Original subtitles

PAUL MURTON: Elemental nature is at its most dramatic

in the mountainous landscape that frames the lochs

along Scotland's west coast.

The rocks here have been weathered for millions of years

by ice and fire, wind and water,

and, for generations, the people have used

the elements beneath their feet to survive.

Scotland's loch's are the product of an element

we have in spectacular abundance -

water.

With so much of the stuff about, it's hardly surprising

that there are tens of thousands of lochs in Scotland,

and they come in all shapes and sizes.

We've got long, fjord-like sea lochs,

great freshwater lochs of the Central Highlands,

and innumerable lochans that stud the open moors.

In this series,

I'm setting out on a loch-hopping journey across Scotland,

meeting the people who live close to their shores,

and discovering how lochs have influenced an entire nation.

For this Grand Tour,

I'm heading from a point way out west

to a fabled mountain,

unearthing stories, quite literally, from the ground.

My journey starts on Ardnamurchan,

heads for the beautiful and secluded Loch Sunart,

then crosses the mountains to Loch Linnhe,

where I stop at a medieval Stuart castle,

and encounter an ancient goddess guarding a dark loch.

This is the Ardnamurchan peninsula,

and this is the famous lighthouse

facing the wild seas of the North Atlantic.

Ardnamurchan Lighthouse is not only the most westerly lighthouse

on the Scottish mainland,

it also marks the most westerly point on the whole island of Great Britain,

making this a rather special place for me to begin my Grand Tour.

I love lighthouses.

In fact, in a previous incarnation,

I was briefly employed by the Northern Lighthouse Board.

As a mobile lighthouse keeper,

I had to keep the lights burning and the lenses turning

at three lighthouses around the Scottish coast.

But I've never been up Ardnamurchan, as they say.

Ardnamurchan is a Gaelic name, of course,

and one translation means 'the headland of the great seas'.

And from up here, the view is truly oceanic.

Despite the tame and gentle weather today,

this can be a wild and hostile place,

and boats heading around the coast

often face a potentially dangerous voyage.

Just around the coast from the lighthouse,

I come to one of the most scenic beaches anywhere on the west coast.

The gorgeous Sanna Bay,

with its pristine white sands and turquoise seas,

has exceptional views west to the Small Isles.

But the peace and tranquillity of Sanna today is in stark contrast

to the destructive elemental forces

that were once unleashed deep within the Earth.

It's almost impossible to imagine now,

but go back 60 million years,

and there would have been an absolutely enormous volcano

rumbling underneath the ground near to this spot.

To find out more, I'm heading inland to meet geologist Alan McKirdy,

who wants to take me on a journey through deep time

into the heart of the volcano.

Alan, we've come some distance away from the beach,

up here onto the hill.

Now go back 60 million years ago,

what would the environment here have been like, do you think?

Well, we're sitting in the remains of an ancient volcano.

A volcano, as you say, that was active 60 million years ago.

And since then, since that time,

um, ice, wind and water has eroded,

or cut down, the surface of the volcano.

So we're sitting in the, what would have been,

the magma chamber of this ancient volcano.

Now how big was this volcano?

Something in the order of about six or seven kilometres across. Wow!

I understand you can actually see

a very distinct crater shape from the air.

Yes, indeed.

And we've got a wonderful aerial shot here,

which shows this outer ring of mountains

that defines the ancient magma chamber.

We're sitting in the centre of it,

so we've got a grandstand view of the whole structure.

This volcano wasn't by itself, was it?

It was part of a wider network?

About 65 million years ago,

and North America and Europe went their separate ways

forming the North Atlantic.

And, as a result, the, uh, crust thinned, quite dramatically,

and a series of seven or eight volcanoes popped up

through this thin crust.

So that's Rockall, St Kilda, Skye, Ardnamurchan,

uh, Rum, Mull, Arran, and Ailsa Craig were all active

over a 10 million-year period.

It's incredible to think

that Scotland's west coast is littered with volcanoes

that witnessed the birth of the North Atlantic,

whose waters now fill all these beautiful lochs.

Like Loch Sunart, with the little village of Kilchoan,

which, until a road to the east was opened in 1900,

was only accessible by ferry.

Kilchoan is traditionally a crofting community,

providing a way of life

that was never meant to get people rich.

Not having enough land to make a living,

people were often forced to look for other work

to supplement their income.

Rosie Curtis is a modern crofter,

helping to keep the tradition alive by working the land.

But it's common for crofting culture to hug the Highland coastline,

and the sea is often as important as the land.

One of Rosie's many jobs is tending a fish farm

near the gaping mouth of Loch Sunart.

This is your daily commute, I'm guessing.

This is my, yes,

this is my beautiful travel to work every morning which is fantastic.

You do a lot of juggling when it comes to work

because you still croft, is that right?

Yeah, I've got a small croft,

ehm, I've got 60 blackface sheep, and some highland cows.

Crofting was never a full-time occupation, was it?

It was there to, kind of, supplement your income?

Yeah, we do eight hours, eight to 10 hours out here,

and then you've obviously got whatever you do on the croft.

I'm also involved in the coastguard and the fire brigade,

so you never know when you might be called out with them,

so, um, you could be 24 hours.

Do you ever sleep? (CHUCKLES) Sometimes, sometimes, yeah.

A short sea-journey brings us to some large netted pens

floating in the loch.

I want to hear from Rosie about some new pesticide-free techniques

to control sea lice infestations on fish.

How many fish have you got in there?

In this pen, I've got 26,000 fish at the moment.

What do you say to people who are a bit critical of fish farms

'cause of the potential environmental consequences,

I mean, you must be aware of that?

I've got lumpfish and wrasse so, you know,

that's cleaner fish which help to eat the lice

off the back of the salmon.

Well, that means, if the lice are being picked off by the cleaner fish,

then you're using less pesticide.

Yeah, absolutely, between wrasse and lumpfish

and also now flushers coming in, you know,

you're hardly doing any chemical treatments at all now.

Well, that's brilliant.

Hopefully, this is the future in fish farming.

Leaving Rosie to her duties,

I'm pleased to hear that this important part

of the rural economy may have a more sustainable future.

My route now heads for the upper reaches of Loch Sunart,

which is one of the longest sea lochs on the west coast

running west to east for 31km.

The views here seem to be timeless.

Many of the hills above the loch are covered in ancient woods.

In places, they sweep all the way down to the shore.

These ancient woods are a remnant of a great forest

which once spread all the way along the Atlantic seaboard,

from Northern Spain to Norway.

In Scotland, it's known as the Celtic rain forest.

Today, only fragments of it survive.

Although undeniably beautiful, it's not entirely a wild place.

In fact, if you'd come down to the woods

in the 18th or 19th century,

you'd have found a veritable woodland industry flourishing here.

The clues are there if you know how to read the forest correctly,

and one man who can do just that

is woodlands expert and historian Jamie McIntyre.

He shows me how people harvested wood sustainably,

without felling whole trees.

Exactly how industrial was it here then?

It was really quite intensively managed for a period.

Now what's significant about this tree, Jamie?

This is a coppice stool.

You can tell it's a coppice stool because it's multi-stemmed.

What would have happened is it would have been a single tree

cut at the base,

regrew as a thicket of shoots.

These would have been thinned out to maybe six or seven per stool

and allowed to grow on for the full rotation,

which was about 25 years.

But, as you can see, this was never cut again,

and each individual pole has grown on

to become a kind of a tree trunk in it's own right.

For centuries, the wood here was harvested

to supply bark for the leather tanning industry

and charcoal to fuel the iron forges.

And it doesn't take Jamie long to find evidence of this.

What's this low retaining wall ahead of us?

This is part of a recessed platform,

and these were the areas that people burned the charcoal on.

If we dig here, we might find some charcoal.

Well, there seems to be a lot of roots down here, Jamie,

but I don't see any charcoal.

I think you need to get your hand in amongst it

and root around a bit.

There you go. There's a big bit.

Wow, who would've thought it? 200-year-old charcoal.

And what was this used for?

This was used in the iron furnaces

that were set up along the west coast.

Just look at that, we've got archaeological evidence

of the industrial past of this beautiful wood.

Amazing.

Coppicing began a slow decline from the 18th century onwards

as coal, mined from deep in the Earth,

replaced charcoal from the forest.

But it was mining lead, rather than coal,

that put this place on the map and, rather surprisingly,

an altogether new substance called strontium,

from this place, Strontian.

On a hillside overlooking the village,

I hitch a lift in a giant dump truck driven by Dan MacDonald.

He owns the mines, which are silent after centuries of use,

and the site is now used as a quarry.

If you could just drop me off here, Dan, that would be great. No bother.

Dan drops me near the dark mouth of a mine

through which I'll be guided by David McCallum,

who has written about the history of the place.

Hi, Paul, how are you?

And who, thankfully, seems to know his way around this labyrinth of dark tunnels.

Dave, how long has the mining been going on here at Strontian?

Commercially, since the 1720s right through to the 1990s.

What were they actually mining for down here?

Lead, copper, and iron.

Dave shows me the most important ore for the production of lead.

This is galena, which is lead sulphide.

It occurs naturally in those shiny, er, cubic forms.

What was it used for?

It could be casted and rolled into sheets

and, of course, for military purposes,

it could be used as lead shot.

Being so close to the, er, Jacobite Rebellions

and the Napoleonic Wars,

the price of lead and these mines

assumed a strategic importance for the district.

Now, that's quite interesting, because this area around Strontian

was famous for its support of the Jacobite cause,

and it was the army that were using this

to fire lead shot back at the locals.

Absolutely.

Now, there's a really interesting connection between the lead ore

that was being mined here and strontium the element.

That's right, the strontianite occurs as a by-product in the veins.

It wasn't commercially usable to the lead miners,

and they discarded it.

And you've got an example here. I have here, this is strontianite.

It's absolutely beautiful, isn't it?

Nobody really knew what was in it.

They presumed that it was a new earth,

as they call it, a new element.

How did it get its name?

When scientists extracted the element

from the strontianite in 1808,

they named the element 'strontium' after the village.

Strontium from Strontian the village.

Strontian. It's used in fireworks, is it not?

It is, the...every element has a characteristic colour

and strontium, er, in an explosion, for example, or a fire,

will emit a beautiful crimson red flame, vivid red flame.

Now, I think you are going to show me a wee flame test.

Right, we've got a lovely flame.

We've got some strontium salt here,

very, very similar to the strontium carbonate in the mine,

mixed with a little water.

Whoa! Look at that flame!

That's typical strontium firework red.

Heading east, I cross the mountains and down to sea level

to the saltwaters of Loch Linnhe,

formed by the upper reaches of the Firth of Lorne,

which penetrates 50km inland to Fort William in the north.

This is Loch Linnhe,

known in Gaelic as 'An Linne Dhubh', or 'The Black Pool'.

Crossing the loch to the eastern shore,

I make my way through an area

which glories in the romantic-sounding name of Appin.

In my mind, Appin is forever associated

with tales of Jacobite intrigue,

symbolised by the improbably picturesque Castle Stalker,

standing proud on its tidal island in Loch Linnhe.

Castle Stalker is one of the most iconic fortified houses

to be found anywhere in Scotland,

and its image appears on a host of postcards,

calendars, and in advertising.

And it's a place I've always wanted to visit.

I've come to meet Alasdair Allward, the castle's current keeper.

Now, your family have had the castle for a while.

Ah, yes, since 1965.

My late father bought it as a ruin.

And he then spent the next 10-20 years restoring it

to what you see today.

I spent every school holiday here working on the castle,

but I've got to say now, looking back at it,

it was worth it.

Now, Alasdair, the name 'Castle Stalker',

where does that come from?

Well, 'Stalker' is a Gaelic word, and it means 'falconer'.

So this is 'Castle of the Falconer'.

But its got a great, uh, link with falconry, this castle,

because it was used as a royal hunting lodge by King James IV.

Uh-huh. He was really keen on falconry.

Because he was a Stuart.

The Stuarts of Appin were cousins of the royal Stuarts,

which is why James used this as a hunting lodge.

These, of course, are the battlements.

And, of course, it's been used as a location for some films.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail filmed here, back in 1974 it was,

and, yes, I am, in fact, in the film.

I came up here as a 20-year-old student

to let them in for the day's filming,

and they ended up giving me a part in the film.

What were you doing?

In fact, I play the part of one of the French taunters

up in the battlements here with John Cleese

taunting King Arthur down below.

Alasdair has made a little museum in the castle

to commemorate taking part in one of the cult comedies of the 1970s,

and this picture of him on the day of filming

is surely its centrepiece.

It must have been tremendous fun.

Absolutely amazing!

We spent the whole day, literally, just laughing, all of us.

It was like a boy's weekend out. Mm-hm.

Especially John Cleese, so funny. He kept on cracking up.

Every time he came out with some outrageous French accent,

it was the first time he'd done it,

he just fell about laughing, and then we did, and everyone did.

From the ridiculous to the sublime.

I'm heading inland, up Loch Linnhe,

where an eastward branch of this huge sea loch takes me

to the much more sheltered Loch Leven,

and the village of Ballachulish.

(HARP PLAYS) Sounds heavenly!

That beautiful music comes from a harp workshop

where extraordinarily skilled craftsmen

make instruments for angels.

Ingrid Henderson lives locally

and has been playing the harp since childhood.

Long before the bagpipe made its stamp on the mythology of Scotland,

the Gaelic harp was our national instrument

and the mainstay of courtly music.

The harp in Scotland can trace its history

at least as far back as the ancient Picts,

and images of harps have been discovered

cut into decorative Pictish stones.

Ingrid is playing an instrument made by Starfish harp makers,

founded in 1987.

I meet up with Dave Shepton,

who shows me how this musical tradition lives on here

near the banks of Loch Leven.

Now, how did you get into making harps?

Well, my history is actually in boatbuilding,

and I just came to Starfish for a, um, summer job once...

Uh-huh. ..and ended up staying.

Was it useful for you, having had a background in boatbuilding?

Yeah, I think both industries have strange shaped pieces of wood,

we don't work with straight lines,

we work with curves and angles all the time,

and so there is a correlation between the two.

And you will quite often see boatbuilders in this industry.

In a way, there is something hull-like about this, isn't there?

Very much so, and we use some bracing inside

which is not unlike the ribs of a boat for extra strength,

there's a lot of tension on a harp,

so we have to make this structure very strong.

Now, Dave, this is, I'm guessing, the business end of the harp, is it?

It is, it's the sound box.

This is made of American black walnut,

11 separate pieces all the way round.

These harps, are they clarsachs?

They are the modern version of a clarsach. They are?

And, here in Scotland,

we tend to still refer to them as clarsachs,

whereas in other parts of the world,

they are sometimes called lever harps and Celtic harps.

There is history and tradition

everywhere in this part of the country,

but the peaty soils here are riddled with mysteries

that run much deeper than recorded history,

into the Iron and Bronze Age,

when it seems goddesses were venerated on the banks of the loch.

In 1880, a labourer digging in a peat bog

made a remarkable discovery.

Lying face down in the mud was the carved figure of a woman.

A photograph taken at the time reveals a totemic representation

of the female form.

Tragically, the Victorians didn't possess modern preservation skills,

and the wooden figure dried out, cracked, and warped

by the time it got to Edinburgh.

is this her?

I've joined this local Scout group in an archaeological experiment

in order to understand how the local peaty soils

preserve wooden artefacts like this,

and how they degrade when removed.

This is just a replica of the Goddess,

but it's a way for the kids to connect

to one of Scotland's most mysterious archaeological finds.

But what could this 2,500-year-old female represent?

I've come to meet a man who has an interesting theory on the subject.

Jimmy Cormack, whose interest in the goddess

was sparked through his work at a local museum.

Do you think there's any connection

between the Ballachulish Goddess and the loch, Loch Leven, in any way?

Well, it's not very far away from the narrows,

the narrowest part of Loch Leven.

And that's where most travellers would cross the loch.

And some people say it was like a goddess there

that you left offerings for safe passage.

Like a guardian angel?

Like a guardian angel, the very same, yep.

But what's great, though, is the fact that she's ultimately mysterious.

Everybody needs a bit of mystery in their life, Paul.

And we've got ours here in Ballachulish.

Having paid due homage to this ancient and mysterious goddess,

I make my way along the banks of Loch Leven,

which is one of the darkest and most mysterious

of all Scotland's sea lochs.

I'm heading for the final destination of this Grand Tour -

a sacred mountain that dominates the view

from where the loch goddess was first erected.

Guarding the entrance to Loch Leven

and to the approach to formidable Glen Coe,

is The Pap of Glencoe,

named for all the obvious reasons.

It - or should I say 'she'? - dominates the scene,

and I'm told that there's a particularly fine view point

from the lofty summit.

Although, be warned, it's relentlessly steep.

As I climb, I'm minded of the beginning of my journey

at the Ardnamurchan volcano,

grumbling away 60 million years ago.

The whole of Glen Coe was also an ancient volcano,

one of the Earth's monsters,

big enough to earn the title of 'supervolcano',

except this one was blowing its top 400 million years ago.

In the presence of such deep Earth history -

the coppice woods, Castle Stalker, and the Ballachulish Goddess

all seem rather recent.

It really is quite tricky under foot up here.

What a brilliant place to end my Grand Tour.

And what a superb view.

To the north you've got Ben Nevis and the Mamores,

and below me the dark waters of Loch Leven.

While, to the east, you've got the entrance to Glen Coe,

and the highest mountains in Argyll.

And behind me, the waters of Loch Linnhe,

and the distant hills of Moidart,

stretching all the way to Ardnamurchan

and the beginning of my journey, from Point to Pap.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2019