Original subtitles

Scotland is a place of outstanding, spectacular landscapes.

A country that seems shaped to be seen from the sky.

For me, this is the best angle on Scotland's magnificent scenery.

But the view from above is about so much more than pretty pictures.

The view from above can offer a whole new angle

on the story of Scotland.

For more than a century,

aerial photographs have opened a window into our past.

For years, I've worked with thousands of these images.

They've helped me discover just how and why Scotland has changed.

I can't believe I'm about to say this,

but I remember when all of this was just fields.

The view from above can help us plan our future.

And it can unlock the secrets of the present day,

exploring our cities and how they were designed...

..for better or for worse.

Could you imagine them putting a motorway

through the heart of Edinburgh?

Our story begins at the dawn of Scottish aerial photography.

An era of brave, barnstorming aviators...

..risking absolutely everything for a picture.

If you were a new pilot, you might last a week or so.

We travel on through the first century of aerial imagery -

bringing archive photography to life,

recreating places that now exist only as photographs.

Now, it didn't make us all rich, but everybody had work.

From above, Scotland is beautiful, exhilarating,

unpredictable and never less than fascinating.

This is the story of Scotland from the sky.

For almost all of human history,

this is what it meant to get the view from above.

It was all very, very straightforward.

You just climb up a hill.

And in Scotland, there are plenty to choose from.

Ben A'an, above Loch Katrine, is a personal favourite.

Wow.

That's just spectacular, isn't it?

Doesn't really matter how long or how hard the climb is,

when there are views like this, it's worth it.

Today, a Scottish hill can be a day out,

a challenge,

a selfie opportunity.

But go back in history and it was far more than that.

In the Scotland of old, lookouts would come to a place like this

to spy on enemy clans advancing.

Roman surveyors would climb up here to plan their roads

through the glens.

Farmers would watch over their flocks.

All incredibly useful,

but all entirely dependent on having, well,

a conveniently placed hill.

That all changed in the first years of the 20th century.

The magical combination of powered flight and photography

sparked a revolution.

Now the view from above could be seen without the need for a hill,

and it could be preserved and studied.

This was a technology that would change how people

understood their world.

But it was a technology born in the most desperate of circumstances -

in the killing fields of the Great War.

These undulations are what remain of British First World War trenches.

You can see them snaking away through the long grass.

But this isn't the Somme, it's not Passchendaele -

this is Belhaven Bay, 30 miles east of Edinburgh.

From above, the tooth-like outline of these trenches

is remarkably clear...

..more than a century after they were dug

out of the East Lothian soil.

But the big question is, why were they here in the first place?

Allan Kilpatrick has studied the deepest secrets of Belhaven Bay.

So, Allan, why were the British military digging trenches

in East Lothian?

This is defined by the British as a site where invasion could happen,

so it has to be defended.

And you defend it by digging trenches.

If we were standing here, 100 years ago,

what would all of this have looked like?

Well, in many respects, just what it does now,

except that along the edge of the beach here,

just at the high water mark,

there would be a set of barbed wire, with machine-gun posts,

a communication trench at the rear.

So there's the defensive depth, so it's a whole system.

And how much remains today?

Well, we're fortunate in that there is some.

If I can put it in context, we have, at Belhaven Bay,

around about 700 metres of trench systems surviving.

If you went to Belgium, you wouldn't find 700 metres in length

of trench systems surviving anywhere in Belgium.

The defences that lined this coast were vitally important,

and because they were so important,

they were recorded and photographed,

which brings me to the second reason that I've come here.

Because one of the earliest known aerial photographs of Scotland

was taken just up there.

An image captured 100 years ago.

A permanent record of how we prepared for an invasion

that, thankfully, never came.

The coastline has changed dramatically,

with sea replaced by salt flats.

And behind the lines, the photograph shows a network

of practice trenches,

used to train new recruits before they were sent

to Belgium and France.

Today, those trenches are buried under forestry.

Ten miles west in the town of Haddington...

..another aerial photograph shows an even larger set

of practice trenches.

Built on land along the River Tyne, requisitioned from a country estate.

Today, it's the 11th hole at Haddington Golf Club.

Everyone in Scotland was touched by the war.

But these hardly-known photographs show just how much the landscape

has changed.

War wasn't something that happened somewhere else any more,

now it was on your own doorstep.

The aerial pictures of Haddington and Belhaven Bay

were taken from airships.

Patrolling the skies above the River Forth,

their role was to protect Royal Navy warships, which, in turn,

protected Scottish men and women from a German assault.

The view from above would prove vital in this war.

And thousands of young recruits from across the country were trained to

operate incredibly flimsy, primitive aircraft.

Today, I'm volunteering to experience

one of those aircraft for myself.

I'm already regretting it!

It's a Bristol BS2 fighter, built exactly 100 years ago.

The Bristol was operated by a crew of two -

the chap in front was the pilot,

the chap in the back was equipped with a machine gun and a camera.

The photographs they took from above the trenches would highlight

enemy positions, which could then be attacked.

I want to see how I'll shape up

as a First World War aerial photographer.

My pilot is the ever reassuring Jean-Michel.

I'm in this man's hands for the next 20 minutes.

That's not good news.

He looks like he knows what he's doing.

Look, OK, you're going to be photographing a bit more down.

Yeah.

I'm trying to recreate First World War aerial photography.

I'm going to be photographing four German flags

that have been positioned, hidden around this airfield.

No-one's shooting at us today, though, are they?

They're not shooting at us, no, no, but we could simulate that.

I'd rather we didn't. No, no!

Up close, the Bristol bears a worrying resemblance

to the balsa wood models I built as a child.

There's not really much to it.

But I'm sure it's going to be fine.

Apart from its engine,

the Bristol is built from wood and stretched canvas.

She's half the weight of a modern family car...

..and she carries no parachutes.

Look, I'll come clean -

I'm feeling just a little bit nervous here.

But it's too late to turn back now.

My mission is under way.

Three, two,

one, go!

Come to think of it, I could do with a drink to steady the nerves.

In the open cockpit, the backwash from the propeller

feels like a punch in the face.

Speech is pretty much impossible.

Worryingly, the only way to take pictures of the ground

whizzing away 1,000 feet below me...

is by loosening my seat belt.

Minutes into the flight and I'm starting to feel

a little less terrified.

In fact, I'm really beginning to enjoy myself.

Right, I think it's time for a few test photographs.

Which aren't up to much.

This is very tricky.

But in comparison to the actual World War I photographers,

I've got it easy.

Their cameras were the size of a briefcase.

They used fragile glass plate negatives.

And they had people shooting at them.

Back then, pilot and photographer were known to write notes

to communicate.

We're getting by with sign language and shouting,

like the best British tourists!

And our coordinated efforts are now bringing a degree of success.

Not at all nervous, I adopt my own personal brace position as we land.

I'm not going to lie, it feels great to be back down again.

Done.

Flags photographed.

Easy.

Well, easy for me maybe.

Much less so for the men who did it with bullets flying.

Alan Wakefield is an expert on the aviators of the First World War.

People who flew these two-seater missions

and flew in reconnaissance squadrons,

none of them were aces.

They've largely been forgotten.

They didn't win many VCs.

And life expectancy for the observers was very low, wasn't it?

If you were a new pilot, a new observer,

you might last a week or so, a week, two weeks.

The chances are, if you got through that period,

you were basically learning on the job,

so the longer you survived, the more chance you had

of going on and surviving.

The people who were fighter pilots, they were reported

in the newspapers, people wanted good morale stories.

But at the end of the day, it was these guys that

really sort of won the war in the air.

But taking the pictures was only the first stage.

The images captured from above had to be examined closely

to discover just what the enemy were up to.

This is a vertical neg from 1915.

You've got to remember, these are the actual negatives

that were exposed over the Western Front.

These are still in original envelopes with the map references -

this is a map reference here -

date and the negative number.

And what can we see here?

Here we can see a road with trees,

you can see the shadows of the poplar trees, typical French.

You know, road, country road, very straight, lined with trees.

And then we've got German front-line trench positions,

you know, the sort of dogtooth positions,

communication trenches coming back.

And these, what look like black spots, are actual shell holes.

And these, these were really used to win the war, weren't they?

They were. In 1918, 2.5 million photographs

were taken by the British alone...

In that one year? ..just in that one year.

The pilots and photographers risked everything

to bring their services to the Army's top brass.

When the war ended, they saw their opportunity to bring their talents

to a new audience - the great British public.

And they started in London.

Here, a band of demob-happy wartime aviators came together

to create Britain's first aerial photography company.

They called themselves Aerofilms.

Wow!

Aerofilms flew primitive aircraft at extremely low altitudes over London.

The results were spectacular.

Here, at Tower Bridge, they captured a 1920s traffic jam.

Their cameras peered down on Buckingham Palace.

CHEERING

They gate-crashed the rugby at Twickenham.

And, unintentionally, the duck pond at Southwark Park.

DUCKS QUACK

Their crews were dashing, thoroughly modern and unflinchingly brave.

I'm on the west walkway of Tower Bridge.

And this is a view that won't appeal to everybody,

but I think it's pretty sensational.

Aerofilms showed Londoners an entirely new city,

a city they'd never seen before.

You could say it was the gods' eye view.

This new technology, imported from the military,

was little short of a revolution,

and the revolution was spreading north.

Aerofilms arrived in Scotland in 1927.

One of their first assignments was inspired

by a great Glasgow tradition -

a pleasure cruise down the Clyde coast.

Today, we're making that same journey,

followed not by a Aerofilms biplane, but by a modern drone.

Our mission is to recreate a wonderful photograph

captured by Aerofilms 90 years ago.

It featured a paddle steamer just like this,

the famous Waverley...

..as she arrived at Largs Pier.

And we're going to try to put our drone in the same spot today.

Just bring it round.

Slowly.

That's it, that's it.

Perfect.

The Aerofilms picture was taken on a beautiful sunny day.

90 years on and the grassy promenade has been lost

to amusement arcades and a car park.

The empty site beside St Columba's Church

is now a Largs institution -

Nardini's cafe.

You can see a crowd gathered on the L-shaped pier,

adapted now for the modern ferry.

Aerofilms had captured a magical moment from 1,000 feet above Largs.

A picture postcard memory,

shared by generations of Scots.

Of course, we don't see this photograph in the same way

that the people of 1927 would have seen it.

Back then, just a few thousand Scots had ever been in an aircraft.

Only a tiny fraction of the population would have

seen this kind of view.

It must have filled them with wonder, with awe.

Beginning that day in 1927,

Aerofilms would capture 100,000 photographs of Scotland.

Those images now form part of

Scotland's National Collection of Aerial Photography,

held in the vaults of Historic Environment Scotland,

where I work.

They are a fascinating window into the forgotten worlds

of our parents and grandparents

and the places they would have known.

The old Aerofilms albums are like a flick book of the past.

This is one of my favourites.

It's Perthshire, where I grew up.

Pilot and photographer would fly along,

ticking off a list of key targets, and then afterwards,

they'd paste them in here, one after the other.

It offers a fascinating insight into how and where

these pioneer photographers operated.

I've always wanted to see for myself just how much, or how little,

Scotland's landscapes have changed

since those early Aerofilms pictures.

And where better to start than my old stamping ground?

So, I'm heading into the Perthshire countryside

for another aerial experiment.

We're not using another veteran aircraft, thank goodness.

We're using this. It's a Twin Squirrel helicopter.

It's what used in the film and television industry.

And this is what makes all the difference -

a preposterously expensive gimbal system.

It keeps the image perfectly steady as the aircraft moves around.

The Aerofilms crews would have set off with a target list,

and this is mine.

Starting at Auchterarder, heading to Perth,

onto Blairgowrie and then on northwards.

There's two vital parts to today's mission.

First, to get a sense of how Aerofilms operated,

moving rapidly from target to target.

But also to use their photographs of 1930s Perthshire

to see just how things have changed.

I'll be working closely with pilot David Blane...

..and aerial photographer Peter Jones,

to match up old and new images.

Our first stop is Auchterarder.

I've never flown over my hometown before.

It's that wonderful moment where the familiar

becomes something completely different.

It takes a few moments to get ourselves lined up

with the old photograph.

That church there with the square, with the spire?

Yes, that one.

Over the tower? Yeah.

But when the two images are perfectly aligned...

I think that's probably not too far off there.

..you can see just how the town has changed.

1930s Auchterarder had a population of just over 2,000,

half the number of today.

It was known as the lang toon...

..with over a mile of main road as its spine.

Now it's got some middle-aged spread.

I can't believe I'm about to say this,

but I remember when all of this was just fields.

Everyone going north or south used to have

to drive through Auchterarder.

Now it's bypassed by the A9,

a major road that didn't even exist when the Aerofilms pioneers

flew onto our next destination, Perth.

Aeriel photography can show you remarkable changes,

but it can also show you what stays the same.

Looking at the picture of central Perth now, it's very similar.

It's remarkably well preserved.

But across the city, away from the river,

the Aerofilms photographs point towards some radical changes,

with entire industries wiped from the map.

In 1930s Perth, the Pullar & Sons dye works

was the largest employer in town.

2,000 people laundered and dyed fabrics,

arriving on trains from 7,000 agents all across the country.

Today, the factories have all gone,

the railways have all gone.

And, like everything else, it's a retail park.

Again, we're headed north,

through scenery that's attracted generations of photographers.

Next stop, Blairgowrie.

The railway station and branch line that once shipped tonnes

of locally grown fruit is now a supermarket,

and that's not the only change.

Blairgowrie was a town that was built around its mills.

Now they've all gone.

Industries that once employed 1,500 people...

..disappeared.

Just one short flight, armed with a handful of old photographs,

really brings home the relentless pace of change

in how Scotland lives and works.

Our final destination is Blair Castle.

The official home of the Duke of Atholl,

the only man in Britain with a private army.

The castle was photographed by Aerofilms in 1933.

Just three years later, it became the first Scottish stately home

to open to the public.

A landmark moment for Scotland's growing tourist industry.

It's still the sort of grand place where you dearly

want to make an entrance.

Hopefully, this will do.

I've landed in the grounds of the castle to meet Leslie Ferguson.

Leslie's spent years studying how those Aerofilms pioneers operated.

Leslie, there was a huge variety to the subjects that Aerofilms

were photographing, from grand castles to market towns,

to big factories. How did they choose their targets?

Well, you have to remember that Aerofilms were a business.

They were out to make money.

And photographing places like this, photographing factories,

they were wanting to sell their photographs.

And they were looking at houses, they were looking at hotels.

The tourism industry in the 1930s was booming,

and what more to attract people to your hotel

than a nice aerial photograph?

And one of their advertising phrases was,

"Looking down to build business up."

Exactly, and it was that - this is different.

Few people see the company from the air.

And in some of the photographs, you actually see people on the ground

looking up because, "Oh, there's a plane."

It was that rare.

For us, looking at it now, it's telling the stories of the past,

the factories grandfathers worked in.

That's what people are interested in.

There's so many stories to tell from the archive.

Back in the 1930s, Aerofilms pilots and aerial photographers

would have been the astronauts of their day -

glamorous, dashing risk-takers.

And few were as dashing or courageous

as Douglas Douglas-Hamilton.

A Scottish aristocrat, champion boxer

and RAF squadron leader.

In 1932, he was approached by John Buchan, no less,

the famous author of The 39 Steps,

to lead an audacious expedition -

to photograph the summit of Mount Everest from above.

I've come to Lennoxlove House near Haddington to meet his son...

..Lord James Douglas-Hamilton.

This was almost like the space race of its day.

It was. I think they saw it as the last great challenge

on the world's surface before space travel.

And they thought that the Royal Air Force should have

a major role in this connection.

I mean, your father made light of the dangers,

but actually this was an exceptionally dangerous expedition.

Well, they had to be very careful.

If anything went wrong...

For example, the oxygen supply - of course, they had open cockpits -

they could survive for half a minute without losing consciousness,

but not much longer.

In February 1933,

Douglas-Hamilton and fellow Scottish pilot David McIntyre

set out for India and Everest.

Lord James and I sat down to watch the Oscar-winning documentary

that followed their progress.

And this is them about to head off. They're about to head off.

They couldn't even have parachutes.

So, they knew that if anything went wrong...

they wouldn't survive.

Is that the summit of Everest we can see there?

It looks like it.

I believe it is.

Closing on the summit, the aircraft were buffeted

by ferocious downdraughts,

and one of the cameramen fractured his oxygen pipe.

He tries to tie his handkerchief around it.

All this time, he would be getting a little oxygen,

but nothing like the amount he should be getting.

The two pilots pressed on,

and at 10:05am on the 3rd of April, 1933,

they looked down on the summit of Everest.

Does it make you feel proud that he did this?

Well, I think it was a triumph to have done it successfully...

..and to have lived to tell the tale.

The two Scottish pilots brought their crews safely back to base,

their RAF-issue stiff-upper lips intact.

THEY LAUGH

The understatement of the century, perhaps.

Well, he was.

But immediately after this, they went for a swim

in a pool infested with crocodiles.

But the threat of crocodiles seemed as nothing in comparison

to flying over the highest mountain in the world.

There's no doubt that Scottish aviation in the 1930s

was dominated by moustachioed ex-RAF chaps.

But the photographs they took captured rich and poor alike.

The men who worked in the shipyards

that lined the River Clyde knew poverty all too well.

In the early 1930s, in John Brown's Clydebank yard,

construction on the Cunard Line, Queen Mary,

was delayed three years by the financial collapse

of the Great Depression.

A third of Glaswegians were unemployed.

Yet, the shipyard workers and the people of the city

still turned out in their hundreds of thousands,

in the pouring rain,

to see the launch of the ship that would become

the world's fastest liner.

NEWSREEL: Now the great day has arrived.

A quarter of a million spectators surround the huge vessel.

It's raining, but that hardly matters.

The rudder at her stern strikes the water,

and gracefully her long hull glides down the slipway.

The Mary was launched in September, 1934.

She slid into the Clyde just over there,

and she was pulled back into this basin.

She was so large, 1,020 feet long,

that the builders had to cut this little V-shaped nick

into the harbour wall

so that her bum wouldn't stick too far out into the Clyde.

A year after her launch,

the Queen Mary began her first journey down the Clyde.

Every available plane at Renfrew Airfield

was hired out to photographers.

There were so many cameras in the sky,

the Air Ministry imposed air traffic controls

to avoid mid-flight collisions.

Everyone wanted to watch the most glamorous ship in the world

heading out to the open sea.

NEWSREEL: The Queen Mary begins her mercantile career.

May she proudly carry the Blue Ensign on 1,000 happy voyages.

John Brown's shipyard was just over here, and directly below me,

2,000 of its men worked on the Queen Mary.

But there's more. Come with me.

Over here, there was another massive industrial concern -

the Singer sewing machine factory,

one of the largest factories of its kind in the world.

At peak, it employed over 16,000 people.

Singers had its own fire brigade,

police station and ambulance service,

a pipe band,

football teams

and a host of clubs.

Today, all trace of the factory is gone.

Replaced by green avenues and a modern business park.

A world away from the place Frances Railton

first encountered back in 1956.

Some of the departments were actually quite scary.

Big machines all going, so much noise,

and the smell of oil.

It's a funny thing, but each factory seemed to have

its own individual oil smell.

You could tell a Singer worker from a John Brown's worker

by the smell of their overalls, you know?

And was there a strong social life in the factory?

Yes, there was. People, for a start off, made friends in here, as I did,

who have stayed friends for the rest of their lives.

But there were lots of things went on.

One of the main things, of course, was having the Singer Gala,

or the games, people racing and doing all that sort of thing,

and athletic things.

There was also, they would have a Singer Queen.

Were you one of the Singer Queens? No.

No, I'm afraid not.

How do you feel when, you know, driving around it now,

to think of a structure, a factory of that size,

that's now entirely gone?

It just seems so impossible.

All of these trees and all these little,

low buildings bear no resemblance to the big, old brick...

..edifices that they had, you know?

Today, the massive Singer factory is just a memory.

A million square feet of work space

squeezed between the Forth and Clyde Canal

and the Glasgow to Dumbarton railway line.

At its peak, the factory could produce some 500,000

sewing machines a year.

Rising above it,

the clock tower was once the largest timekeeper in the world.

For Singers and Clydebank, the clock stopped in 1963...

..and the factory closed completely in 1980.

Do you remember it being demolished?

I think we were... Most of us were...

..a bit too upset to really pay an awful lot of attention to it.

When I think back to the size of the clock, I can't...

It seems so hard to believe that they were able

to pull all that down.

There's no monument or marker to what was once

the world's biggest factory.

A key part of Scotland's industrial heritage

is preserved only in photographs.

And as the 1930s drew to a close,

more sinister photographs would be taken

of Clydebank's factories and shipyards.

This picture was taken by a German civilian aircraft.

The writing betrays its purpose.

It was a list of targets.

And target A was John Brown's shipyard.

15 months after this photograph was taken,

over 500 died in the Clydebank Blitz.

In the build-up to the Second World War,

the Luftwaffe started photographing key sites all across Scotland.

It ranged from the obvious,

like the Rolls-Royce Spitfire engine factory at Hillington,

and the oil refinery at Grangemouth,

to other more obscure targets, like Benbecula.

All of Scotland was in the crosshairs.

Aerial photography was going back to war.

As the Germans took photographs of the British,

the British took photographs of the Germans.

Now using specially adapted Spitfires,

then the fastest aircraft in the world...

..with cameras that could capture pin-sharp images

from tens of thousands of feet.

Some of the souped-up Spitfires were based here, at Wick Airfield,

in Scotland's far north-eastern corner.

And from one of those aircraft came one photograph

that would change the course of the war.

Just before 11am on the 21st of May, 1941,

Flight Officer Michael Suckling

climbed into the cockpit of his Spitfire.

His mission was to find and photograph the largest ship

in the German fleet - the Bismarck.

The 20-year-old pilot headed north.

He refuelled at Sumburgh,

then set a course for the Norwegian town of Bergen.

Two hours after take-off, at 1:15pm, Suckling found his prey.

At a height of 25,000 feet, he pressed the trigger on his camera.

At 2:30pm, Suckling landed back at Wick.

The negative was developed within minutes,

and Suckling himself flew it on to London.

His single photograph set in train a massive naval pursuit.

The Bismarck rushed for the open waters of the North Atlantic...

..hunted down by the Royal Navy.

And six days after Suckling took his photograph,

the Bismarck and 2,000 of her crew...

..lay at the bottom of the sea.

In this war, the RAF's eyes in the sky were deadly.

Aircraft could operate further and faster behind enemy lines

than ever before.

What could and what couldn't be seen was now of vital importance.

Less well known than the photograph that sunk the Bismarck

are the efforts that were taken to protect Wick's airfield.

Six miles to the south, in the fields around

the village of Sarclet...

..an incredible plan was put into action.

A band of local men brought horses onto the peat bog.

They were in serious danger of sinking deep into the mud,

but somehow they ploughed this field.

Then they rolled it, spread quarry dust and limestone on top.

What they achieved is almost impossible to see from the ground,

but entirely possible to see from the air.

What they had to build was a replica of Wick Airfield's three runways,

at exactly 70% of the size of the original.

And at night, Sarclet's bogus airfield was lit up

by powerful electric lights.

All part of an elaborate ploy to protect the genuine airfield.

And it was a ploy that worked.

The fake airfield was bombed on a number of occasions.

Today, from the air, the craters are still visible.

During the war, there was an obsession with

staying dark, staying hidden.

But here, in Sarclet, their job was to light up the night sky,

to distract the German bombers, take them away from the airfield at Wick

to the dummy airfield just over there.

They were putting themselves and their families

right in the firing line.

World War II Caithness was Britain's forgotten front.

Heavily defended against the threat of German invasion,

with three huge airfields,

radar stations,

wireless stations,

and dozens of military camps.

I've been amazed at just how much of World War II remains today.

None more fascinating than Wick's old bomb store.

From above, its design is revealed,

with each building isolated from the other by earth banks

topped by concrete.

Protection against explosion.

The bombs would come out of these doors,

just north of the main runway,

and they'd be slung under these rails above me,

and they'd be loaded onto aircraft bound for Nazi-occupied Europe.

This was just one part of a massive military complex,

spreading for miles all around Caithness.

In May 1945,

Caithness and the whole of Scotland

celebrated victory in Europe.

In the aftermath, Scotland prepared for a whole new battle -

to feed a hungry nation...

..to build homes fit for wartime heroes...

..and to bring light and energy to the most remote parts

of the country.

To understand how the landscape of the post-war Scotland changed...

..I've taken the high road to the west Highlands...

..to a windy mountain pass on the southern edge of Loch Cluanie.

My normal commute's 20 minutes in through the south side of Edinburgh.

You might hit a bit of traffic, maybe some roadworks.

This is a bit different.

Believe it or not, this potholed, overgrown track

was once a main road.

In the 1950s, if you were driving from Skye to Edinburgh,

you'd quite possibly have come along here.

The road's pretty overgrown now,

but actually if you look around, you can still see the traces

of the old infrastructure,

the walls that were here.

This really was a major road.

Oh, that was a pothole.

Very bumpy.

Today, the road is privately owned.

But if you did travel along it, hoping to reach Edinburgh...

..then I'm sorry to say...

..you'd be very disappointed.

It's not so much the case that the road stops here.

It would be more accurate to say that it continues, just underwater.

To understand what's happened here,

we need to look at some aerial photographs.

These images were taken by the RAF in 1947.

They show the road I've just taken,

winding its way south to this very point

where it crosses Loch Loyne.

Today, as we've seen, it's all very different.

The level of the loch is higher,

and the road across it is just a memory.

Taken just a few miles north,

these photographs show where my journey began,

at Loch Cluanie.

These were taken in 1948.

Again, the landscape has changed dramatically.

Buildings alongside the loch have disappeared

and the road that ran just to the north

has climbed further up the hill.

So what was the magical power that moved roads and raised the level

of lochs?

The answer, of course, was electricity.

In the years after the war, only one croft in every 100 had electricity.

To remedy that, the nationalised hydroelectric board

built 78 dams and 54 power stations.

Construction took 20 years and brought huge changes

to Scotland's landscape.

Even today, parts of Loch Cluanie are fringed with tree stumps.

Their tops all lopped off before the planned flooding.

The trees were not the only victims.

The men and women who lived along the shores of Loch Cluanie

were flooded out of their homes.

But on special days, when the water is very low,

those homes emerge from the dark waters.

Duncan MacLeod grew up in a croft alongside Loch Cluanie.

You knew people who lived here? I knew the family that lived

in that house where the chimneys are.

They were McCraes and they were shepherds.

There was two brothers, their mother,

one of the brother's wives, and three of a family.

And how did they feel when they were told they had to move?

I don't think they would have been very happy because...

..in those days, work wasn't that easy to get.

With the house being a tied house,

after they moved from here, they moved from house to house.

I remember because they had nowhere to go.

Were you ever inside these houses?

I was in this house. I was in this house quite a number of times.

The road goes here across the bridge and there was quite steep steps

going down to the front door of the house.

I remember quite distinctly.

It wasn't a big house, it was a very small house.

I remember it being very, very small.

Of course, they had no electricity, nothing like that.

It was all Tilley lamps.

And you used to play here as a child?

I used to play here. I used to play shinty here on the road.

It's only one of the flat areas, there was no cars then.

You could probably play for an hour before a car would come.

Sections of that old road can still be seen, snaking through the glen.

As water levels rose through the late 1950s,

it too was sacrificed to the encroaching loch.

A new high road was built to replace it.

But Duncan can remember his father's last,

valiant attempt to drive the low road.

We came along this road, myself and my father.

We set off from Cluanie and came along past here,

and all of a sudden, we came on the loch where it had come over

the road overnight, and we just turned back.

Was that an emotional journey with your father?

It was, it was. It stuck in my memory.

I remember it quite vividly.

And I think, I remember my father's emotion.

That was the last time he was going along this road, and that was it.

End of a story for him.

End of a story.

From above, it was clear the landscape of post-war Scotland

was changing dramatically.

Hydroelectric schemes were one part.

But so too was the massive increase in forestry...

..and also farmland,

as the country looked to become increasingly self-sufficient.

This rush to put every acre of the land to use

would inevitably become controversial.

Particularly when progress collided with Scotland's past.

I've come to the hills above Newburgh in northern Fife.

1,500 years ago, the local people chose this very spot

to build a well defended hillfort.

An aerial photograph, taken in the 1930s,

shows the terraced defences that once protected the top of the hill.

But in the 1950s, after much controversy,

the government decided that the archaeology on top of the hill

was much less important than the stones beneath it.

And the ancient fort gave way to this.

Clatchard Craig Quarry.

Within ten years,

the digging here would obliterate

all trace of the ancient fort.

For some, this was cultural vandalism.

History lost to the bulldozers.

But for others, the present was more important.

These stones would build and improve roads and railways.

And with over 1,500 recorded hill forts in Scotland...

..would we really miss one?

The arguments between preserving the past and building the future

would continue, and the view from above would remain at the heart

of Scotland's story.

Next time, our towns and cities.

How the view from above has transformed

the way we understand them

and make them.

From the Georgian elegance of Edinburgh's New Town,

to the present-day rebirth of Dundee,

the aerial view has always been vital.