The box-office hit that gave one village a global calling

With their pilgrimage across the Atlantic almost complete, there is one final emotional moment before seeing the object of their affection.

They slip the CD into the player and, as they journey the last few hundred yards, Mark Knopfler's theme music to the film Local Hero fills the car.

Turning the corner, in the single street of the fishing village, they can finally see Pennan's red phone box - probably the most famous in the world.

In 1983, when Bill Forsyth made a low-budget film called Local Hero in Pennan, it made the village's bright red telephone box almost as well known as the star, Burt Lancaster. Over the years since then, the locals have got used to thousands of visitors from all over the world arranging for calls to the box so they can recreate the scenes in which American oil magnate Felix Happer (Lancaster) speaks to his wheeling and dealing assistant Mac (Peter Riegert), who describes the lights he sees in the sky, the Northern Lights.

BT statistics released this month show even after 24 years, no public phone box in Scotland rings more than the one in Pennan.

Pennan was once a thriving fishing community but now has less than a dozen permanent residents. The other well-kept whitewashed houses are holiday and second homes which sell for increasingly high prices. But at the heart of the village is the phone box.

If anywhere needs a phone box then Pennan does, because the village is nestled at the bottom of steep cliffs, which provided a magnificent backdrop for the film but also helps ensure the tranquillity will not be disturbed by the ring of mobile phones because no signals can reach them.

Then there are those who have never visited Pennan but, 24 years after the film was released, still dial the number - 01346 561 210 - just to see what happens.

"It quite often rings out and I answer if I am passing," says Vince Melvin, owner of the Pennan Inn which provides a hospitable welcome for those who make the journey.

"I have taken calls from all over the world and most people that make them simply ask if that is the Pennan phone box. Many people, particularly the Americans, are very sentimental about it and have been waiting to come to see it for years or make return visits."

It's Vince who recounts the story of the American family's pilgrimage to see the box. They told him how every Thanksgiving, after their meal, they sit down to watch Local Hero. Vince was diplomatic enough not to point out to them that the phone box in the village is not exactly where it was in the film - it was a prop located a few yards away at a more photogenic position at the head of the pier, while the real one was disguised as a shed.

"I asked if they were disappointed that the bar was not as it was in the movie but they said that they weren't, and it had lived up to their expectations," he says. "The internet has so much information about it that the real aficionados know it is not the phone box in the film before they come here, anyway."

Almost every day through the summer a film fan arrives at the Inn, and barmaid Linda Stanton says the Canadian who burst into the bar last year with his camera in his hand and announced in a quivering voice: "I'm here. I'm here at last," was typical.

For more than 20 years, since he first saw the film, it had been his dream to go to Pennan. He had suffered a heart attack some months before and, when he recovered, decided that he had to make that special journey in case the opportunity was lost.

The visitors' book in the Pennan Inn is like a world gazetteer - Denmark, Canada, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, Poland, Germany and France. However on the day I visit, the first arrivals at the phone box were from a little closer by.

Doug Matheson had brought his daughter Anya, 11, and friends Jocelyn Clark, 11, and Hannah Beattie, 10, from Portsoy to take a very close look at the box. At the end of this month the three girls and around 14 of their friends from the Skip 2 The Beat skipping group will try to squeeze into the box to set a world record. The attempt has been organised by the Banffshire Coast Tourism Partnership to celebrate the status of the box and promote tourism in the area.

After a winter of pounding by the North Sea wind and sea spray, the box, shielded in part by a row of wheelie bins, was looking in need of a spring clean. BT have tried to keep it pristine and some years ago, the box was stripped back to the bare metal and primed, before being covered in a special marine paint of the type used on North Sea oil rigs.

But the girls were more interested in the fact that the telephone itself is larger than the one in which they have been practising in Portsoy, and that they will have to wind their bodies around two unexpected shelves.

The next visitor, Aberdonian Eddie Stephen, 71, a retired sheet metal worker, has been photographing landscapes along the north east coast for more than 40 years.

"There were free darkroom facilities when I was doing my national service and I thought I might as well take advantage of them - so I started taking photographs then and have been doing so ever since," he says. "I like to come back to the places along the coast I photographed many years ago and compare the photographs for change, but this phone box hasn't changed much."

As he heads off for the village of Crovie, Neil and Marie Lambert from Helensburgh arrive - again drawn by the phone box.

"We are having a few days' break along this coast and felt we had to see it," says Neil. "I remember the phone box in the film but I didn't realise it was in a different place."

"I'd better phone my mum from the box," says Marie.

Alan and Susie Creane-Smith, who are also visiting the Pennan Inn for lunch, describe how they regularly send visitors to see the phone box from their Dufftown guest house, Tannochbrae, which also has a showbusiness connection, having been named after the fictional town in A J Cronin's Dr Finlay stories, which became a famous television series. "We recommend a visit to the village and the Inn. Most guests are fascinated when we tell them about the phone box and the film, and many want to use it when they get here."

Not that everyone knows about Local Hero. Gregor Szewerda, 23, from Silesia in Poland, is a computing student in Fraserburgh and had taken visiting friend, Lucas Luscot, 23, to Pennan.

"We came here because I had been told it was a beautiful village," he says. "I knew nothing about the film or the phone box. Do people really come from all over the world to see the phone box? How strange."

But the lure of the box is too great. He reaches into his pocket for a coin, and says he had better call his mother.