The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
I was shaken and stirred by Bond’s Scotland
For thrills and spills, follow Sean Connery and Daniel Craig to a land of awe-inspiring scenery and classy hotels, says Daniel Pembrey
WIngredients for a vodka martini plus a cocktail shaker were set out in the suite’s sizeable living room
elcome to Scotland,” says the sign on the M6. I can’t read it without hearing a gruff Albert Finney, playing the gamekeeper in Skyfall – the 2012 film in which Daniel Craig’s Bond returns to his Scottish roots. Wielding a shotgun, Finney greets villains streaming into Bond’s ancestral Highlands lodge. Less ironically, Scotland has been welcoming the Bond cinematic franchise since its inception.
No Time To Die (which hit cinemas this week), is the latest Bond thriller. The producers shot key chase scenes in Scotland. I was driving north in a large black Land Rover Defender – a vehicle used in those scenes – but before I got there, I wanted to stop and pay homage to the father of modern spy thrillers.
“John Buchan helped inspire Fleming’s Bond,” Ursula Buchan, the novelist’s granddaughter and biographer, told me. “In his books there are fast cars, trains, boats, novel planes and of course chase sequences – not to forget shadowy organisations threatening world order.” Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) features the German “Black Stone” organisation. Ian Fleming’s features “Spectre”.
Buchan used to visit Cringletie House, an imposing red-sandstone baronial-style home just north of Peebles. It is now a hotel. In the candle-lit dining room, I raised a pre-supper whisky to the atmospheric hills and the highland cattle roaming them.
This Borders realm was the perfect starting point for my trip. The hero of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Richard Hannay, goes to ground after a murder takes place at his London flat, opting for remote Borders moorland. You can inhabit one part of his experience by striding out on the John Buchan Way, a 13-mile hike from Peebles (where Buchan’s mother, sister and a younger brother lived) to the village of Broughton (home to his maternal grandparents), navigating stiles and burns amid the mournful cries of curlews.
Alas, the next day proved “dreich” (drizzly) as they say in these parts, imperilling views, so I paid a visit to the well-organised John Buchan Story Museum in Peebles. The displays here highlight the film adaptations that popularised Buchan’s writing. It was Hitchcock’s 1935 adaptation that arguably explains the story’s – and the author’s – enduring renown.
So it proved for Fleming, too. The adaptation of his novels to screen, starting six decades ago, has meant that an estimated one quarter of the world’s population has experienced a Bond story. Many ingredients went into the adaptation recipe, but a crucial one was Sean Connery.
I drove on to another red sandstone landmark, the Waldorf Astoria Edinburgh – The Caledonian, on the trail of the original Bond. Once a grand train station hotel at which Hannay might have alighted, it became a focal social point in the capital.
Connery’s Bond would eventually go on an eventful train journey in From Russia with Love – the second Bond film and the one that cemented Connery’s role as Bond and his international stardom. But before all that, the actor started out in the neighbouring working-class area of Fountainbridge as Tom Sean Connery, or “Big Tam” (he was 6ft 2in). Famously he worked as a milkman. According to close neighbours, there was something magical about him, even as a teenager in the 1940s. The Caley hotel – a glamorous hangout for American GIs and film stars – was a symbol of hope and aspiration.
I stayed in the Alexander Graham Bell suite, the same that Sir Sean used to request. It was the panoramic view of the castle that tugged at me, for I was a student here in Edinburgh, but Connery valued it for its first-floor location. His ability to use the original grand staircase let him avoid getting trapped in lifts with autograph hunters, one of which I could so easily have been.
On arrival, the ingredients for a vodka martini plus a cocktail shaker were thoughtfully set out in the suite’s sizeable living room. Less well known than the “shaken, not stirred” line is how Fleming developed Bond’s Scottish ancestry in the books after he warmed to Connery on screen. In You Only Live Twice, published the year after From Russia with Love premiered, Bond’s father, Andrew, is identified as being from Glencoe. The mention comes in an obituary written into the story when 007 is believed to have been killed.
To fill out this fictional obituary, Fleming consulted his friend Sir Alexander Glen over lunch at London’s Savoy hotel. Glen attended Fettes College, considered to be Scotland’s Eton, and so Bond became an Old Fettesian. I set off on foot for the 100-acre Fettes campus just north of the elegant New
Town. As with Cringletie House, baronial-style Fettes was designed by architect David Bryce, but on a far larger scale, and ornamented with gargoyles. It particularly impressed on a bright, blustery day. Connery once delivered milk here. He returned to the school while making a 1982 short film promoting the City of Edinburgh, arriving by helicopter that time.
What would Bond be like as a pupil? “Doubtless he would make the most of what the college has to offer, developing his languages and revelling in the many outdoor pursuits,” said Helen Harrison, the approachable head. “Although I might have had to have words with him about other subjects.
“I like the way female characters have been given more substantial roles in the Daniel Craig films,” she added, although she can’t seem to hide her fondness for Connery, the Scottish Bond.
The helicopter rides aside, Connery tended to spurn flashier modes of transport, stating in one television interview that he preferred station wagons. Thatthought put me at ease as I set the Land Rover’s satnav for points northwest.
The Land Rover Defender features in No Time To Die
If Bond hadn’t retired to Jamaica at the start of the new film, he might just have retired here
The climactic chase sequence of From Russia with Love was shot in coastal Argyll in July 1963. In the film, Connery and Daniela Bianchi abandon the Orient Express and set off by truck, then speedboat, for Venice.
As the light turned soft and liquid, the landscape became more sparse and watery. It is warmed by the Gulf Stream, and I noticed palm trees as I passed the exotic-looking Crarae Garden, managed by the National Trust for Scotland. The Gulf of Venice setting in the movie suddenly didn’t seem so far-fetched. A remote glen near the town of Lochgilphead hosted the scene in which Bond is chased by a helicopter then downs it using a rifle. It is pure Hannay – hunter; hunted.
The helicopter that director Terence Young used also crashed; remarkably, no one was seriously injured and filming quickly resumed. Shooting for the climactic boat chase sequence was based at the waterside Crinan Hotel, which today promises jumbo prawns landed just 20 yards away. Owner Frances Macdonald, a renowned artist, confirmed that Connery stayed here during filming. Her son Ross Ryan, also an artist, arranges boat trips to the locations on the shimmering sea lochs, to bare low islands that look otherworldly.
Despite all this hunting and chasing, Fleming himself wasn’t enamoured with deer stalking when staying at his family’s vast Black Mount Estate further up near Bridge of Orchy. As a young man in the 1920s, he did shoot deer, and he was inured to the ways of the kill among other local customs. “Never forget you’re a Scot,” his mother Eve would apparently tell him. Yet he preferred to play records, or read – notably Buchan.
I visited the area with Colin Fraser, whose grandfather was a stalker on the estate. Black Mount is more remote and secluded than better-known Glencoe or Glen Etive slightly to the north. It is a primordial-looking scene: brimming bodies of water almost seeking to join together, the more surprising for being inland, with vigorous gnarled trees and vivid greens. Moody Black Mount Lodge itself sits distantly but distinctly on raised ground.
Fraser worked as head stalker at Dalness Lodge in nearby Glen Etive. The steep sides of this dramatic glen are accentuated by a floor dropping to sea level (uncommon in the Highlands). It’s perfect for framing shots, such as the famous ones in Skyfall with Craig’s resolute Bond, Dame Judi Dench as “M” and the silver Aston Martin DB5. I opted to stay at the Kingshouse Hotel at the head of the glen, because, like Dalness Lodge, it was once owned by the Fleming family. The gates, dipping driveway and blunt low structure all bring to mind the Skyfall Lodge created down south for the film. There are no antlers on the gate posts, but there are deer munching tawny-coloured grass. Inside, an aromatic woodfire burns, and the venison pie tempts.
A hotel has been on the site since the 1750s and while the main building was added three years ago, an original part still remains, with the welcoming character of a walker’s pub – it is on the West Highland Way hiking trail, after all. The real draw though is the new dining room, and its floor-to-ceiling view of misty Glencoe, from where Bond’s father came. A burn runs through it.
Fleming’s interactions with the Black Mount head stalker would have been limited, but an equivalent relationship is explored in Skyfall, with the head stalker figure, played by Finney, depicted almost as a surrogate father (Bond’s parents died in a climbing accident, that obituary tells us). Connery was reportedly considered for the cameo, but the producers reasonably concluded that he would have been too distracting for audiences. It is tantalising, because with his hard-edged realism and relatable portrayal, Craig is widely felt to be the true heir to Connery in the role. Alas, No Time To Die looks sure to be Craig’s last stop.
As Ardverikie Estate, on the edge of the Cairngorms National Park, was mine. The estate is a wilderness adventure playground – Scotland in miniature – filled with glens, rivers, mossy forests, lochs, and a baronial castle. It extends an impressive 62 square miles and is where the key chase scenes from No Time To Die were shot, including a stunt rollover of a vehicle, plus a high-speed pursuit along a riverbed.
Ardverikie has six self-catering cottages, but all this time spent with Hannay and Bond made me bold; I camped out on what is claimed to be Europe’s largest natural inland beach. With the remnants of a fire fizzing and popping outside my tent, and the lapping waters of Loch Laggan lulling me asleep, I decided that if Bond hadn’t retired to Jamaica at the start of the new film, he might just have retired here. Of course, Bond and retirement would always be uneasy bedfellows. His continuation in active service is to be celebrated everywhere, but especially in glorious, brooding Scotland.