Scotland

I was born here and I still find myself stopping in the middle of familiar streets, looking up at something I've walked past a thousand times, and seeing it properly for the first time. Glasgow does that to you. It is a city that reveals itself slowly, and rewards the person who pays attention.

The cathedral is where I always start. Built in 1136, it is the only medieval cathedral on the Scottish mainland to survive the Reformation virtually intact, which means walking through its doors is walking into a building that has stood for nearly nine hundred years. The nave is one of the finest examples of Early English Gothic architecture anywhere in Britain. The crypt, with its forest of stone pillars holding up the floor of the choir above, is extraordinary in a way that photographs cannot quite capture. You have to be inside it.

Directly behind the cathedral, the Glasgow Necropolis watches over the city from a hill. Fifty thousand souls are buried here, in a Victorian city of the dead that is simultaneously beautiful, melancholic and completely unlike anything else in Scotland. The merchants and industrialists who built Glasgow in the nineteenth century are all here, in mausoleums and monuments that were designed to impress even in death.

Glasgow has one of the most extraordinary collections of Victorian and Edwardian architecture in Europe and almost nobody outside the city knows it. The City Chambers on George Square, modelled on the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, is so ornate inside that first-time visitors genuinely do not believe it is a functioning municipal building. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery is a Spanish Baroque masterpiece that appears, suddenly and completely unexpectedly, at the end of Argyle Street.

The University of Glasgow, which has been educating students since 1451, looks from the Kelvingrove Park like something out of a Hogwarts fever dream, gothic towers rising above the trees on Gilmorehill, the whole thing lit amber at dusk in a way that stops you walking. I have filmed it dozens of times and it still catches me off guard.

Across the park, the West End is the neighbourhood for everything else Glasgow does well, excellent independent restaurants, coffee shops that take their craft seriously, the Oran Mor in a converted church, the Ubiquitous Chip which has been serving Scottish produce with intelligence and care since 1971. Glasgow is a city that eats and drinks extremely well, which is not always the first thing people expect.

Edinburgh is the most dramatically positioned capital city in Europe. The castle on its volcanic rock, the Old Town climbing up the Royal Mile toward it, Arthur's Seat rising above everything to the east, it is a city that looks like it was designed for cinematography, which is why it appears in more films and television series than almost any other British city.

The Old Town is extraordinary for reasons beyond the obvious. Greyfriars Kirkyard at dusk, when the day-trippers have gone and the light goes blue, is one of the most atmospheric places in Scotland, the graves of Covenanters, the tomb of the poet William McGonagall, and the famous small statue of Greyfriars Bobby near the gate. Victoria Street, curving down from the Royal Mile toward the Grassmarket, with its coloured shopfronts and cobblestones, is the street that apparently inspired Diagon Alley. Dean Village, hidden in the Water of Leith valley ten minutes from Princes Street, is a completely preserved Victorian mill village that almost nobody outside Edinburgh knows exists.

There is a moment somewhere north of Pitlochry, on the A9, where the landscape changes so completely and so suddenly that it feels like crossing a border rather than simply driving. The hills are larger. The sky is wider. The light is different, a particular quality of northern light that makes everything look slightly more real than real, more vivid, more present. This is where Scotland becomes itself.

Glencoe is the most dramatic valley in Britain by some considerable distance. The mountains come down so steeply to the valley floor that on overcast days the clouds sit at mid-height, and the tops are invisible, and the whole thing looks like something from the age before history. Eilean Donan Castle, on its small island at the meeting of three lochs, looks exactly as a castle should look, reflected in still water, mountains behind it, mist optional but frequent. The Isle of Skye needs more than a weekend and repays every day you give it.