- more British films, a Bond movie and a classic puffer

With its all-of-a-piece period frontage by the water and a castle nearby, Inveraray has had a role to play in a number of films. (Ironically, it failed with Arthur Freed, a Hollywood producer, in 1953, along with every other part of Scotland. He visited while trying to find a location for Brigadoon - the archetypal film about a Scotland that didn't exist, so had to be made in Hollywood.)

However, Inveraray became a setting for The Three Lives of Thomasina (1964), originally a novel by Paul Gallico. This featured the young Susan Hampshire as the girl who lived in the woods and had a special way with animals. (Useful - as, in the story, Thomasina was an unwell cat.)

Then Michael Caine came along to play a conman, along with Roger Moore in the 1990 comedy Bullseye! (Caine had been around Argyll before in 1971 in Kidnapped - see below) This time Inveraray Castle was the location.

The little town also appears in the TV series Brotherly Love (2000) and in the British Channel 4 series Seven Ages of Britain (2003).

To the south-west of Inveraray the Crinan Canal is a special place, and known to many yachting folk. The chase scenes on fast boats near the end of From Russia with Love (1963), the second Bond movie, were filmed out on Loch Craignish, near Crinan. More gently, though the canal itself is mostly used for recreation, once it was used by the 'puffers', the now-vanished fleet of small and flat-bottomed coastal cargo vessels which served the seaboard communities.

The Maggie (1954), aka High and Dry in the US, is a gentle portrayal of the life of this type of craft, in a plot about a wealthy American (played by Paul Douglas) who hires a puffer to transport a valuable cargo to one of the islands. Apparently, the rise and fall of the tide, along with the ever changing light made the shooting sequences on the Crinan Canal quite a challenge for the film crew! (The Crinan Canal was also used in the filming of the 'home-grown' television series, The Vital Spark [1959] with Roddy McMillan.)

Puffer fans will also enjoy the scenes on the island of Islay around Bowmore and Port Askaig shot for The Maggie. Much more recently, Islay, or more specifically, Finlaggan, associated with the Lords of the Isles, was investigated by the British Channel 4 TV Time Team.

Islay's wilderness island neighbour, Jura, was the setting for an extraordinary art film. Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, lately of the band KLF, came to Jura in 1994, and in a boathouse on the island burned £1 million. They filmed this action and the unedited result became the controversial Watch The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (1995). It was premiered in the village hall on Jura. Did they really burn all that money?

Finally for Jura, the Gulf of Corryvreckan, with its whirlpool of fearsome reputation, plays an important part in the plot of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger classic I know Where I'm Going (1945). (See the Mull and Lorn section)

Back on the mainland, Tarbert, the Kintyre gateway town, appears in the gritty and raw My Name is Joe (1998). The southern end of Kintyre around Campbeltown and Machrihanish is usually associated with whisky, golf and impressive seascapes. However RAF Machrihanish had a role in White Nights (1985), the story of a Russian ballet dancer who had defected to the West but whose plane is forced down in Russia. The even darker Death Watch (1980) also used locations on the Mull of Kintyre. (By the way, the Picture House in Campbeltown is Scotland's oldest surviving purpose-built cinema.)