HIGHLANDS & ISLANDS
Glencoe at dawn on a softly lit winter’s day presents a portrait of a country dressed in its full finery (pictured right). Its snowdusted hills, frozen waterfalls and lost valleys are suggestive of a mythical place created by an ambitious god. A rutting deer bellows across the moorland. A snow goose soars above a sea loch. A climber ropes up for a day above the clouds on the famed Aonach Eagach ridge. The pyramid-shaped guardian Buachaille Etive Mor is a fitting introduction. It is your archetypal Scottish mountain: its paths and precipices present challenging obstacles for climbers and hikers; there’s a life-affirming view from its top; and the location - overlooking Glen Etive and Glencoe Mountain Resort (ground zero for skiers and mountain bikers) - is classic movie fodder. You may recognise it from the James Bond film Skyfall, or from the Harry Potter series, extensively shot around the glen. It is a setting made for natural drama.
* Glencoe is a 93-mile drive north of Glasgow on the A82. To avoid midges and crowds, visit in April, May or later in September (discoverglencoe.scot).
YORKSHIRE
Find a perfectly preserved slice of 1950s England in the Yorkshire Dales: villages of honey-hued stone, with sheep grazing on the green, set against a landscape of flat-topped hills and broad valleys patchworked with pastures and stone barns. This countryside has served as a backdrop to British TV period dramas like All Creatures Great and Small and movies such as Calendar Girls and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Away from its film-star good looks, the Yorkshire Dales National Park also offers some of Britain’s best walking, mountain biking, caving and wild swimming. The limestone country in the southern part of the national park displays fine examples of karst scenery, including the natural amphitheatre of Malham Cove and the beetling crags of Gordale Scar. To star in your own epic, descend, if you dare, into the depths of Gaping Gill (a cave shaft open for a week in May and a week in August), or climb up Whernside (736m), the highest summit in the Dales.