All he could say when he heard about it was: 'It's gonna be great, all that sex in them hills'.
'LOOK at that," said James McKelvey, the owner of the Wanlockhead Inn, as he pointed to the newspaper cuttings on the pub wall, all of them featuring sultry-looking ladies in low-cut dresses. "All those famous actresses coming up here! Who'd have eve
r thought it? The whole place is buzzing with it."
Wanlockhead, Scotland's highest village at 1,531 feet above sea level, is ready for its close-up. This week sees the beginning of filming for Hope Springs, a new prime-time BBC1 drama series from Shed Productions, the outfit which has provided the nation with several slices of seminal intellectual fare over the past couple of years. You know, that Prisoner: Cell Block H re-run for the new millennium, Bad Girls, and the glitzy Essex WAGfest, Footballers' Wives.
The first time I went to Wanlockhead, I had just moved into Dumfriesshire and I wanted to visit this cultural curiosity – a lead-mining village with the second-oldest subscription library in the world and a fully functioning steam railway. As if these weren't attractions enough, this was also the area that produced the gold used to make the Scottish crown. It's also got a lead-mining museum. Oh, and it's a major stop on the Southern Upland Way. And it had lots of sheep. Wanlockhead, I was firmly convinced, had it all.
"What's the best way to get there?" I asked my neighbour, farmer Willie Brown, as we studied a map of the Lowther Hills. "Gettin' oot of Wanlockhead; now that can be mighty tricky," he said. "But getting tae the place is easy. You just get into a time machine and select reverse. Whit on earth d'ye wanna go o'er there for?"
I loved the 10-mile drive up from my house, which would see the tiny road wend its way alongside a babbling burn as it climbed through the steep gorge coated in heather and gorse. Finally a higgledy-piggledy collection of cottages would heave into view.
Whereas I loved the remoteness and tranquillity, my wife thought it was the village of the damned: bleak and perennially shrouded in a fine mist. Her first visit was her last – she point-blank refused to go back. This proved to be a blessing because when I wanted time to think or to be alone, I'd head to the Rob Roy Bar at the head of the village, a pub that was trying to set a record for the amount of tartan and claymores crammed into one room. But it was also untouched by mobile phone reception and had a roaring fire and a welcoming barman who would allow my smelly old Newfoundland dog to snooze by my feet as I read the papers and contemplated some of the best views in Scotland.
The Rob Roy is now ancient history and has been replaced by the Wanlockhead Inn, which has taken over the mantle of the highest pub in Scotland. That, however, is about the only change to a village which remains a little slice of yesteryear. So is it ready for the culture shock of becoming a star of prime-time national television?
At the beginning of the year rumours began circulating that something was afoot, that Wanlockhead was to be the venue for a Hamish Macbeth meets Two Thousand Acres Of Sky, with a sprinkling of Monarch Of The Glen. Within days, letters plonked onto the 100 or so doormats in the village telling them that the village was to host eight episodes of a drama in which four female ex-cons who have stolen £3m from one of their gangster husbands are foiled in their plan to escape to Barbados and are forced to hide out in the Highland village of Hope Springs. The stars will include Alex Kingston and Annette Crosbie.
The rumoured plotlines are a bit racy for a family village, but no one seems to mind. McKelvey says that the whole village is enthused by the prospect. "Take Gary here," he says, pointing at the grinning builder in the car park. "When he heard about it, all he could say was: 'It's gonna be great, man, all that sex up in them hills'. And my wife Elaine, all she talks about is getting to be an extra when filming starts on Tuesday."
She's not alone: although part-time thespians came from as far away as Inverness, the casting session was dominated by locals. Almost the entire village turned up looking for a part, lured not so much by the £70-a-day fee but by the chance to be immortalised on the small screen.
"That's because there's a real sense of community here," says Maria Muir, who runs the Lead Mining Museum. "This is the sort of place where everyone speaks to you, not because they're being nosey but because they're genuinely interested. It's a fantastic place, the sort of place where I can walk my little Yorkshire terrier at night and feel completely safe. I'd never do that anywhere else."
Like everyone else in the village, Muir is attracted by the potential increase in tourists that is expected to follow the series next year. If it carries on like this, there might even be enough people to support a shop: at the moment villagers have to make the mile-long trip to Leadhills. Filming has already brought benefits – Shed Productions has painted one row of cottages and laid a new car park at the pub – but Muir says the villagers aren't naive enough to believe there are no potential pitfalls.
"We all love living here," she says. "It's a thriving, busy community in which you can take part in something every night of the week or take a step back, it's your choice. Half of the village are incomers and half are from here, but everyone gets on and there are all sorts here, from farmers and shepherds to artists and songwriters, to people who commute to Dumfries, Glasgow and Edinburgh. This place is beautiful and unique and while we can all see the benefits of change I just pray we keep the things that make this place special."
She is, however, preparing for the worst excesses of modern media. "I've just started listening to The Archers and watching Emmerdale for the first time," she admitted. "You've got to be prepared."
The full article contains 1093 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
