Original subtitles

Scotland is one of the most beautiful,

most photographed countries in the world.

Wow. Look at that rainbow.

That's spectacular.

It's a place that seems shaped to be seen from the sky.

Oh, yes. Look at that.

Pictures taken from above have the power to astound

and to amaze.

The view from above isn't just about spectacular mountains

and dramatic castles...

..the view from above

offers a whole new way of understanding our history.

I'm James Crawford,

and I want aerial photography to take you on a journey.

I'll be using everything from fascinating old imagery

to modern aerial footage to uncover the secrets of our past.

In this film, we'll be looking down on the history

of Scotland's industry...

..using the view from above to uncover where we worked...

..and the remarkable things we built.

I'll be taking to the skies, hunting down traces of the past...

That is Scotland's very first motorway.

..exploring the places we've lost.

I enjoyed it. It was a filthy, dirty hole...

I'm following in the footsteps of my father

to Shetland and the oil boom.

And there we are. Me on my dad's shoulder.

This is the story of Scotland's industry, told from the sky.

Think of the words "Scotland" and "industry".

You'd picture grimy cities...

..mines, mills and railways.

You probably wouldn't picture a beautiful boat trip

on the west coast of Scotland.

Just south of Oban, there's a whole network of islands.

I've headed off from Cuan Sound to one of the smallest - Belnahua.

Traces of Scottish industry can be found in the most remote,

most inaccessible places.

That's why I'm making a commando-style landing

on this forgotten island with a fascinating story.

Welcome to the island of Belnahua.

Population...

..me.

It's a genuinely eerie place.

The rusting machinery and ruined buildings

point to Belnahua's industrial past...

..and to a work that changed the entire island forever.

To understand what happened here, what industry did to this island,

it helps enormously to see it from the sky.

The island of Belnahua has been hollowed out.

These were once massive quarries over 60 feet deep,

but now flooded by the sea...

..dug away for one bustling business.

That business was the production of this - slate.

Quarrying slate was hard manual labour and frequently dangerous.

The local product had these distinctive flecks of fool's gold.

And for every single piece of slate produced,

nine imperfect ones were left behind.

Those rejects can be found today scattered all across the island.

At the industry's peak at the end of the 19th century,

this tiny island was home to over 200 people.

Fiona Cruickshank's great-aunt worked here

in the schoolroom, unused now for over a century.

She was the classroom assistant on Belnahua and she would come over.

My gran used to tell us this story of her,

and she would talk about auntie Polly being here

and playing the piano for the children.

What were conditions like here?

It must have been very dangerous, actually,

because you're living so close to the quarries and, you know,

heavy machinery - very noisy - must have been pretty grim.

Slate dust is not nice. It's horrible.

It gets into your skin

and washing your clothes was really difficult

for the folk around here because there was a lack of water.

Although the quarries were flooding with sea water,

fresh water itself was difficult to get hold of.

So the women used to get in the boat once a week

and go way down to Lunga, do their washing,

dry their clothes on the heather

and then they would come back on the next tide...

Would bring it back to get filthy... To get filthy again, yeah.

The gold flecked slate of Belnahua adorns great buildings.

Scottish castles.

It was used as far away as Nova Scotia.

The industry continued from as long ago as the 17th century

to the early 1900s.

But by 1920, the sea had broken into the deep quarries

and flooded them, making them useless.

The slate industry was ending.

Today, the workers cottages still stand in neat rows,

ironically without their slate roofs.

With some sites, it's hard to get an idea.

You've got to work at thinking of what life was like.

This isn't one of them. It's like a ghost town.

It's like the people just packed up their stuff, their goods,

their gear, got on a boat and left everything behind them.

You can imagine the noise, the smells, the sound.

It's all here, crumbling slowly back into the island.

From the air, Belnahua's story becomes starkly clear.

How this remote place provided the natural resource

that supported a whole community.

But, also, how industry never stands still.

It uses what it can then moves on.

And as it is for this one tiny island,

so it is for the rest of our country.

I've become fascinated by the power of the view from above

to reveal how the remains of industry

are still scattered all around Scotland.

Ten years ago,

I came to work here in the archives of Historic Environment Scotland.

What caught my eye more than anything else

were these - aerial photographs.

These vaults hold some 1.6 million photos

going from the beginning of the 20th century

all the way up to the present day.

From up high, Scotland's transformed.

You can read the landscape itself,

see how we've written on it again and again.

Our industry has always relied on good transport links,

be it by sea or land.

And aerial photos reveal

how the road network has developed over time.

From drovers' tracks...

..to General Wade's roads of the 18th century...

..to motorway junctions outside Glasgow.

But now I'm going in search of Scotland's very first main road.

I'm calling on a favour from my old friend William MacInnes

to hunt down this ancient highway.

He's arranged to pick me up at an airstrip near Edinburgh,

in his handsome Tiger Moth.

So, William, we're about to use a 70-year-old aircraft

to try and find a 2,000-year-old road.

Do you fancy our chances?

Yes, I think we've got a pretty good chance.

An old aircraft like this doesn't travel very fast

so we'll have plenty of time to look out over the cockpit window.

And how are the flying conditions looking today?

The flying conditions today are excellent.

What I'm really pleased about is

the day's only going to get better.

The winds are light, and I think

we should have a fairly free, smooth ride across the Lammermoors.

But at 2,000ft, it's going to be cold.

It's going to be very cold. So I've got all my thermals on.

I see you have as well.

So, yeah, that's going to be important.

Going up in a vintage biplane is wonderful and terrifying

all at the same time...

Shoulder one. ..but to me it's really the best way to see history

brought to life...

..the closest you'll come to time travel.

We'll be heading south towards the Borders in search of our road.

All right, Jamie. You ready? I'm ready, yeah. Let's go. Let's go.

From up here, the views are truly awe-inspiring.

That is beautiful. Oh, just spectacular.

Oh, there's so much pattern in the...

..in the fields and everything.

It's amazing. Yeah.

We're looking for the remains of a road called Dere Street,

constructed by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

But, really, it's no street.

It ran from the city of York northwards.

Built decades before Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine Wall.

200 miles long and the first and only main road into Scotland.

You'd imagine a route this old would have disappeared completely

but just east of Jedburgh, we finally spot some faint traces.

I'll just do a little orbit round here.

So I think that's Dere Street underneath us. Yeah, it is. It is.

OK, I'm just going to gently turn around to the right.

That's it. That's it below us. Yeah.

Nice stone wall just helps you see the route it takes

through the countryside. Yes.

Now we're going right down the road.

Got a stunning view of it. Yeah.

That is Scotland's very first motorway.

It's only really cows that are travelling on it these days. Yeah.

This is one of the best sections, you can really see very clearly...

Look at that. ..of how that road must have looked.

The view from above reveals the sheer scale of the road

and the ambitions of those early Roman builders.

We can also see how the road has changed over the centuries.

That's it, now it becomes a modern road.

Yeah. That's the transition.

It's amazing to think the number of armies

who've marched up and down this road.

Wow.

On the ground, you can see up close the Roman design

that allowed Dere Street to survive through time.

Here, I'm meeting historian Richard Oram to find out more

about how this ancient road helped trade and industry.

So the Romans left just a couple of centuries after they arrived.

What happened to the road after that?

Well, the road basically stays here

and it becomes, from the point of the Roman departure,

it starts to become this major boundary feature in the landscape.

Mostly we hear about this being a military road, an invader's road.

But was there more travelling up and down it than just soldiers?

Well, the presence of the road allows people to begin to push back

into the country on either side of it.

Begin to open it up for agriculture, open up to exploitation,

and so the roadway is something that is physically

going to lead to the transformation of the landscape.

So could you say that this was a road that was ahead of its time?

For this area, yes.

It's breaking into a territory that had seen nothing of its kind before

and it wasn't going to see anything of its kind again

for a few centuries.

Dere Street was a vital route, but for hundreds of years

it was virtually the only major road in Scotland.

The time of the roads would come, but for almost all of our history,

industry relied on access to two things - resources and the sea.

If you had both of them together,

then you could start a business pretty much anywhere.

Like here, in the northwest highlands in Wester Ross.

The land around Loch Maree

is picture postcard Highland wilderness...

..but I'm taking a boat across the loch

to what was, believe it or not, a massive industrial centre.

And I'm looking for traces of that industry

hidden away within Letterewe Forest.

It should be said that, for a forest,

there's rather less in the way of trees than you might imagine.

Once these hillsides were swathed in oak, pine, holly, birch and elm.

The bare slopes today hint at a very different story of this landscape,

because it was here that Scotland's iron industry

first sparked into life.

In a time before coal, trees fed the fires of industry.

As to where those fires were placed,

the name of this small burn is a bit of a clue.

In Gaelic, it's called

Abhainn An Fhuirneis - The River Of The Furnace.

And here are the faint remains of what would become

one of the country's biggest industries.

Four centuries ago,

this was the site of Scotland's first-ever blast furnace.

Using the wood from the surrounding forests

to make ferocious heat to create iron.

Today, all that remain are slabs of sandstone

and this heap of slag - a waste product from the smelting process.

The rest is all gone.

But in the 1600s,

this area was the beating heart of iron production in Scotland.

A whole landscape put to work.

Around Loch Maree, 300 acres of forest a year were felled

and burned to make charcoal for the furnaces.

Some of the iron ore came from local deposits.

And easy access to the sea allowed boats to bring in additional ore

and take away processed metal.

Just north of the loch, you can find the remains of another blast furnace

used to smelt the iron. This one better preserved.

The perfect place to meet Dr Karen Buchanan

who studied the industries of this remote area.

This site is called A 'Cheardach Dhearg -

The Red Smiddy.

Behind us you can see the remains of the stack of the blast furnace.

And who was buying the iron? Where was it going to?

We think the iron was going to the Netherlands.

In the literature, we're told that they were making great guns.

In other words, cannon on these sites.

So an early example of the arms trade?

Exactly. In the most unlikely of places.

Who'd have thought that Loch Maree

was the birthplace of Scotland's heavy industry -

that cannon and thousands of tonnes of iron

came from this tranquil spot?

It's quite remarkable that we have these sites of such importance

in what is now perceived to be

such a remote and under-industrialised area.

It's not what people expect from industry, is it?

No, indeed.

What happened here at Loch Maree couldn't last.

The forests were decimated

and deposits of local iron ore dwindled.

The business used up this landscape and then abandoned it.

But from these unlikely beginnings grew a massive industry

at the heart of Scotland's Industrial Revolution.

The Central Belt of Scotland.

This is where we traditionally think heavy industry was born.

No wonder, because in 1759 an ironworks was built

close to Falkirk that was to last for over 200 years.

The Carron Ironworks became one of the largest

and most important in the world.

In this 1928 photograph,

you can see its chimneys belching smoke.

But today just modern warehouses remain, and a single large wall.

This is the southern wall of the Carron Ironworks.

This place changed everything.

This was the Industrial Revolution.

You get a sense of the impact of Carron in this painting from 1824.

The smoke from the smelting

pouring out over the quiet fields of Falkirk...

..Scotland's countryside colliding with heavy industry.

The Carron Ironworks led the way for the vast industrial sites

that sprang up all over the Central Belt.

Coal mines, quarries, factories and shipyards...

..with thousands of workers flocking to feed this great industrial beast.

Carron's site near Falkirk

was the perfect place to harness the natural resources needed for iron.

Ore came from Bo'ness,

and newly discovered coal from the Shieldhill mine.

Canals and railways made it easier to transport materials.

Water for the works came from the River Carron,

diverted into huge reservoirs which today have been reclaimed by nature.

Local lad David Mitchell is a colleague

from Historic Environment Scotland and an expert on Carron's history.

You've got a real passion for iron work,

do you think that came from growing up so close to a site like this?

I've spent 25 years researching the firms

and Scotland was the largest exporter of

architectural iron products in the world for about 80 years.

And it's something that's not widely known.

So we have railway stations in Brazil,

and Maharaja's palaces in India that were all made in Scotland.

And latterly they also produced domestic castings,

architectural work like the front facade of Harvey Nicks in London,

down to cast iron pots and pans.

And there are a number of

famous names associated with this site, aren't there?

Yes. James Watt. Probably the earliest

and probably the most important who was putting together a steam engine

at Kinneil House, not so far from here.

And we have one of his first cylinders cast by Carron Company,

actually built into the front facade of what's left of the foundry.

But to begin with,

the factory's most famous product was also its most deadly.

Cannon.

Like this one still manning the parapet of Fort George

just northeast of Inverness.

Every cannon was marked by its maker with the date of its production

and you can still see it here.

Carron, 1800.

Trafalgar.

Waterloo.

The American War of Independence.

The Crimean War.

For some 200 years, no major battle happened in the world

without row after row of Falkirk iron.

After Carron, there was no going back.

Scotland was changed for good.

Every square inch of land was weighed and measured for its worth.

Everywhere was fair game

in the onward march of Scottish industry.

The Carron Ironworks relied heavily on coal found locally...

..as did dozens of other Scottish industries,

some all but forgotten today.

This is the Fife coast, best known today for pretty harbours

and picturesque golf courses, and fish suppers.

But if you'd come here 200 years ago you would have been

standing at the heart of a massive industrial operation,

producing something that changed how we traded, lived, even how we ate.

I'll give you a clue.

My fish supper wouldn't be the same without it.

Salt.

Just next to the village of St Monans are nine very curious shapes.

They're all that remain of an industrial plant

converting sea water into salt.

But to understand how it all worked,

you really need to look down on the whole site from the air.

In a time before freezers, salt was highly valuable

because it could preserve meat and fish.

And sites for salt production

were scattered all around the coast of Scotland.

But one of the largest and most impressive from the air

is here at St Monans.

Joining me is Jo Hambly,

who studied the lost industry of the salt masters -

the one-time producers of what was known as Scotland's white gold.

How did they make salt?

It's a very simple process.

Over here is a sea full of salt water, so that's their raw material.

And over here is coal.

And salt making was always associated with a colliery.

So, here for example, it's called the Newark Coal And Salt Work.

So the two go hand-in-hand.

So, for it's time, was this quite sophisticated?

It was really sophisticated and it was the...

It produced the most salt in Scotland.

A mountainous 430 tonnes a year.

An aerial view shows how salt water

could be drawn along this man-made channel

cut into the rocky coast, still visible today.

This wind engine pumped the water up and into the nine Pan Houses.

So, Joe, we're standing in the ruins of the Pan House.

What would be happening here?

Well, we're actually standing in the coal chute.

So if we were here when this building was operational,

there'd be a little mini railway here with wagons on it,

and those wagons would be full of coal.

This coal was used to fuel fires set up under a large metal pan.

The pan was filled with sea water,

and the heat would evaporate off the liquid

leaving the precious salt behind.

And where we're standing now

is where they would have worked the pan.

So the pan would have been in this hole here...

..and, then, it's like magic.

Suddenly the salt starts crystallising out of the water

when it gets to a certain concentration...

..and, then, imagine a big, like, garden rake...

..and they would just pull it to the side...

..and then pile up the salt on one side of the pan.

But there would still be liquid...

As it crystallised. ..as it crystallised,

but there would still be liquid in the other part of the pan.

Salt production in Scotland lasted till as recently as the 1950s.

But salt was just one cog of the Industrial Revolution,

so much of it relying on coal.

Coal also revolutionised how we travelled,

with the development of steam trains.

Railways became the hallmark of a new industrial Scotland,

moving people and resources to every corner of the country.

A network once far more extensive than it is today.

This is the fate of many old railway lines.

The hurtling rush of iron and steam

replaced by simple pedal power.

This track was built

by the old Callander And Oban Railway 150 years ago.

To climb up the glen, the incline was 1/60 for six miles.

Tough going for a train hauling tonnes of freight and carriages.

Easy going on a bike, though.

The line started in the Central Belt

and the plan was to build it all the way to the fishing port of Oban,

connecting the west coast to the centres of commerce.

By the autumn of 1866, the line had reached Glen Ogle

where the track clings to the contours of the hill.

Here at the halfway point, the land falls away.

The track builders needed another solution.

A stunningly bold and beautiful piece of engineering.

This - the Glen Ogle Viaduct.

Built to smooth out a tight bend

that would have been impossible for a train to get round.

And joining me on a walk across its splendid 12 arches

is railway historian Tim Dunn.

So, Tim, why did they build a line here?

In the middle years of the 19th century, of course,

those railway magnates wanted to get access to the coast,

because on the coast you had the fish. They want to bring those fish

back into town and down to London. That was a lucrative market.

But also the other direction as well.

They were there to take people, the tourists, up to the coast

for those great coastal steamers.

This was a line that was built to take people out

and bring goods back down.

Construction in this kind of landscape requires you to innovate,

doesn't it? Oh, massively.

I mean, this is a line that clings all the way along this valley side,

all the way from here and up-up-up up the glen over the top.

And, of course, this is a pretty severe gradient.

They had to take out huge amounts of stuff from the valley side as well,

and build viaducts like this, to go round very tight curves,

and over very, very steep gorges.

And how successful was the line?

Well, for tourists it was very successful.

But, then, unfortunately this particular line got overtaken

by a competing line that was much more direct

from Tyndrum down to Glasgow.

And suddenly the passengers just dropped off.

Trains kept crossing the Glen Ogle viaduct

until the line closed in 1965.

Today, it stands as proof

the industry isn't always a blot on the landscape...

..and as a testimony to those

who delighted in the challenge of building it.

If you've ever wondered why Scotland has such a remarkable reputation

for producing engineers, then here's your answer.

Faced with a landscape like this,

you had to innovate, you had to be good.

Photos show how elegant railway viaducts were built

all across Scotland.

Not forgetting that pinnacle of Victorian railway engineering,

with the original and unrivalled Forth Bridge.

The best way to get a sense of how industry

has shaped our landscape is in one of these.

A Twin Squirrel helicopter,

with a half-a-million pound camera on its nose.

From Cumbernauld Airport, pilot David Blaine is taking me

on a whistle-stop tour of Scotland's industrial centre.

Our first location, just south of Harthill,

a landscape of old collieries and what some call spoil heaps.

In Scotland, we call them "bings".

It comes from the old Norse word for heap.

Harthill Bing grew out of the coal mining industry.

This was a man-made mountain.

Tonnes of waste rock had to be extracted

from the ground to get to the good stuff - the coal.

And it had to be dumped somewhere.

But not all Scotland's bings are the result of coal mining.

Next up, we're flying towards West Lothian.

We're just above the town of Addiewell.

And in front of us is the remarkable Five Sisters Bing.

It's the result of mining for shale,

the rock that gave Scotland its first oil boom

in the mid 19th century.

The shale business produced four times as much waste

as it did oil.

And that waste was simply dumped at the back door

onto any one of the five bings,

depending on which way the wind was blowing.

From The Five Sisters we're heading north, close to Edinburgh Airport

and another even larger legacy of the shale industry.

Just ahead of us is Scotland's largest bing. Greendykes.

It's our own table mountain, so large you can see it from space.

In its day, Greendykes stood in a science fiction world

of heavy industry.

I was obsessed with this place as a boy.

I thought it was like the surface of Mars.

I always wanted to climb it.

I never thought that the first time I'd get to the top

would be by helicopter.

I'm touching down to meet up with Dr Robin Chesters

from the Scottish Shale Oil Museum.

So, Robin, it looks like we're just on top of a hill, doesn't it?

The vegetation is taking over again.

It's a very special sort of hill.

I think it's only been this green for the last 20 or 30 years.

Before that it would be raw and red and black and very, very dusty.

Over the course of the years,

it's turned this lovely orangey colour because the iron inside it

has sort of oxidised and gone nice and rusty.

What do you think the local community must've thought

when they saw this hill start to get bigger and bigger and bigger?

I suppose it's something they sort of live with

and it just takes its time.

There's a wonderful sort of sequence of building of these various mounds.

It's over a long period of time.

I wouldn't have liked to have lived in Niddrie village behind us

because it gradually became enclosed

in a canyon between two shale bings.

And they say it was very difficult to get your washing clean,

dust coming in one direction or the other.

But these bings were obviously tied to their livelihood.

This is why they were here.

People came to West Lothian to work in the shale oil industry.

It created an awful lot of economic benefit. It was a lifestyle.

It's something which people have come to be very proud of.

And now these sites have become national monuments.

Certainly this one and The Five Sisters are scheduled monuments

which means they're here in perpetuity,

that this is a wonderful and unique monument to a very special industry.

What began as industrial waste is slowly reverting back to nature.

It's a process that's not unique to Scotland's bings.

I'm travelling on 20 miles to the southwest, to Lanarkshire

and what was Scotland's most famous industrial plant...

..Ravenscraig.

Today, it's Europe's largest waste ground.

1,000 acres.

So large you could fit 700 football pitches inside it.

But in its heyday, this plant was the largest steel-maker in Europe,

producing two million tonnes of steel per year.

Through the '80s and early '90s,

images of the towers of Ravenscraig dominated the news.

Politicians, strikes and threats of closure.

Today, only the footprints of those towers remain.

And David's going to bring us into the base

of what was that famous blue tower.

The footprint of the iconic blue gas holder

is a perfect place to put down.

It's an exhilarating but poignant moment.

A perfect landing in the very centre of the circle...

..arriving in a world nothing like I'd expected.

In my lifetime,

this place had been the crucible of Scottish industry.

Now it's just a vast, eerie, desolate space.

Fragments of floors and walls scattered around everywhere.

I've been trying to work out where I am

using this aerial photograph from 1989.

You can see the old cooling towers and gas holder here.

I think I'm in this building.

It's hard to tell.

I'm meeting up with Jack Dodds.

He worked at Ravenscraig for over two decades.

It's sad when you think what was here...

..and everything that happened here.

The impact that Ravenscraig had on industrial Scotland

at that time was massive.

And here we are, '92... 30-odd years later. You know?

And it's like a country park here.

I worked here for 22 years as a contracting electrician.

So I worked in every area in Ravenscraig.

I enjoyed it.

It was a filthy, dirty hole,

there was continual vats of hot metal in close proximity,

sometimes passing over your head.

In those days, health and safety were two words that...

..nobody had heard them here.

Only men were allowed to work in the steel mills.

The women of Ravenscraig, like Dorothy McCready,

worked in the offices.

I was a wee shy lassie when I started.

I wouldnae say boo to a goose.

And when I went to Ravenscraig,

on the front door as you go in in the admin block,

it was all rubberised tiles and there was...Ravenscraig,

there was a raven bird standing on a craig

and big glass doors, and I thought,

"Ooh. This is posh. This is awful posh for the likes of me."

A wee lassie fae the flats, you know?

And it was just kind of overwhelming at first.

What would this have looked like if we'd been here 30/40 years ago?

Noisy.

Men shouting. Steam.

Men coming and going. Trucks. Lorries.

I can't say it was a heat because I wasn't working in a heat.

But it was busy. It was dirty.

You know, you get the ore dust flying about

and steam and smoke and...

It was...

..typical industry, you know? It was a man's world.

720, Andy.

For much of its working life,

Ravenscraig made a profit from steel production.

But in the 1980s, industrial disputes, privatisation

and increased foreign competition threatened its future.

The market had fallen out of the steel industry.

China was sending steel here, Mexico was sending steel here,

and it severely hindered this place. It did.

Ravenscraig closed its doors in 1992.

The iconic towers were demolished four years later.

Dorothy couldn't bear to watch.

Where I live in Law, it's quite high up

and I could have walked to the top of the street

and looked down and seen them coming

but I couldn't do it. I thought, "No."

That was it. That was the death nail. I felt that was it.

Would it have been too sad, almost, to watch it? Oh, aye.

It would have been too sad for me.

The headlines spoke of the end of heavy industry in Scotland,

claiming that centuries of furious

and often ingenious activity was over.

Salt, shale, coal, iron, steel - they'd all come and gone.

What was to be the future of Scotland's industry?

The answer would be found at the extremes,

as new technologies explored and exploited old landscapes.

Scotland's age of oil had begun.

Once again, it was resources on the far edge of the country

that regenerated our industry

and made a living for so many Scots, including my dad.

In the summer of 1977, he arrived here in Shetland.

It was the oil boom and he'd come to help build the colossal

Sullom Voe oil terminal.

My dad was one of many thousands of Scots who got on planes

and ferries to come here.

It was a far cry from the tenements and the heavy industry

of our great cities.

This was a remote, foreboding, starkly beautiful landscape.

You've got to wonder what many of them thought,

but I know what my dad thought.

One of the biggest construction jobs in the world.

He couldn't wait to get started.

It was a young engineer's dream.

Aerial photographs taken in 1975

show what was to become the oil terminal

as an empty stretch of peat, coastline and heather.

But a few years later,

work was under way moving ten million cubic metres of peat,

building 25 miles of road and 150 miles of pipeline.

By 1981, the oil terminal was completed,

the work of the thousands of people who'd come here.

People like my dad.

During the construction,

he and my mum lived here, in the village of Brae.

It's a very un-Shetland like estate,

purpose built in 1977, to house people working on the terminal.

A year later, I was born.

I lived in Shetland for the first six months of my life.

And I've come back to meet the present occupiers

of my parents old house - Aran and his daughter Mia.

You must be Aran? Yeah. How are you doing? I'm James.

Mia, I've got a photograph of me at this very space.

Let's come out and look at this.

So it's that door. Oh, yeah. Just like that.

And there we are.

Me on my dad's shoulder.

My dad would just have been 29 there. A year younger than me.

A year younger than you? Wow. You don't have the moustache.

I think the moustache helps with the age, doesn't it?

It was the '70s after all.

Now, what I want to know is do you still have this carpet?

ARAN LAUGHS

The carpet has long gone

but these houses and the community they created survive.

Families like mine were lucky enough to have lived in individual homes.

But men who came to Sullom Voe on their own

enjoyed rather less salubrious accommodation.

I'm driving just a few miles east of the terminal

on what looks to be a rather odd

purposeless road to absolutely nowhere.

It's all that remains of

the legendary Toft Camp,

built to house 2,400 of the workers

who'd come to construct Sullom Voe.

Local girl Margaret Roberts started work at the camp as a teenager.

When I was 14, I was old enough to take a weekend job

in one of the small camps,

and I started as a chambermaid when I was 14 so...

So, actually, that was the start of a 40-year career

in the oil industry.

What were conditions like?

They were pretty good for the guys, I think, in a way.

They all had single occupancy rooms which was, I think,

quite unusual and, I mean, you don't get that offshore these days.

And... But, I mean, it was the 1970s.

They were working seven days a week through the winter.

You know, they were working in adverse conditions,

so I guess it was quite a hard life,

and so they worked hard and they played hard, in the main.

And there must have been a lot to clean up?

Yeah, we had interesting times cleaning up.

Sometimes you would go in to make a bed

and find that the guy had clearly gone straight to the pub

in his working clothes, come home,

gone straight to bed in his working clothes

cos you'd sort of be getting the shingle off the sheets.

He'd just gone straight back out.

But, yeah, I mean, it was it was mopping

and sweeping and making beds. That's what we did.

Now husband and wife, Sheila and Dave Newcomb both got new jobs

at the oil terminal. For Dave, it was well-paid but gruelling.

I started about 1976...

..right up to the end.

Started with site trucks and reclaiming the land

and then moved over to the concrete side.

We had a big mixing plant.

We were busy all the time.

The longest one I ever did was about 36 hours nonstop

to get all the concrete in. So it was hard work.

Had you ever experienced anything like it?

No, never. You couldn't. The scale of the construction.

I mean, you're looking at thousands of men

and you just wonder where all these people went.

It's just amazing that when it came to break time

all these men popped out of ditches and holes

and everyone went to the canteens.

We were all designated to a certain canteen, so...

Ours was canteen seven, I remember it well.

Most of the Toft camp has gone, but traces remain of the old pub.

The sight of many a tranquil evening in.

Dave's wife Sheila worked as a barmaid.

I was told to start my work on a quiet night

and I got behind the bar and we each...

There was four of us. We had four stances.

You stayed at your own stance.

And this guy came up to the bar, first customer

and he wanted 26 pints of lager and 24 pints of beer and I said,

"You've got to be kidding me?"

I said, "You must know that I'm new", and he says "no".

That was the way it was. That was how it was

because there was so many of them waiting to get served

that they just bought huge rounds of drinks.

What was it like, seeing the oil industry arriving here?

I think they got it so right because the terminal is hardly visible

when you drive past it but it's such a huge terminal.

And I just think they got it right.

And people were afraid.

They were fearful of what the future was going to be.

But I think once they saw how it was panning out,

that, "Yeah, this is OK." And let's face it,

where would Shetland be if we didn't have the oil terminal?

I was born at the birth of the oil boom in Scotland.

But the business of finding black gold at the end of the rainbow

has passed its peak.

Now, they don't build new terminals on Shetland.

It's a place where old rigs come to die.

Just north of Lerwick is a decommissioning site

for oil rigs and platforms.

For over a year

they've been stripping this 12,000 tonne steel giant

back into tiny pieces.

This rig, it's actually older than me. For more than four decades,

it's been at work in some of the harshest environments imaginable.

And even after more than a year of being pulled apart,

it's still quite a sight.

North Sea oil was to be Britain's cash cow,

delivering profits to put all others to shame.

The industry was at its height in the late 1990s.

But it can't last forever.

It's estimated that another 40 years of production is possible

and one by one every obsolete platform will have to be dealt with.

Recycling the rigs is about a commitment to cleaning up the mess

the industry leaves behind for the sake of the planet.

But one day these huge works of engineering

that have become familiar sights along our coastlines

or even far out to sea will all be gone.

But in their place, new giants have already arrived

to stock our landscapes.

The wind is one resource that Scotland

is unlikely to ever run out of.

And wind turbines have become a massive industry.

The Scottish Government plans by 2020 to have 100%

of the electricity used in Scotland produced by renewable sources.

But where you place turbines can be controversial.

I know some people who get upset

if there's a single wind turbine anywhere in their postcode.

I can't begin to imagine how they'd feel if they came here.

This is the Whitelee Wind Farm,

at Eaglesham, south of Glasgow,

home to not one turbine, but 215.

Whitelee is the largest onshore wind farm anywhere in Britain.

It produces enough electricity to power 300,000 homes.

It's big.

And to get a sense of just how big, this is the map of Whitelee.

And this is the city of Aberdeen -

a city with a population of 200,000 people.

They say this is what the future looks like.

All the same, it's really just another vast stretch of land

co-opted in the service of industry...

..not so different from many of the past.

Industry moves so quickly. In 50 years, the wind will still be here.

Maybe the turbines will, maybe they won't.

Time and again, new industries have come to dominate

Scotland's landscapes and have then all but vanished.

But what they've shared is a reliance on the resources

found all around us -

the slate of Belnahua...

..the iron for Carron...

..the salt for St Monans.

The landscape still holds these traces and memories.

And when we look down on our past,

we can see industry at the heart of it all.

Across this whole series,

it's been exhilarating

flying over so much of Scotland.

It's been an adventure too,

descending Canna's towering cliffs

in search of forgotten remains...

..or riding the highest road in Scotland on a mountain bike.

With the view from above as your guide,

you can seek out remarkable sights

and understand our past more clearly.

From huge forts that once dominated hilltops...

..to a lost fleets of ships

that brought riches to our biggest city.

Look down and you can

see it laid out before you,

an ever-changing landscape...

..with Scotland's fascinating story written all over it.