Where Was The Wicker Man Filmed? The Scottish Locations and Chaotic Shoot Behind the 1973 Original

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Collage for The Wicker Man (1973) showing Christopher Lee in a kilt, Britt Ekland in a cape, Edward Woodward in police uniform and strips of film

In November 1972, on a clifftop in Galloway, Edward Woodward stood barefoot in a nightshirt inside a giant wooden man. A goat in the cage above him was so nervous it was peeing on his head. Below, a crew he'd spent seven cold weeks with were getting ready to set the whole thing on fire.

That was the last big scene of The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy's 1973 folk horror about a policeman lured to a pagan Scottish island. The island was never real. The filming locations are spread across mainland Dumfries and Galloway, and most of them are still there to visit. Here's where it was shot, who was in it and how a film set on May Day got made in the cold end of a Scottish autumn.

Quick Answers

Where was The Wicker Man filmed? Around 25 locations, mostly in Dumfries and Galloway in south-west Scotland, with the crew based in Newton Stewart.
Is Summerisle a real place? No. Not one scene was shot on an island.
When was it filmed? Early October to late November 1972, over seven to eight weeks.
Where was the wicker man burned? Burrow Head, on the cliffs near Isle of Whithorn. Two were built.
What did it cost? It was budgeted at about £420,000 and came in at roughly £450,000.
Is it based on a true story? No, though the burning figure comes from a line in Julius Caesar.
When did it come out? December 1973, cut to 87 minutes and shown as the support feature to Don't Look Now.

Director Robin Hardy holds a loudhailer beside Edward Woodward in police uniform on a boat deck during filming of The Wicker Man — Director Robin Hardy uses a loudhailer to set up a shot of Howie (Edward Woodward) and the Harbour Master

Where Was The Wicker Man Filmed?

Almost all of it was shot within reach of Newton Stewart, where the cast stayed at the Kirroughtree Hotel. Hardy and his team picked a couple of dozen villages, gardens and bits of coast, then cut them together as one island. The BFI's location guide matches them up shot by shot, and Almost Ginger's rundown fills in the street addresses.

Location	What was filmed there	What's there now
Kirkcudbright	May Morrison's sweet shop at 84 High Street, the alley chase and the May Day gathering on the old town hall steps	The shop is an art gallery. The hall is a visitor centre
Gatehouse of Fleet	Outside of the Green Man on Ann Street	Building and cobbles still there
Creetown	Bar of the Green Man, shot inside the Ellangowan Hotel	Hotel has closed
Anwoth	Ruined kirk, graveyard, schoolhouse and the maypole dance	Kirk is open to walk round. The schoolhouse is a private home
Whithorn	Library and registrar's office	Former public library building
Logan Botanic Garden	Lord Summerisle's stroll among the palms	Still a public garden
Culzean Castle, Ayrshire	Outside of Lord Summerisle's house	Open to visitors
Lochinch Castle and Castle Kennedy Gardens	Drawing room, courtyard, the stone circle dance and part of the procession	Gardens open to the public
St Ninian's Cave	Rowan tied up at the cave mouth and the walk to the sea	Open shoreline, reached on foot
Burrow Head	The burning of the wicker man	A holiday park. The concrete base survives
Plockton, Highlands	The seaplane landing and harbour	Working village, a long way north of everything else
Wookey Hole, Somerset	A cave interior	Show caves

A few details are worth knowing before you go. The hole that held the maypole at Anwoth can still be found in the grass. The gothic tomb with the skull and hourglass in the churchyard is a real gravestone, not a prop. The stone circle at Castle Kennedy was not real. Production designer Seamus Flannery built it.

Is Summerisle a Real Place?

No. Summerisle was invented by writer Anthony Shaffer, and the title card thanking Lord Summerisle and his people for their help was a joke that plenty of viewers took at face value.

The only island in the film is Skye, glimpsed from the air as Howie's seaplane flies in. He lands at Plockton, a mainland village in the Highlands. The orchards in full blossom that he flies over were shot in South Africa, because the budget wouldn't stretch to dressing that many Scottish trees.

The palm trees are the bit people assume was faked, and they're real. They grow at Logan Botanic Garden near the Mull of Galloway, kept alive by the Gulf Stream. Time Out's trip round the locations found staff who still remember the crew turning up, and the garden's curator got a walk-on.

Film crew and lighting rigs outside a stone house in Scotland while shooting a deleted scene from The Wicker Man in 1972 — Filming an unused scene in which Howie arrives by bicycle to check on a girl who recently stayed with the postmistress.

Who Was in The Wicker Man Cast?

Actor	Character	Role in the story
Edward Woodward	Sergeant Neil Howie	The mainland policeman
Christopher Lee	Lord Summerisle	Laird of the island
Britt Ekland	Willow MacGregor	The landlord's daughter
Diane Cilento	Miss Rose	The schoolteacher
Ingrid Pitt	The Librarian	Keeper of the island's records
Lindsay Kemp	Alder MacGregor	Landlord of the Green Man
Irene Sunter	May Morrison	Rowan's mother
Geraldine Cowper	Rowan Morrison	The missing girl
Aubrey Morris	The Gravedigger	Churchyard caretaker

Lee had his own reasons for wanting in. He'd spent years in a cape and fangs for Hammer, playing a count whose roots go back to one stormy night in 1816, and he wanted a part with some brains to it. He took no fee and called it the best thing he ever did. If you only know him as Dracula or Saruman, Christopher Lee's life off screen was stranger than most of his films.

Ingrid Pitt only got her part after ringing Hardy a few days before filming and dashing across London to meet the producer. A year after the release, Lee and Ekland were both in The Man with the Golden Gun, part of a series with its own history of dangerous shoots.

Britt Ekland wrapped in a dark cape on a windswept hillside during the 1972 shoot of The Wicker Man — Britt Ekland as Willow

How Did The Wicker Man Get Made?

The film started with three men and a book. Lee, Shaffer and producer Peter Snell each put in £5,000 to buy the rights to Ritual, a 1967 novel by David Pinner. Shaffer then threw most of it away and wrote his own story. He later joked about it: "David Pinner certainly got a good deal: £15,000 for the use of one scene." That line is recorded in Cathode Ray Tube's production history.

It wasn't planned as a cheap horror quickie either. Shaffer was coming off Sleuth, and Allan Brown, who wrote the standard book on the production, told Reel Scotland it was meant to be a major release despite the tight money.

That money came from British Lion, where Snell had become head of production in July 1972. The studio's owner was under pressure to prove he was making films at Shepperton and not just selling off the land, so the shoot was pushed into the autumn whether it suited a May Day story or not. In her Den of Geek column, Pitt remembered that "practically every other day there were rumours that the production was to close down". By her count the company changed hands three times while they were making it.

Why Does a May Day Film Look So Cold?

Because it was. Cameras rolled in the first days of October 1972 and stopped in the last week of November. Sources differ by a day or two on the exact dates, but everyone agrees on the weather. It was wet, it was freezing and the script said spring.

Flannery had 42 plastic apple blossom trees made, and fake blossom was fixed to bare branches wherever the camera pointed. Actors sucked ice cubes before a take so their breath wouldn't show.

Woodward spent a lot of the shoot in thin costumes. Before takes he warmed his bare feet on Ingrid Pitt's legs, an arrangement she described with some relish. Ekland mostly remembered trudging about in flimsy gowns. She told the Sunday Express that the area was "the most dismal place in creation", which went down about as well locally as you'd expect. Some retellings have her calling it the bleakest place on earth and the producers having to apologise. The wording changes with the source, the insult doesn't.

By most accounts the evenings at the hotel were boozy. Locals were used as extras throughout, and staff at Kirkcudbright's visitor centre say nobody round there can watch the film without pointing at the screen and naming a neighbour.

Edward Woodward in police uniform, Christopher Lee in a check jacket and director Robin Hardy among palm trees on The Wicker Man set — Woodward, Christopher Lee and Hardy

Did Britt Ekland Use a Body Double in The Wicker Man?

Yes, and she didn't know about it. Willow's naked dance against the bedroom wall took 13 hours to film, going by Gary Carpenter, who worked on the music. Ekland found out during the shoot that she was pregnant, and she'd drawn the line at being filmed naked from behind.

What happened next depends on who you ask. Hardy said Ekland asked for a double because she didn't like her own backside. Ekland said Hardy promised there wouldn't be one. Either way, SlashFilm's account has a Glasgow nightclub dancer called Lorraine Peters being driven to the set lying flat in the back of a car once Ekland had left for the day, then filmed in a blonde wig.

Ekland's voice went too. Her attempt at a Scottish accent was replaced in the edit by the jazz singer Annie Ross, and nobody mentioned it. "I really never knew that I was dubbed. They never told me," she said in a later interview.

Edward Woodward in the white fool costume on a lawn during filming of the May Day procession in The Wicker Man — Woodward in costume as the fool

One story you'll see everywhere is that Rod Stewart tried to buy up the negative to stop people seeing his girlfriend naked. Treat it as a rumour. It's never been backed by anything solid, and the two didn't become a couple until 1975, well after the film was out.

Who Wrote the Music for The Wicker Man?

The songs do as much work as the script, and they came from an unlikely place. Paul Giovanni was an American playwright and musician from New York who'd written folk-rock scores for the stage. Hardy hired him, and Giovanni built a band around Gary Carpenter's folk group, added extra players and singers and named the result Magnet for the credits. The mfiles profile of Giovanni covers his career.

Very little of it was written from scratch. Corn Rigs, the song over the opening flight, sets a Robert Burns poem from 1783. The tune the islanders sing as the fire takes hold is Sumer Is Icumen In, a medieval English round. Giovanni also worked in nursery rhymes such as Baa Baa Black Sheep and Oranges and Lemons, which is part of why the film feels so wrong in such a cheerful way.

The songs were recorded before filming, but the musicians were brought up to Scotland for the whole shoot so they could play on camera. Giovanni appears on screen himself as one of the musicians. His song Gently Johnny was dropped completely from the 87-minute cut.

Robin Hardy talking to Christopher Lee, who wears a long dark wig and dress as Lord Summerisle, on The Wicker Man set — Hardy chats to Lee (as Lord Summerisle)

Was the Wicker Man Really Burned?

It was. A six-man crew built the wicker man at Burrow Head. There were two of them, used across three spots on the cliffs so Hardy could get the angles he wanted, and the crew dug the hole that Howie and Rowan climb out of. Part of it is still there.

Woodward had only seen drawings. Hardy said the look on Howie's face when he first comes over the rise wasn't acting. Time was so short that some of Woodward's final lines were painted on bedsheets and held up for him to read.

Then there were the animals. People in Newton Stewart had heard the crew meant to burn livestock alive, and Shaffer had to go round reassuring them. None were harmed. The animals were lifted in and out by cherry picker before the real blaze. That didn't help Woodward much, because for the shots inside the structure the goat was penned directly above him. Hardy's own version, quoted by Cinephilia & Beyond, is typically breezy: "Although the fire brigade put the blaze out several times, we were always in control."

Woodward didn't feel in control. He broke a toe during the climax and didn't notice until the next morning, thanks to the cold and the drink. Years later he told The Independent it was the most frightened he'd ever been on a job: "The heat was intense and I felt at times that I was really burning."

Three behind-the-scenes photos of the wicker man prop at Burrow Head, with crew, a cherry picker and boards showing the islanders' lines

Is The Wicker Man Based on a True Story?

No, but the wicker man wasn't Shaffer's invention. It comes from Julius Caesar. In Book VI of his account of the Gallic War he says some Gauls built huge figures of woven branches, "the limbs of which formed of osiers they fill with living men", and set them alight.

That one passage is nearly all the evidence there is. Tastes Of History's look at the legend points out that Caesar was borrowing from an earlier Greek writer, wasn't describing anything he'd seen and had every reason to make the people he was conquering sound like savages. No independent account backs him up, and nobody has ever dug up a wicker man.

Christopher Lee holds an umbrella over Britt Ekland on a clifftop during a rainy break in filming The Wicker Man — Lee and Ekland sheltering from the rain

Hardy spent about four months reading up on old religion all the same, leaning on James Frazer's The Golden Bough and a 17th-century engraving of a wicker figure stuffed with victims. He insisted every rite in the film was drawn from customs recorded somewhere in Britain or western Europe. Plenty of them will look familiar if you've read about the pagan history of Easter: spring fires, fertility symbols and a community very keen on a good harvest.

What Happened to the Original Negative?

Editor Eric Boyd-Perkins spent about three months on a cut that ran somewhere around 100 minutes. By then British Lion had been sold again, to EMI, and the new man in charge, Michael Deeley, didn't care for it. Someone suggested a downpour should put the fire out and save Howie. Hardy refused.

A print went to Roger Corman in America for advice. He suggested trims for the drive-in market and offered $50,000 for the US rights, which British Lion turned down. Deeley had the film cut to 87 minutes anyway, losing the mainland opening. It crept out in December 1973 as the bottom half of a double bill with Don't Look Now, the same month The Exorcist opened in America and changed what horror could earn. One American distributor that did sign up went bust four days later. Lee rang critics himself and begged them to go.

Producer Peter Snell, writer Anthony Shaffer and director Robin Hardy standing in front of the wicker man prop at Burrow Head — Producer Peter Snell, left, screenwriter Anthony Shaffer, centre, and Hardy

When Hardy and Snell later went looking for the missing footage, they were told the 368 cans of negative and trims had been cleared out of Shepperton. The famous version says they ended up as landfill under the M3. Another telling says the M4, and a studio executive is also on record saying they were simply burned in a clear-out. Steve Phillips's history of the film's versions is the most careful account, and the honest answer is that nobody has proved where the cans went.

What saved the longer film was the print still sitting in Corman's vault. Two fans turned distributors, Stirling Smith and John Simon, picked up the American rights for $20,000 and worked with Hardy on a restored version released in 1977.

Which Version of The Wicker Man Should You Watch?

Version	Length	What it is
Theatrical cut (1973)	87 minutes	The studio's version. No mainland scenes, no Gently Johnny
US re-release (1977)	About 95 minutes	Hardy's rebuild for America, with most of the cut material back
Long version	About 100 minutes	The fullest cut, surviving only through Corman's print. Picture quality is rough in places
The Final Cut (2013)	Between the two	Restored from a print found at the Harvard Film Archive and approved by Hardy

Running times for the longer cuts vary by a few minutes depending on who's counting. If you're watching for the first time, go for the Final Cut. It's the one Hardy signed off and the one used for the 4K restoration.

Is the Nicolas Cage Wicker Man a Remake?

It is, and it's a very different film. Neil LaBute's 2006 version moves the story to an island in Puget Sound run by women, with Nicolas Cage as a Californian cop. It opened on 1 September 2006, cost a reported $40 million and took less than that worldwide. SYFY's look back notes that the bees scene everyone quotes wasn't even in the cinema release. It turned up on the DVD and became a meme from there.

So if you came here looking for the bees, you want the other one. The 1973 original has no bees, no bear suit and a much better ending.

Can You Visit The Wicker Man Filming Locations?

You can, and most of them are free. Kirkcudbright, Gatehouse of Fleet, Creetown, Anwoth and Whithorn are all within a short drive of each other. St Ninian's Cave is a walk down a wooded glen to the shore. Logan Botanic Garden, Castle Kennedy Gardens and Culzean Castle are paid attractions, so check opening dates before you travel.

Burrow Head is now a holiday park, with the clifftop path running past the spots the crew used. The wicker man's legs stood there for about 30 years, charred stumps on a concrete base. In the mid-2000s someone sawed them off. The owner of the holiday park only found out when people rang to ask if he knew they'd gone. The concrete is still there, and so are faint steps in the grass on the mound.

Not bad for a film its own studio tried to bury. Half a century on, people still drive to a caravan site on the edge of Scotland to look at a block of concrete.

Frequently Asked Questions

How tall was the wicker man?

The figure burned at Burrow Head is usually put at around 60 feet. That's the number given by Compulsion's location guide, though nobody seems to have kept the plans.

Is there a sequel to The Wicker Man?

Sort of. Robin Hardy made The Wicker Tree in 2011, a companion piece with a new story and a brief appearance from Christopher Lee. It didn't land anything like the original.

Is the Wickerman Festival connected to the film?

Only by inspiration. The music festival ran in Dumfries and Galloway from the early 2000s and ended each year by burning a giant wicker figure. It was last held in 2015.