ITV’s new psychological thriller Coldwater masters our autumn television cravings, featuring a picturesque village idyll with secrets tucked away in every nook and cranny. We centre on John (Andrew Lincoln) and his wife Fiona (Indira Varma), Londoners who up sticks with their two children and move to rural Scotland after a terrifying incident in a city park. They land in Coldwater, a strange small town chock full with even stranger people. But John finds an ally in Tommy (Ewen Bremner) – a man who may be an oddball, but he totally knows himself while John sinks deeper into an identity crisis. So when Tommy’s grave secrets emerge, John’s life is already intertwined with that of his new friend – and as with all good TV dramas, unpredictably twisty-turny chaos ensues.
This is all backdropped by the picturesque Scottish village John and Fiona now call home: Coldwater. Here’s everything we know about the real filming locations.
ITV’s new six-part thriller Coldwater is set in the titular fictional Scottish village – but it sadly wasn’t filmed in one particular town. Instead, the town of Coldwater we see on screen ‘is a composite of many different locations surrounding Glasgow,’ director Lee Haven Jones tells ITV. ‘And the key thing for me was to make the place as real as possible. We have to understand why John and Fiona want to live in this rather lovely village: because they’ve come from London and they’re in search of a new life.
‘So it was really important that this place felt aspirational, that it was beautiful,’ Jones says. ‘But at the same time, it felt very real. I wanted it to feel authentic.’
Creator and lead writer David Ireland started penning the drama in 2020, ‘which was a very strange year for everyone,’ he says. ‘I was having trouble sleeping and I would write really late in the middle of the night. The things that were on my mind then are in the first couple of episodes.’ Glasgow local Ireland says he was running obsessively, as well as reading the Bible and true crime books, all while toying with the idea of moving out to the countryside with his family.
‘I really like thrillers about urban men being put in situations in rural settings where they’re out of their depth,’ Ireland says. ‘Stuff like Straw Dogs and Eden Lake. I thought I’d really like to just write a TV series that’s a really great thriller about a man who’s in a violent situation and out of his depth.’
And thus Coldwater was born, which sees middle-aged, stay-at-home, urban father John (Lincoln) pick up his life and drop it back down in the Scottish countryside with his wife Fiona (Varma). The couple is searching for a fresh start: a safer space for their children to grow up, and to reignite the spark in their waning marriage. Varma describes Coldwater as ‘like living in a snowglobe’. ‘It’s slightly strange, like a little suburbia, in the middle of the countryside. Very charming and pretty.’ But this claustrophobia also breeds tension – or ‘intrigue and madness’ as Varma puts it, as John is lured into the absurd web of his curious neighbour Tommy (Bremner).
While Coldwater isn’t a real place, series creator Ireland drew on the spellbinding rural villages he has visited and dreamt of living in. ‘I’ve always loved small towns in Scotland and I’ve always wanted to live in one but never had the chance to,’ he says. ‘I love a lot of small towns in Northern Ireland so Coldwater is my little fantasy. You’ve got the beautiful church, beautiful coffee shops… It’s an idealised version of rural Scotland. Everybody is friendly, and a little bit strange. Everyone knows your business and people don’t seem to judge you, but maybe they do.’
One particular filming location locals might recognise is Dunlop – a small village in East Ayrshire to the south-west of Glasgow on the way to the coast – which is used as the older part of Coldwater town. With a history dating back to 1260, Dunlop was home to 1,170 residents in 2020, and the village is all small higgledy-piggledy houses in different shades and cobblestone streets.
Dunlop, along with the church Rebecca (Myles) is the pastor for, is ‘the heart of the community,’ Jones says. The church we see in Coldwater is also in Dunlop, but the characters’ houses are not. Instead, the exteriors were filmed in a village in south Lanarkshire with the interiors created on a set, with executive producer Alice Tyler describing these sets as ‘just amazing’.
‘We all wanted to move into them ourselves,’ Tyler jokes. ‘They look beautiful and lived in, but distinctive and unusual. And they are inspired by and based on two real houses that really do sit side by side, sort of on each other’s shoulders. And we love that sort of idea of voyeurism and peeping Tom-ness, I guess, that comes with that proximity between the two spaces.
My favourite location from the series is William’s house, the therapist’s house, which is on a beautiful hill overlooking Loch Lomond,’ Tyler adds. ‘The landscape around it is amazing. It’s got these amazing big glass windows that look out onto it. But I loved as well the fact that we start the series there with this quite funny, strange, intimate therapy session between John and Williams.’
More filming locations we can spot include Glen Fruin and Loch Lomond, which ‘give a sense of scale to the series,’ Jones says. Such quintessentially Scottish scenery also ‘gives a real sense of what John and Fiona had in their mind’s eye when they were thinking about uprooting their family from London and moving to the Scottish Highlands,’ Jones points out.
Myles describes filming around Glasgow as ‘a personal treat’ because her father was Glaswegian and she still has ‘so much family here’. ‘For the first time, to come to Glasgow and work has been a real personal treat,’ Myles says. ‘People have been amazing. The locations have been jaw droppingly gorgeous. And it’s a perfect backdrop for this wonderful, wacky, eccentric new series.’
Scottish Hotels For A Coldwater Staycation
If Coldwater has inspired you to venture into the land of lochs, castles and kilts, here are our favourite places to stay.
Coorie Inn Restaurant & Rooms – Muthill, Crieff
This is the Scotland John and Fiona were dreaming of: a historic village in the foothills of the Highlands. And 18th century coaching inn Coorie Inn nails that fine balance between elegant bedrooms and top-notch cuisine all without feeling stuffy or overly formal. Just six super-stylish bedrooms await, featuring plush beds, quirky accents, elegant touches and a rich colour scheme. With an intimate vibe, we’re sure your neighbours will be much more convivial (and much less nosy) than those we see in Coldwater. Doubles from £170.
For that rural but still edge-of-the-city vibe, try Chef Tom Kitchin and his wife Michaela’s modern Scottish restaurant with rooms The Bonnie Badger, younger sibling to their Michelin-starred The Kitchin in Edinburgh. Ivy-clad The Bonnie Badger is hidden in coastal Gullane, an enchanting village just outside Edinburgh, and draws on East Lothian’s bountiful larder to present Tom’s signature ‘From Nature to Plate’ concept. As for the 12 bedrooms, expect cosy, inviting spaces scattered across the house and two cottages, with children warmly welcomed, and dogs too. Rooms from £215.
If you were spellbound by Loch Lomond’s cameo in Coldwater, look no further than The Pierhouse Hotel for your next Scottish staycation, which encapsulates all the raw and breathtaking beauty of western Scotland. Perched on the shores of Loch Linnhe, 12 comfortable bedrooms gaze across the loch, Lismore and Shuna islands and the Morvern Peninsula beyond. In chef Michael Leathley’s Michelin Guide restaurant, enjoy countryside cooking elevated with the freshest west coast seafood. Doubles from £155.
