Original subtitles

Right across our planet, there is an incredible variety of astonishing

landscapes.

One of the most beautiful anywhere in the world is the Scottish Highlands.

A rugged but astonishingly beautiful landscape.

Mountain ranges.

A jagged coastline that reveals picture -perfect beaches.

Locks deeper than the sea.

But it creates a kind of shimmer. When you see that on a loft like this, you

see why people think there's something in there, there's something mysterious

going on there.

A geologist's paradise.

What we get to see in the Northwest Highlands is a fascinating snapshot into

something that is very deep within the planet and other parts of the world. And

so we're really lucky.

A history of rebellion and Neolithic sophistication.

The largest assemblage of Neolithic art anywhere in the UK.

In fact, there's been more Neolithic art found at the Ness than every other site

combined in the UK.

We're going to take you on a journey through the Scottish Highlands to admire

its wonders and discover its secrets.

Our journey begins in the most northerly city in the UK.

Inverness is sheltered from the rough waters of the North Sea by the great

natural barrier of the Murray Firth Inlet.

Via the River Ness, Inverness is joined to a genuine natural wonder.

Loch Ness was formed after the last ice age, when a vast glacier tore its way

through a fault line in a rock.

When the Earth warmed 11 ,000 years ago, unimaginable quantities of water gushed

into the space left by the ice.

This Loch reaches twice the average depth of the North Sea.

Seen from space, it resembles an unfeasibly long natural runway.

It holds more water than every lake in England and Wales put together.

Tourists flock every year in the hope of glimpsing the Loch Ness Monster.

And for centuries, artists and writers have been drawn here too. The painter,

Turner. Poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, even the ultimate Londoner, Dr. Samuel

Johnson.

Trouble writer Kathy Kamleitner is following in the footsteps of giants.

It's one of those tourist hotspots, but I've really come to love it for even

its... quieter sites and the less known spots and there's lots of them you can

easily escape the crowds when you come to Loch Ness and it's just such a

peaceful place not only in the mornings but really all year round it's such a

beautiful place to come and enjoy the nature along the south side of

the loch a string of enticing pathways lead right down to the water

We are now getting to one of my favourite views of Loch Ness here on

Beach, where you can really see all the way down to the southern tip of the loch

near Fort Augustus.

Loch Ness is about 23 miles long and only a mile wide, but what is really

fascinating to me is how deep it is.

and how much water there is in it. And because there's so much water, it

actually never freezes over.

The cold water always sinks to the bottom and the warm water rises up, but

there's never enough cold water at the surface to actually make it freeze over.

So when the warmer water of the Loch rises up and hits the really cold winter

air, what it creates is a kind of shimmer.

just on the horizon, a distortion of the horizon.

And when you see that, normally you would see that on a hot road or maybe in

desert. When you see that on a loch like this, you can see why people think

there's something in there, there's something mysterious going on there.

Loch Ness gathers water from 700 square miles of higher ground and six major

rivers.

Atlantic salmon flourish here in these rivers.

Every year, around late autumn, they make their way from the sea to spawn

Once the young salmon have hatched, they stay here to build strength for two

years before heading out to sea themselves.

Towards the western edge of Loch Ness is a waterfall that the painter Turner, no

less, stopped to sketch.

So we are now at the Falls of Spires, which is a very special place here in

Great Glen.

It's on the quiet south side of Loch Ness again.

and it's a very popular place to visit still, but you kind of need to know that

this is here in order to make your way to the Falls of Foyers.

In Gaelic, the falls are called Esna Smudhia, which kind of means something

the Smoking Falls.

The Falls of Foyer is absolutely spectacular today.

The amount of water just coming down, the depth of it, the depth of the pool,

the shape of the falls bending left and right as they navigate the rocks, the

really dark rock and the really dark water, which is kind of in reference to

what Robert Burns called the boiling cauldron of the Falls of Foyer, that

shape. Rock face around the pool and the fall. It's just absolutely stunning and

you can imagine Why so many people came here?

Most travelers just pass through But Kathy decided to stay preferring the

highlands landscape to the Austrian Alps where she grew up People often ask me

about you know, why did you move to Scotland if you've come from a country

the Alps?

What I really love about the mountains in Scotland is the dark rock, the

mysteriousness, but also the roughness.

And it's easy to get lost in views like this.

And I'm just very grateful that I get to call this my home.

Loch Ness is just the start of a geological fault line.

that slices right through the highlands.

The Great Glen Fault was formed as two mighty tectonic plates shifted across

each other hundreds of millions of years ago.

For millennia, the northern side carried on creeping northeast across the

southern side.

A chain of locks then formed along the fault line at the end of the last ice

age, almost connecting the North Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.

It was up to mankind to finish the job.

In the early 1800s, work started on a chain of canals and locks to enable

to pass from one side of Scotland to the other.

The Caledonian Canal.

Where the canal meets the sea, an awesome sight comes into view.

Ben Nevis loomed 1 ,300 meters above sea level.

350 million years ago, its granite rocks were the molten core of a huge volcano,

which reared even higher into the sky.

Ben Nevis is topped with snow and ice most of the year round.

Climbing this mountain is only for the intrepid. Every year, people perish on

these slopes.

The North Face is the most spectacular approach, but also the most challenging.

One misplaced step could be your last.

At the summit, many climbers find themselves in a sea of cloud.

From time to time, some climbers will witness cloud inversion, where warm, dry

air at higher altitudes traps colder, moist air below it, pushing the cloud

level far below the peak of the mountain.

on a clear day from the summit, it's possible to see out for 120 miles.

Our journey will now take us north, where the highlands display even greater

splendors.

We will travel along the West Highland Railway line, through hills and valleys

with a famous history.

The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 began right here, when Charles Stuart, better

known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, believing the crown had been stolen from

family, started to build an army, which would fight to win back the throne.

Seen from above, the challenges of crossing this thicket of ridges and

are all too clear.

But it was no match for Victorian engineers.

They blasted no fewer than 11 tunnels through the mountains and built six

viaducts between Fort William and Malay. The most iconic is the Glenfinnan

Viaduct, famously crossed by the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter

It took four years to build the viaduct's 21 arches.

The local stone proved too hard to shape, so instead Victorian concrete was

poured into giant moulds.

There's no steel frame inside.

It's held up by geometry alone.

The West Highland Line then twists its way onwards, eventually reaching a

bewildering coastline.

Around Marat, it twists around jagged peninsulas and sea locks that carve deep

indentations into the land.

Over the millennia, the complex interactions of land and sea have

extraordinary surprises.

The silver sands of Mara stretch for miles along the coast, as if transported

here from a tropical island.

The secret to how this stunning scenery was created lies below the surface of

the waves.

Merle is a pink and purple coral like seaweed.

When Merle dies, it leaves a hard, white skeleton rich in lime.

Fragments crushed by the waves turn into sand.

The merle beds are also a vital habitat for hundreds of species of marine plants

and animals.

Their protective spikes provide shelter.

This makes them ideal nurseries for fish to breed.

And despite overfishing and plastic, Scotland's welcoming waters, plankton

and warmed by currents from the south, are still home to over 6 ,000 different

species.

Between April and October, you might even spot a bathking shark, a severely

threatened but magnificent species.

They are the second largest sharks of all, up to 11 metres in length.

and with 1 ,500 tiny teeth.

But they don't eat unlucky swimmers, just enormous quantities of plankton.

When autumn comes, they leave for warmer waters.

For people on these shores, control of these seas was key to who ruled the

highlands, as Vikings invaded and Scottish clans struggled for supremacy.

800 years ago, three intersecting sea locks became a vital strategic point.

King Alexander of Scotland built a castle here in the 1200s to defend

the Vikings.

Ellen Donan sits where the three locks meet.

A century later, Robert the Bruce sheltered here, just a few years before

defeated English invaders at the Battle of Bannockburn.

Ellen Donan is not the only strategic point in these seas.

A short stretch of water separates the mainland from the next point in our

journey, an island...

of astonishing natural beauty, the Isle of Skye.

Skye was where Bonnie Prince Charlie came to hide when his Jacobite rebellion

failed. His armies had been defeated at the Battle of Culloden, and he fled for

his life, an event remembered in song.

Speed, Bonnie Boat, like a bird on a wing.

Onward the sailors cry.

Carry the lad that's born to be king over the sea to Skye.

Bonnie Prince Charlie fled to one of the most bewitching places on earth.

At the southern end of Skye are the Kulin Mountains, with jagged peaks and

plunging valleys.

What we see today are the remnants of volcanic lava formed 60 million years

in Scotland's split from North America as the Atlantic Ocean was torn into

existence.

The cooling lava and millions of years of water erosion have created some

extraordinary rock formations, like the ones seen around the aqua blue fairy

pool.

Legend has it that a chief from the clan Macleod married a fairy princess and

gave many places in Skye a fairy name.

At the foot of the hills is Loch Corish, fabled to be the home of another shape

-shifting mythological group.

In accounts, tell of boatmen refusing to sail on the lake alone for fear

of falling into its fangs.

At the opposite end of sky, the northern side, is a very different landscape.

Here you can almost imagine you have left Earth altogether for a harsher

some way off in the solar system.

At the Quarang, we can still see the aftermath of a dramatic geological

Landslides. on a vast scale took place here over tens of thousands of years.

They were caused by basalt lava from the island's volcanoes pouring out over

weaker sedimentary rocks.

The weight of the lava made the softer rocks slip, creating the remarkable

and pinnacles we can see today.

Just off the coast, are Meath Falls, which crash directly into the waves.

They're backed by kilt rock, so -called because its volcanic columns resemble

the pleats of a Scottish kilt.

Skye's beautiful coast is also treacherous.

At the isle's most westerly point, the wreck of a steamer travelling from

Liverpool to Poland still lies below.

Back on the mainland, we're now heading up the west coast.

The view from space reveals the intricate, jagged patterns of this

Our destination is one of the least populated areas in all Europe.

But there is perhaps nowhere on Earth that tells a more extraordinary story

about how the surface of our planet was formed.

The Northwest Geopark is an area which has been given special scientific

For Dr. Laura Hamlet, who is a geoarchaeologist, it's paradise.

Where we are, we're actually standing at the edge of a continental collision

that happened in the border between Scotland and England.

So these were two different continents, Avalonia, which was England, and

Laurentia, which was Scotland.

And about 430 million years ago, those two continents collided and the force of

that collision pushed mountains up into the Caledonian and Appalachian mountain

chains. And here at Knock and Crag, we're standing at the edge of that

collision.

Across the park are unusual rock formations that reveal the secret of how

mountains were formed.

We're going to start at the knock and puzzle.

It shows you the relationship between all the different rock types in the

geopark.

They've been deliberately placed here by an artist.

And you can see right at the bottom here are the oldest rocks in the geopark.

So down here you can see there's a kind of stripy rock.

louisian knife it's three billion years old some of the oldest rocks in europe

and then on top of it we've got torridonian sandstone which is what the

mountains here are made out of again it's a billion years old so you can see

we go up it gets younger but the really interesting thing about this puzzle and

the rocks in the northwest highlands is that as you go up the rocks get

gradually younger until these rocks at the very top the moines shifts are a

billion years old again and that's the puzzle

This strange arrangement of rocks can be found on Nock and Crag itself.

You need to come up here and see this.

At the top is your Moinshiff.

This is a billion years old and it was thrust here by the continental

At the bottom is the Derna limestone, 500 million years old. Where did that

go? Isn't that amazing? You can put your hand either side of them and the

contact between is the thing that so fascinated geologists.

Seeing how older rock had been pushed on top of younger rock helped Victorian

geologists work out how mountain chains were created during the collision of two

continents.

Well, if you just follow me along this path, you'll see this absolutely amazing

panorama that opens up across the mountains.

Glaciers from the last ice age also had a part to play in creating this

spectacular landscape.

The shapes of all these mountains.

have been carved out by ice so when ice was there up to the top even beyond of

these mountains this mountain here at the very top of it there's a boulder

of quartzite and that's called a nun attack and it means that that little bit

the mountain was the only thing that was sticking out above the level of the ice

so imagine that ice that thick and we're standing underneath it and over

thousands of years It's ground down the rocks and carved out these landscapes,

forming the shapes of the hills that are so recognisable today.

But for Laura, it's an appreciation of the age of the rocks that is most awe

-inspiring.

I think what you start to feel when you're out in the mountains, when you

little bit of geological knowledge, is just that reverence for the deep time

that's all around you.

Because the stories that the rocks can tell...

Stretch back three billion years here.

The oldest rocks in the geopark, the oldest rocks in Western Europe, are

Louisian knife.

Those are metamorphic rocks, which means that they've been buried beneath the

Earth's surface and they've been heated and stretched and crushed and washed and

put under lots of pressure.

In the Northwest Highlands, we tend to say it's roughly 3 billion years old.

that's three quarters of the age of the planet. The oldest rocks that we know

about are around about 4 billion years old. So this is really a huge proportion

of the history of the world represented in our piece of the crust.

And it's dynamic. It moves all the time. So although those rocks have been 30

kilometers beneath the Earth's surface at some point, they've naturally moved

through cycle. And now they're at the surface.

What we get to see in the Northwest Highlands is a fascinating snapshot into

something that is very deep within the planet and other parts of the world. And

so we're really lucky in this part of the cross to be able to see what we can

see of the Earth's story.

The Northwest Coast is an unwelcoming place for many plants and animals.

But all that changes as we take a detour inland, away from the harsh winds of

the coast, to a more sheltered landscape of hills and valleys.

If you'd looked down on this landscape 5 ,000 years ago, very large areas of it

would have been green.

After the glaciers melted, Pine trees, birch, hazel and oak gradually took hold

and covered much of the highlands with thick forest.

Across the highlands today, you're more likely to find sheep than pine trees.

There are seven million sheep in Scotland chewing plants down to the soil

saplings can grow.

The sheep took over around 200 years ago during the Highland clearances when big

landowners pushed out farming communities who'd lived on the land for

generations, often using brutal force.

Many ended up living in small crops by the coast, where less fertile soil made

it hard to survive.

Many had little choice but to leave Scotland for the New World, Australia or

North America.

The sheep don't have it all their own way. There are well over half a million

deer here.

Their numbers have mushroomed since their predators, including Scotland's

wolves, were killed off.

And the Highlands moors are also home to tens of thousands of grouse, carefully

reared and managed for the sport of shooting.

The moors are regularly burned to foster the young heather that grouse like

best, so here too, forest has no chance to take hold.

But in recent times, you can sometimes spot rare birds that once flourished in

the forest have been coaxed back in recent years.

There are 400 pairs of golden eagles soaring above the highlands.

You might see them summer or winter, as they never migrate.

As long as there are enough rabbits, hares and large birds to hunt, golden

eagles stand a chance in the highlands.

In times past, the capercaillie was an iconic Scottish bird.

The males as large as turkeys, with red eye markings, wattle, and a sheen of

purple and green.

There are now around a thousand of these magnificent birds back in the Highland.

Highlanders are fighting to restore the forest habitat and give the wildlife

that lives alongside it a better chance to survive.

Allardale Wilderness Reserve is a former hunting estate.

The goal here is to restore the Caledonian forest to its former glory.

Ryan Munro is one of the rangers at Allardale.

We're just coming into where we've done some of our recent planting.

And these trees here that are just below us, these are 10 years old.

What we're trying to recreate is the old forest used to be here, which you can

see remnants of it way out in the distance there.

So around that forest out there, we've added another 190 ,000 around it.

And in the last 10 years, we've planted just under a million trees.

These trees here are six years old.

As you can see, in six years, they haven't grown an awful lot.

They went into the ground at that height, and they're now...

that tight after six years.

So it's going to take a long process before you can call this a forest.

You're talking 100 years, so it's not even my generation, it's future

generations after that that are going to benefit of this.

At the end of the glen is a remaining patch of the old Caledonian forest.

Down the line, this is hopefully what we want to try and recreate, this mosaic

of birch trees, pine trees.

mature forest, and putting something back for future generations.

That when people are coming out here, they can have a chance of seeing more

things like squirrels, pine martins, black grouse, other sort of birds that

haven't really been here, but hopefully down the line they will be.

Red squirrels, who've lost out to grey squirrels in most of the UK, are already

flourishing here, and their presence could help the forest grow.

So the red squirrel is a good ecological engineer, so they'll effectively,

hopefully, plant the trees for you. So they'll take their seeds and bury them

for the winter, and obviously they'll forget about some of them, and that tree

will hopefully regenerate and grow up into new forests.

The last wild wolf in Scotland was hunted down as long as 300 years ago.

They killed too many sheep.

But at Allerdale, they want to bring the wild wolves back.

Nature is about balance, and predators have a key function in creating or

maintaining balance.

Just imagine the glen behind me filled with, say, 600 deer.

with a healthy appetite, they will eat everything that they can find,

in these winter conditions.

So that continuous grazing pressure will prevent any, not just trees,

but any plant species to sort of reestablish itself.

A predator would keep those animals on the move.

Bring numbers down.

We're looking for a controlled release.

of wolves in an area roughly 50 ,000 acres in size.

So Allendale itself is not big enough for the idea.

We'd need the collaboration of surrounding areas or surrounding

One day, this landscape might see roaming wolves once again.

But another predator unique to this land is already well on its way back.

So the Scottish wildcat is the only native family we have in the UK.

It's been in Scotland pretty much for forever.

You can see that on a lot of Scottish clan crests have got wildcats on them.

So that symbolises that they've been here for a long time and they're heavily

respected creatures, you know.

Scottish wildcat is now classed as functionally extinct.

It means that there's no real pure ones left in the wild.

And the only ones...

that we have close to purity are left in captivity.

Part of our programme is to try and increase the stronger bred cats in

to create a good population in captivity, and then down the line

released into the wild.

What the wild cattle do in the ecosystem is keep everything in check with the

small animals, so it stops overpopulations of things like mice and

stuff, which could do damage to different habitats, different smaller

species.

So down here we have the main breeding pair, which is just here.

Then we've got another cat just on the right there.

And then the other three cats are just on the bottom side of the enclosure

there.

So I just try to throw some food into the enclosures and just give them their

dinner for the day.

Normally just chuck it in a random sort of way, try and get it to hang up in

trees. Other times I'll go in and hang it in places so they have to go and work

for it.

They're different from domestic cats with their head.

It's slightly broader.

Their aggression, they're always aggressive. They're never not

They're always hissing and spitting.

They say it's the only cat in the world you can't domesticate.

So even if you got a kitten before its eyes were, like, days old, you still

can't domesticate it.

In the last three years, we've bred eight kittens, and they're now in

parks around the UK.

A record number of wildcat kittens are being reared across Scotland.

Now they have a chance of growing up to survive in the wild.

Just as we reach almost to the northern tip of mainland Britain, nearly 600

miles from the White Cliffs of Dover,

there is a lesser -known natural wonder.

The unsung hero of the highlands landscape, helping to protect our

climate, is peat.

At 1 ,500 square miles, this is the largest expanse of rare so -called

bog found anywhere in the world.

The peat here has been building up for around 10 ,000 years and is now 10

deep in parts.

The peat is formed from layer upon layer of heather and moth, partially

preserved by acidic water.

It's a vital breeding ground for many bird species, like the hen harrier.

and the Green Shack.

For centuries, peat has also been an integral part of Scottish life, cut and

dried and burned to heat houses, or malt barley to make whiskey.

In the 1970s, blanket bog was drained at a rapid rate.

Channels were dug, so this land could become commercial forest.

or farmland.

But scientists have now realized that peat is a vast carbon store.

It covers just 3 % of the world's land surface, but holds twice the amount of

carbon as all the world's forests.

All our futures depend on keeping every square mile of peatland intact.

As we reach the northern tip of mainland Britain, the land finally comes to an

end on a dramatic series of headlands.

At Duncan's Behead, the sea stacks just off the coast have been sculptured over

millennia, slowly eroding away due to the power of wind, rain and the North

Sea.

But our journey does not end here.

For around 6 ,000 years ago, settlers decided to make a voyage from the

just seven miles across the sea to the islands of Orkney.

Orkney's human settlers survived and thrived here for thousands of years.

The settlers had a dangerous journey.

The Pentland Firth is one of the most perilous sea straits in Europe.

The water between the principal islands is known as Scarpa Flow.

At the end of World War I, seven German warships were scuttled here.

Alton Cliffs are made of a distinctive red sandstone.

The Old Man of Hoy is the tallest sea stack in Britain.

Made from soft Orcadian sandstone, it sits on a lava base, which has so far

protected it from the waves.

But it's only a matter of time until these rocks succumb to the power of the

sea.

Around the coastlines of these islands and inland in their rivers, streams, and

lochs, Orkney is home to a tiny population of otters, possibly as few as

Otters don't migrate for long distances. They tend to settle where they can find

fresh water to drink and an abundant supply of food.

Over a kilogram a day of fish, crustaceans, or frogs.

or even small mammals and birds.

Otters are not only few in number, they're shy creatures.

But if you understand their habits and you're willing to spend the time, you

be lucky enough to spot them.

In Orkney, the settlers left behind extraordinary evidence of their

sophisticated life.

and culture.

On the main island is a magnificent ancient monument, the Ring of Brodgar.

In use around the same time as Stonehenge, there were originally 60

surrounded by a massive rock -cut ditch.

Four metres deep and over ten metres wide.

Nick Card is a world expert on Orkney's incredible archaeology.

This construct was built by Neolithic ancestors, the first farmers in Orkney.

who arrived here about 4 ,000 years ago, coming across the Pentland Firth,

probably in skin boats, coracle -type boats, bringing not only themselves, but

also their families, their livestock, their cereals, their grain, everything

that introduced this kind of Neolithic package, the change from the kind of

hunter -gatherer lifestyle to something more sedentary, something more complex.

There's been many, many theories about what the Stone Circle's function was.

But I think, apart from perhaps being something to do with observing the sky,

kind of astronomical observatory, which has often been quoted as a function, I

think it was a place where people came together. Maybe not just local people,

maybe people from right the way across Orkney, maybe from much further afield

well.

While hunter -gatherers lived in temporary dwellings...

The farmers of the Neolithic put down roots, building whole villages out of

stone.

This is a village of lots of interconnecting houses, but when it was

built, each one of these houses would have been standing almost in isolation,

very close proximity, but not with all this kind of subterranean appearance.

This is one of the best preserved houses at Scarrowbrae, and it kind of shows

the main structural elements to these buildings.

There's a short entrance passageway just over towards my right, and it opens up

into this relatively spacious room, which would have probably been occupied

family, or an extended family, in fact.

But as you enter, you would have been immediately confronted by this large

square hearth, which would have really been the heart of the house.

And opposite this stone edifice, which has been called a stone dresser, it's

where some people envisage where the Neolithic people kept all their kind of

prized possessions.

In 2002,

archaeologists made the find of a generation when they uncovered a massive

Neolithic complex without parallel in Western Europe, the nest of Brodgar.

When the summer weather makes it possible, excavations continue every

headed up by Nick Card himself.

At its height, this must have been a truly spectacular sight, not only these

massive monumental buildings, but the fact that they were contained or defined

by two massive walls, one at either end, the so -called Great Wall of Brodgar,

which was four to six metres wide and spanned the peninsula here.

It's immaculate, it's breathtaking.

But it's not just the structures, it's every other aspect of the site, all the

signs, a whole range of different materials, stone tools, ceramics, bone,

bone artefacts, but also art, Neolithic art, the largest assemblage of Neolithic

art anywhere in the UK.

In fact, there's been more Neolithic art found at the nest than every other site

combined in the UK.

So I think the nest was really something, a place of innovation, where

new designs of pottery and perhaps even the stone circles themselves initially

being created in Orkney.

Neolithic Orkney was a centre of innovation for ideas that spread out

Britain.

The Scottish Highlands may now be the least populated part of the United

Kingdom, but it has a strong claim to be its very greatest landscape.