One of the most famous glens in the Scottish Highlands, Glen Coe forms a narrow defile 10 miles (16 km) long between Loch Leven and Rannoch Moor. The main road from Glasgow to Fort William passes through wild scenery that provides some of the finest hill walking and climbing in Scotland. The hills surrounding Glen Coe are internationally important as a geological site that demonstrates the phenomenon of a volcano collapsing in on itself, an event which took place some 400 million years ago. The glen is also an important botanical site, noted especially for its native woodland and arctic alpine flora. In the 1930s, 5180 ha (12,800 acres) of the glen were purchased by the National Trust for Scotland with the help of an appeal launched by Percy Unna, President of the Scottish Mountaineering Club and in 1976 a visitor centre was opened at Clachaig. An Torr Woodland and Inverigan campsite were purchased by the Trust in the 1990s and a native woodland restoration scheme initiated. A new visitor centre was opened in 2002, having been designed to minimise its environmental impact. The National Turst opened a new visitor centre here in 2002. It was near Inverigan that the famous massacre of the Macdonalds by the Campbells took place in 1692. Sir Jimmy Saville bought the whitewashed roadside cottage Allt Na Reigh in 1998 but it was sold in 2013 following the death of the disgraced disc-jockey.
Glen Coe has been used as a location for numerous films, including 633 Squadron (1964), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Braveheart (1995), Rob Roy (1995), several of the Harry Potter series and the opening credits of the American fantasy television series Outlander (2014).
