of his sons. No filming happened here. It is 51 km south of Glen Coe and 107 km from the beach where the production built his house.
The kirk was put up in 1631 by David Murray, Lord Scone, and rebuilt in 1774. It has stood roofless since the parish moved into a new church next door in 1855. The chiefs of Clan MacLaren are buried here as well, and a MacLaren trust stabilised the ruin in 1997.
Three carved slabs lie inside a low railing under the yews. The plaque set behind them reads MacGregor Despite Them.
