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Ever watched a film and been convinced you’ve seen that beach or building somewhere before?

Chances are, it’s not your memory being a bit cheeky with you, but an example of the popularity certain locations have with movie makers.

Across the UK, there are places the camera crews come back to time and time again to make use of the impressive landmarks and scenery in telling their stories. How many of these do you recognise from some of film and TV’s biggest shows?

Caerphilly Castle: Watch out for a little blue box

The production of 91�ȱ� sci-fi series Doctor Who has been based in the Welsh capital Cardiff since filming on the show’s revival began in 2004. After two decades and close to 200 episodes, eagle-eyed fans may spot some local landmarks popping up more than once in episodes set in different time zones.

Caerphilly Castle has been a popular spot with the programme makers so far. Among other stories, it has appeared as a 22nd-Century acid mining factory in the Matt Smith episodes The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People. When Peter Capaldi took over as the Time Lord, the castle got closer to its roots by appearing as an, erm, castle, in the 2014 Robin Hood-inspired episode Robot of Sherwood, set in 1190. That one thousand year gap (or close enough) really does show off its versatility.

Away from space, the castle also appeared in the 2015 drama Wolf Hall. Anyone who visits the 13th-Century building may also notice that its tower leans at an angle of 10 degrees. Please be assured this has nothing to do with alien attacks, it’s just everyday subsidence - or possibly damage caused by Oliver Cromwell's soldiers - it depends who you ask.

Glencoe: Loved by Bond - and Bollywood

This picturesque part of the Scottish Highlands, with its windswept greenery and eight Munro mountains, has become known by some as Scotland’s Hollywood, thanks to the regularity with which it appears on screen. It appears mostly as a Scottish backdrop, but it has featured in a lot of films.

The glens themselves have a history worth telling on screen. The Glencoe Massacre of 1692 was carried out against the MacDonald family by King William III’s soldiers, after the clan chief missed a deadline to swear an oath to the monarch. Since 1935, the National Trust for Scotland has looked after the area for future generations.

One of the biggest films to be made in Glencoe is, perhaps unsurprisingly, Highlander - the sci-fi franchise with a strong Scottish setting which began in the 1980s.

In 1993, filming for both Rob Roy and Braveheart - two Hollywood historical blockbusters - took place at Glencoe and, around 10 years later, Hollywood was back with Harry Potter. The third film in the series, Prisoner of Azkaban, involved much location filming in Glencoe, with Hagrid’s hut constructed on site.

Bollywood, a nickname given to India’s film industry, has made use of Glencoe’s scenery too - and many other parts of Scotland. Sequences for the title song of the 1998 hit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, one of the highest grossing Bollywood films ever when it was released, were filmed there, alongside other Scottish locations such as Eilean Donan Castle, to the north west of Glencoe. The film developed such a following, a downloadable map showing tourists the different locations was released to mark its 20th anniversary.

More recently, the nearby Glen Etive was the stirring location chosen for the climax of the James Bond movie Skyfall, with Daniel Craig’s secret agent tackling Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) at his childhood home in the Highlands - although the house itself was a full-scale model built and filmed around 500 miles south, on Hankley Common in Surrey.

Ballywalter Park: St Petersburg to Flanders, with stops in between

The house and grounds of Ballywalter Park in Northern Ireland’s Ards Peninsula have been appearing on film since 1997, when it was used as a location for a film, also set in Northern Ireland, called Divorcing Jack.

Since then, Ballywalter has appeared on screen as London, Paris, Sarajevo, Brussels, St Petersburg and Berlin, among other cities.

The 91�ȱ� Two drama The Wipers Times, about the satirical newspaper circulated around the trenches of the First World War, was filmed at Ballywalter Park, where the grounds stood in for Flanders. The park’s mansion house is the home of the Lord and Lady Dunleath - their family have been on the site for more than 150 years.

Alnwick Castle: Where alien robots tread in Robin Hood’s footsteps

Robots, wizards and outlaws are three very different characters to have used this castle - which still serves as a real-life family home - as a backdrop to their stories.

In the early 90s, it was one of the UK castles used for scenes in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Starring Kevin Costner as Robin, it’s perhaps better known for a song from its soundtrack, Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do it For You). It spent 16 weeks at number one on the UK singles chart in 1991, a record that has yet to be beaten.

Away from a world of scheming sheriffs and archery, the castle also featured in the first two instalments of the Harry Potter film series; The Philosopher’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, where it doubled up as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. The scene in the second film, where Harry crashes Mr Weasley’s flying Ford Anglia car, was shot in the castle courtyard.

In matters more intergalactic, Autobots and Decepticons arrived in Alnwick, not to check out the gift shop, but to continue their raging conflict in Transformers: The Last Knight, with scenes for the franchise filmed in 2017. When the cameras aren’t rolling, Alnwick is home to the Percy family. Their ancestral roots stretch back to 1309 and the 12th Duke and Duchess of Northumberland are the current residents, along with their four children.

This article was first published in June 2021 and updated in August 2024