The Doctor Who Location Tour: The Highlanders

I’ve been determined to see as many Doctor Who locations as I possibly can lately, and while some don’t exist anymore, have been renovated or are incredibly hard to spot, some areas like Frensham Ponds are actually pretty easy to find. Despite one tree looking very much like another, the exact, (almost) filming locations are really easy to find with a bit of patience and detective work.

Location footage is used throughout The Highlanders, thanks to the surviving telesnaps, though it is more heavily used in Episodes 1 and 4. It’s a shame that The Highlanders doesn’t exist outside a few surviving censor clips cut from foreign broadcasts, luckily the telesnaps and soundtrack give us a great story, but one that might get a big reappraisal if they ever find the missing four episodes.

Filming for The Highlanders took place in November 1966 over the 14th/15th and 21st at Frensham Ponds which doubled for the battlefields of Culloden. Filming still takes place there for various movies and television shows, aside from Doctor Who, Netflix’s The Witcher used the Ponds extensively, Snow White and the Huntsman and the 1999 The Mummy had segments filmed there. In the 1960s Hammer Horror also used the heath areas as Moorlands for Plague of the Zombies and The Reptile thanks in part to its relatively close proximity to Hammer’s home at Bray Studios.

Upon entering the Ponds it’s not hard to see why it is used often as a filming location. It could easily double as a historical setting as well as an alien planet, especially if you’re lucky enough to have the glorious weather I did to enjoy it. I entered the Ponds from the bus stop entrance if you walk straight ahead you’ll find a pathway lined with wooden posts. Stop just in front of them and look down towards the water.

This is where the opening scene of the story is filmed, in which a group of highlanders struggle up a hill carrying their injured Laird. Looking at the telesnap and the area in real life, it’s pretty easy to match up, almost exactly, the area used to film this scene, matching the trees in the distance up between the two.

If you carry on walking past the little café, which is run by a really rude manager, you’ll find yourself looking up at a steep hill. This is where a lot of The Highlanders was filmed. Initially just looking up the hill, there is a telesnap of a Highlander looking at bodies of English Redcoats.

While standing in the same spot looking up the hill you’ll spot two trees on the heath, it’s between these two trees that Ben stands looking out over the Highlands trying to spot the Doctor, Polly and Jamie towards the end of the story.

Walking up that hill, and turning right, you’ll find a little footpath that if you follow it along will take you to the entrance of the car park, but as you begin to walk down that footpath, look to you’re right and you’ll see four trees two in front of another two, it’s between the back two trees that the TARDIS arrives and the Doctor, Ben and Polly step out into the Highlands. This is also where at the end of the story, under the cover of darkness the TARDIS departs, leaving Kirsty to wave Jamie off.

Moving to the side you can almost match up the angle of the camera taking the footage of the trio looking out at their surroundings.

Coming out of the wooded area and looking back down where you’ve just come from there is a gap between the branches of the two groups of trees, I’m pretty sure this is where the telesnap of Ben and Polly looking out between branches at their surroundings was filmed.

Turning slightly to your left and looking down towards where the café and the car park are the scene with six or seven redcoats descending on the house where the Doctor is trying to help heal the Laird’s wounds was filmed.

Sadly the telesnaps don’t really give us a great look at other scenes that may have been filmed in this area besides close up on feet and fallen soldiers but this would have all been filmed around the same heathland. It’s possible that should the episodes ever be miraculously discovered there will be some better looks at the various scenes filmed in this area that will uncover some more locations.

Moving away from the heath brings us to our final location for The Highlanders. As you walk across the beach, which you should definitely do as it’s a lovely area and there are stunning views on offer and sand as far as the eye can see, there are a series of three bushes. This might sound strange but it’s actually pretty easy to find them thanks to their pink flowers.

The third and final one is where the image of Polly and Kirsty hiding from the Redcoats that are trying to find them is taken from. For this area I matched up the trees behind them in the distance which dip in the middle and come back up again, I’ve seen videos where there’s a little gate behind them in location tours but the trees in the background don’t match up enough.

It’s a real shame that nothing really exists for The Highlanders, there is only so much that we can do with telesnaps and soundtracks, as fantastic as it is to have them, how amazing would it be to have all the missing episodes returned to the BBC archive! And because of this, there might be locations at Frensham Ponds that I’ve missed. But even if you didn’t go for the Doctor Who or Hammer Horror filming locations, then a nice summer day spent at Frensham Ponds would definitely be in order, and you can even swim in the lake!

As a little bonus too, if you leave The Great Lake and cross the road, (but be quick it’s a national speed limit road), you come to The Little Pond. It was here that in 1965, scenes for the First Doctor story, The Myth Makers were filmed. It’s a long old walk but it’s worth doing and powering through the steep hills. Even less of The Myth Makers survives so it’s almost impossible to see what was a location and what was filmed in the studio but with its dry and dusty footpaths and scenery, it’s not hard to see why it doubled as ancient Troy.

And when you get to the top of the hill and turn left, walk a mile and you’ll come across the moorland and home farm that was used extensively in the 1970s The Silurians, but having walked a grand total of twelve miles, I didn’t have the energy for that, so that’ll be a trip for another day!