Pennan

A single row of cottages backs against a cliff face with nothing between the front doors and the North Sea — Pennan is a village built in a space that barely exists. The red phone box on the harbour wall, made famous by the film Local Hero, still stands as a pilgrimage site for anyone who remembers the movie's aching melancholy.

Pennan clings to the base of a cliff on the Aberdeenshire coast, its houses in one terrace so narrow the road simply ends at the village. The harbour, once a herring port whose boats landed on the shingle that doubles as the main street, now serves occasional lobster boats and visiting kayakers. Local Hero filmed its phone box and harbour here in 1983, and the story of an oil man falling for a Scottish fishing village resonated so deeply that visitors still come to stand beside the box and look at the sea — the film long since folded into the village's own story. This is a place for lingering rather than ticking off: a slow lunch, the cliff path east toward Crovie through some of the north-east's most dramatic coastal scenery, and the light changing on the Moray Firth.