Original subtitles

Scotland is one of the most beautiful

and 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.

What a stunning landscape!

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 unique journey.

I'll be using everything, from fascinating old imagery,

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

In this film, I am looking down on Scotland's coast.

For many of our communities, it was the place where it all began.

The coast, it's where we look to for food and for trade.

It's where we built many of our first homes.

It's where we watched the arrival of refugees,

of invaders, of war.

Scotland's coast is awash with stories

and the promise of adventure.

Oh, like some half-sunk medieval castle, in the water.

It's breathtaking. It's sometimes terrifying.

And all along it are tantalising clues...

Whoo. Whey! Nice one.

..to the way we used to live.

This is the story of Scotland's coast.

A story told from the sky.

I understand the appeal of fishing.

Fresh air, beautiful scenery, getting back to nature.

But I just have to confess that I'm not very good at it.

Well, that was a good one.

That went well.

People who know what they're doing say fishing with a rod and a line,

well, it's all about patience.

About casting out, time and time again.

But in the past, if you wanted to feed a family

or even a whole community, they needed a bit more of an edge.

A way of fishing that some might just call cheating.

To find out exactly how it worked,

I'm on the southern bank of the Beauly Firth,

four miles west of Inverness.

This is going to be interesting.

HE LAUGHS

I think it's going to be OK.

Joining me on a tricky and slippy trudge out over the mud flats

is archaeologist Tom Dawson.

A kilometre of this could take a while.

Yeah.

If you risked a broken ankle to walk along here,

you might wonder why someone has gone to a lot of bother

to build a huge line of stones.

But when you look down on those stones,

their shape becomes clear.

It's a giant man-made hook.

The purpose of that hook was, very fittingly, to trap fish.

Tom, this is clearly a huge construction,

how did these fish traps work?

Well, certain fish like to swim quite close to the coast

and the fishermen would place obstructions in the way,

so that as the fish are coming down the coast,

they would hit this solid wall, come along the wall

and get funnelled into the corner just here

and at this corner there would be a net or a piece of basket work

and the fish would go into that.

And the whole key behind this is the tide.

The fish are following the tide and as the water comes out,

the fish will follow the tide down the wall

until they get into that net just there.

People have been making fish traps for some 8,000 years,

but this one is only 200 or 300 years old.

And it's one of a pair of traps, built to double the efficiency.

You don't have the same tidal range every single day,

so sometimes in the neat tides this trap would work,

but in a spring tide, where the tide goes right, right out,

you need to have a second trap in order to catch all the fish

and that's what that second trap over there is doing.

And was it a very efficient way of catching fish?

Incredibly efficient.

It would absolutely catch everything in there.

And why have fish traps fallen out of use?

Well, it's probably because they were so successful.

It led to a number of court cases.

There was an example over at Loch Broom,

where a fish trap was so successful

that they took away 1,000 baskets of fish in one day

and then still left some fish behind

and unfortunately, those fish rotted

and ended up polluting the whole of that area of the loch.

Building fish traps was banned by Parliament in 1860.

In aerial photographs, their shapes still stand out,

often crystal clear.

But the traps are fading fast.

And will one day disappear forever.

Our coastline is continually changing.

So photographs and film are vitally important.

They are often the only clues to the many mysteries

our ancestors left behind.

Millions of those photographs are stored in the vaults

where I work, at Historic Environment Scotland.

Based in Edinburgh,

it's Europe's largest collection of aerial photography.

These photographs are a unique record

of how we have lived and worked next to the sea,

from the massive coastal defences and airfields

of the Second World War,

all the way back to the enigmatic shapes left in the landscape

by our early ancestors...

..like these. Strange circles, halos of tumbledown rock.

Built by people we hardly know.

One of Scotland's greatest historical mysteries.

The one I have always wanted to visit is in Shetland...

..on the tiny Island Of Mousa.

An ancient and remarkable building, called a broch.

Scotland was once home to

many hundreds of these mysterious towers...

..and Mousa is the best preserved.

I've come to see it for myself, and you can't help but be amazed.

I know that this broch is 2,000 years old...

..but what I don't know, what no-one really knows,

is who built or lived in this amazing structure.

The construction's stone on stone, there is no mortar,

nothing binding these great slabs and blocks together.

And from directly above,

you can see that it is not just one tower, but two.

One inside the other, with a staircase filling the gap,

perhaps Scotland's oldest surviving staircase.

We think they had roofs.

This is Scotland after all, but none remain.

Scotland's got more brochs than it's got football stadiums,

and for centuries, some of the greatest minds in the country

have been studying them, yet, to this day,

we still don't know, with any degree of certainty,

exactly what they were for.

Archaeologist Val Turner sees two main possibilities.

They may have been defensive

and, indeed, some of them have massive great ditches around them.

So it looks like a really serious attempt

to keep someone in or someone out.

But, other people suggest, at the other end of the spectrum,

that they were really the impressive houses of chiefs.

An interesting thing about them is that they tend to be inter-visible,

so you can see from one to another, in a chain,

which suggests that there was

a reason that they wanted to kind of see each other,

send signals perhaps to each other...

Brochs appear to have originated in Shetland and Orkney

and then spread south.

They were all built to nearly the same height.

And it's a tantalising prospect

that they were intended as coastal beacons or connected watchtowers.

Perhaps a system for communicating over large distances?

It's a fascinating theory.

But still just a guess.

Brochs are a uniquely Scottish enigma.

Nobody else, anywhere else, has them.

Perhaps one day we will work out what they were for,

but I wouldn't bet on it.

And maybe it is better if we never do.

Over 1,000 years after the brochs,

it was castles that told the locals who was boss...

..and told outsiders where to go.

But for all those centuries of defensive posturing,

there has never been any shortage of people coming to visit,

or to stay for good.

From Ireland, early Christians made their mark

on Scotland's landscape with a network of religious buildings.

They sought sanctuary in the most remote locations

and there's one in particular that even today

is monumentally difficult to get to.

And I'm heading there now,

to get a sense of what life would have been like

in such an isolated community.

And while the early Christians travelled in the tiniest boats,

we've got something a little more powerful,

with former fisherman Billy Simmons at the wheel.

If you had been navigating these waters without GPS,

without an engine, would you have fancied that?

No. I mean, we can do it, because it is all done through habit,

but to come in here, through uncharted waters...

..the guys that did that were just legends,

as far as I'm concerned, like.

We're sailing just to the south of the Isle of Skye,

heading to the most westerly of the Small Isles, Canna.

1,500 years ago, a Christian community came to this island

and built a place of worship.

Today, it is one of the most remote,

most inaccessible religious sites in Scotland.

Can you imagine what it must have been like,

the first time you saw that island?

Oh, like some half-sunk medieval castle, in the water.

I suppose it would have been quite rewarding.

Many times as a fisherman, we were caught out in The Minch

with poor, poor weather, and it was certainly our sanctuary.

So, who knows, did they find it through, you know,

poor weather, and it was the closest point of land?

But, it was certainly, from a 30 year period,

it was our sanctuary, our safe haven,

many, many a welcome night, like, you know?

Canna remains a place of escape.

Its permanent population is just 18 people.

Those who visit this harbour today

mostly come in search of peace and nature.

My trip promised to be a little more vigorous.

For the second stage of the journey,

I'm heading west along Canna's only road...

..becoming ever more terrifying.

It's ridiculously bad and not for the faint-hearted.

This was a three mile drive I wouldn't forget in a hurry.

Well, that was pretty wild.

I couldn't help but notice that the 60 foot drop down the cliff

was on the passenger side.

Anyway, this is as far as we could go by the Land Rover,

so the rest of the way is a bit of a hike.

After four hours of travelling, I'm now closing in on my target.

In Gaelic, they called it Sgorr Nam Ban-naomha.

"The Slopes Of The Holy Women."

Some believe that early Christian visitors built a nunnery

at the base of these terrifying cliffs.

And there is only one way to get down and see it...

..with the help of my new best friend, mountain guide Jonah Jones.

Hi there, Jonah. Hi. Good to see you. You too.

How's the descent looking?

It is looking quite greasy and quite bouldery and quite eroded ground.

So, what we are going to do is, we're going to control the descent

from the top, put you on a static line and lower you from the top.

Harness. OK. That's the front of the harness.

Are we safe? You can still breathe? It's not tight? No.

I can still breathe.

OK, we'll put the line through, so it'll be at the front

and we're ready to go. Excellent. Let's go.

And so with a little trepidation and a few deep breaths,

I find myself heading for the edge.

Working down a slippery, slimy cliff face,

I could still enjoy spectacular views of the island.

But any descent like this carries a risk.

Just ask the person below me, Alistair - our camera operator.

He lived to film another day.

Has it stopped? Yeah, it's stopped.

Below the cliffs, the final stage of my journey...

..to an almost unvisited section of Scotland's coast.

What might have been Scotland's most remote nunnery

isn't easy to spot amidst the undisturbed bracken...

..but from the air, the site is revealed in all its glory.

It's a massive 37 metre wide dry-stone enclosure.

It contains the remains of small huts

where pilgrims came for enlightenment or a cure.

And at its centre is another circular structure,

believed to be a chapel...

..with the remains of an ancient altar sitting alongside.

It was within the rubble of this broken altar

that archaeologists found stones

inscribed with early Christian crosses.

The theory is that this site was linked to a larger monastic site

at Canna's main bay.

If that wasn't remote enough for you,

you'd come here, to a near inaccessible refuge,

with only the sea birds and the waves for company.

I think it is hard to understand today,

why you would come to somewhere like this.

We're so obsessed with being connected,

with our phones, with Wi-Fi,

the concept of remoteness, of having time to yourself,

isn't something we really understand, but coming here,

you get a sense of what they were looking for.

Peace, tranquillity, absolute solitude.

It's a haunting sight.

Scotland's coast has always been an enticing source of inspiration.

Magnificent and wild.

The communities who lived along the coast needed to tame its waters.

They built harbours like this one in Catterline in Aberdeenshire...

..as a shield from stormy seas...

..a safe haven for their boats.

People have been bringing fishing boats in and out of here

for over 1,000 years.

All along our coastlines, you will find stone built piers

like this, big or small.

They're physical monuments to one of the longest lasting relationships

in our history, between people and the sea.

From above, the bizarre geometry of Scotland's harbours

is a moving testimony to our determination

to carve a living out of the sea.

Borderlands leading to the tempestuous waters beyond.

I've come to what was one of Scotland's

most important fishing harbours...

..in the town of Wick, 100 miles north of Inverness.

This is an edition of the Illustrated London News

from August, 1875.

It describes Wick as the largest fishing station in the world,

with a staggering 800 boats cramming this harbour,

dedicated to the pursuit of just one thing.

Herring.

The magazine included this special illustration.

It shows the chaotic cram of boats in the harbour.

It was said that you could walk from one end to the other,

just stepping across their decks.

Much quieter now. I'm on that same quayside,

chatting with Harry Gray - a local historian,

his mother and grandmother worked in the herring industry.

Can you give me a sense of the scale of the operation?

Oh... That was the greatest thing that ever happened to this town.

They planned to have a village for 1,000 people

and a harbour for 300 boats.

In hindsight, which is always very clever,

they should have built the village for 3,000 people

and the harbour for 1,000 boats.

But people flocked into town to get a piece of the action.

Where were they selling it to?

Well, the big customers in those days were Russia,

the Baltic and Germany.

Germany was a huge market,

so schooners were setting sail for Wick across the sea

to these countries all the time, with loads of barrels of herring.

Alongside the fishermen

were thousands of what were then called herring girls.

Stories of their work have been handed down

through the family of Maureen Ross.

The gutters, what they did was,

they would set to picking the herring

and it was just one action, it was in the throat and...

MIMICS SLICE

..and out with the gut.

And these girls, they worked so fast,

it's said that when they were filmed at one point...

..it was just a blur. Their hands were a blur.

40-60 herrings would be gutted in a minute.

And that's an amazing speed.

The herring girls worked the length of Britain's coast.

From Shetland to Great Yarmouth, they followed the fleets.

And there is one particular view from above

that shows how hard their work could be.

An inlet below the village of Whaligoe,

seven miles south of Wick.

These steps, all 365 of them,

led some 250 feet up the cliff to the village.

Whatever was caught out there, had to be carried up here.

Today, it's a picturesque walk.

But for the herring girls, climbing Whaligoe's flagstone steps

was gruelling, painful work.

On their backs, they were weighed down with heavy baskets of the fish

they'd gutted on the quayside.

78, 79, 80, 81, 82...

The very existence of such an unlikely harbour at Whaligoe

is testament to the remarkable scale of the business...

93, 94, 95, 96, 97...

..a business that would disappear when its biggest clients,

Germany and Russia, exploded into war and revolution.

251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257...

By the 1950s, Scotland's herring industry

was little more than a memory.

These steps are a monument to Thrownness.

The fish may have gone,

but they remain as an enduring symbol

of the women who worked the herring.

Scotland's coast has long been shaped by the people

who worked it.

Their stories often told by the buildings they left behind.

Harbours, lighthouses, boathouses, shipyards.

Yet, sometimes the evidence of what we've done

and where we've done it is a little harder to find.

This isn't a place I'd recommend for a visit.

It's a muddy southern bank of the River Clyde.

A dangerous place if you don't know the tides, and even if you do.

I'm heading east to a creek running into the River Clyde

at Newshot Island, opposite Clydebank.

Joining me, squelching across the mud

is archaeologist Ellie Graham.

She has come to guide me, safely, I hope, to a quite incredible sight.

A ship's graveyard...

..discovered, almost by accident, by a view from above.

It was actually first brought to our attention

by a member of the local community who was exploring the area

and the river bank through Google Earth

and he spotted this collection of wooden boats

on a high resolution Google Earth image

and, uh, got in touch with us

because he thought they might be of interest.

What did you find when you came to investigate the site?

Well, we found a massive group, actually, of wooden barges that...

We call them mud punts, because they were actually initially moved

by punting around the river.

They worked in partnership with steam dredgers

and then later with the diving bells

and they just removed the spoil that they excavated from the river banks,

because the problem with the River Clyde

is that it was naturally a very, very shallow river,

so in order to allow big boats to come up and down,

to trade and then later for the big boats that were built on the Clyde,

they had to put in a lot of effort to deepen the river.

Braving the worst of the mud,

it's possible to get closer to Glasgow's forgotten fleet

and to identify individual vessels.

Alongside the wooden barges is a distinctive bullet-shaped boat...

..designed to support a primitive diving bell.

So, where are we standing right now?

Well, this is the business end of the diving bell barge.

This cut out here in the stern

is actually where the diving bell was mounted

and they were for the carriage

where the diving bell itself was actually raised and lowered

from here, down to the river bed.

Working often many feet below the boat,

the bottom of the diving bell was completely open,

the water kept out by air pressure.

It allowed the men to use picks and shovels to work on the riverbed.

It was extremely dangerous, but it was crucial

to Glasgow's development as the world's shipbuilding capital.

When some of the biggest ships in the world,

like the Queen Mary and the Lusitania

were constructed at Clyde Yards,

this was still working, using that sort of very basic technology,

still, to achieve those depths that were needed

for these great big ships to be built

and then launched down the Clyde.

So, hugely important then, in historical terms? Absolutely, yes.

We think as far as we know,

it's the earliest surviving dive support vessel

that we know of anywhere in Britain.

It's a very important piece of diving history,

not only for the history of civil engineering,

but also for the history of Glasgow as well,

because without the dredgers and the diving bells

and the barges that laboured to deepen the river,

there is no way Glasgow could have become the city that it did,

the sort of powerhouse of shipbuilding.

The lucrative transatlantic trades that helped build Glasgow

all disappeared.

But Scotland's harbours have never stopped finding new things to do.

In the north-east, the dolphins have come out to play

at the mouth of Aberdeen Harbour.

From tiny fishing boats to massive oil support vessels,

this is a business that has been reinvented time and again.

And it is one with an impeccable pedigree.

With a more than credible claim

to have the oldest business in Britain.

Aberdeen Harbour was officially established in 1136

when King David granted the local bishops the right to tax ships

going in and out. It's an amazing history.

It has been attacked by everyone from the Vikings

to the German Luftwaffe. Not many companies can say that.

I'm on a pilot boat heading into Aberdeen Harbour,

past a truly fascinating range of ships.

You can see how Aberdeen Harbour is the centre of this city.

How the buildings seem to grow outwards

and away from the waterfront.

Keith Young is the harbour's engineering director.

So, Keith, this is a harbour

that has supported many different industries down the years.

Well, I'm from Aberdeen, I grew up here,

so it used to be that when you were a boy you could come down here,

be on the quayside and you saw the fishing vessels coming in,

you'd be able to walk in amongst the fish market.

The earliest maps of the harbour date to the 1600s

and show a tidal base at the mouth of the River Dee

with three large islands.

Those islands gradually gave way to shipping

and were replaced with the Victoria Dock, completed in 1848.

20 years later, the River Dee itself was diverted to the south.

And, in 1870, the new Albert Basin was built in its place...

..seen here in this 1949 aerial photograph,

filled with fishing boats...

..a generation before the Aberdeen oil boom.

RADIO: OK, you can let go and travel through...

But as the oil industry peaks and wanes,

this old harbour is looking for new business.

We're travelling out to see work under way

on the massive 200 metre long breakwater

for Aberdeen's new South Harbour at Nigg Bay.

A project that will take millions of cubic metres of rock,

creating one-and-a-half kilometres of quay.

Big enough for a new generation of cruise liners,

bringing thousands of tourists to the north-east.

So this is the latest chapter in Britain's oldest business.

Exactly, yes. We've been around for almost 900 years

and some of the staff maybe feel like they've been here that long,

but we know that we are looking after the harbour

and there is a great sense of pride

amongst the harbour staff for what we're doing.

Harbours, ferries, fishing boats...

..the coast has always been a place of work.

But in the 20th century,

it gradually came to be seen as a place for fun and leisure.

And in the 1930s, an extremely unlikely craze

swept Scotland's coast.

Remnants can be found in the north-east,

on the Moray Firth...

..in a little bay in a place called Tarlair.

It all began when local authorities all across the country

started building something that may surprise anyone

who has ever dipped a toe reluctantly in a Scottish sea.

Huge outdoor swimming pools...

..known as lidos.

Tarlair Lido opened in the summer of 1930...

..and was an immediate hit with the locals.

Carved into an Aberdeenshire cliffside,

Tarlair was an Art Deco marvel.

Inspired by a famous Parisian swimming pool,

it was the height of fashion,

and ingeniously designed.

That side was for boats and this side was for swimming.

It was built as a tidal pool.

Every day it was replenished

by the invigorating waters of the North Sea.

These days, we're used to cheap foreign holidays,

sun and sea and sand just a few hours flight away,

but back then most people had no choice.

They had to find their slice of paradise a little closer to home.

Hugh Gordon played in the pool as a boy and later worked here,

one of the last supervisors before the lido's closure.

What was this like on a summer's day?

Packed. Packed. Mobbed.

Erm... There was people everywhere sitting, picnic area up here,

you could hardly get a place to sit.

You know, people came from Huntly, Keith,

Pier Head, Fraserburgh, all around the countryside

and they used to come here at the weekends.

And during the week, when the summer holidays went out,

you would get bus parties coming through here as well. Yeah.

The fashion for lidos didn't last.

The pools were expensive to run and maintain

and local councils no longer had the money

or the enthusiasm to keep them going.

Tarlair lasted longer than most, but closed in 1996.

How did you feel when it closed?

I'm sad, I'm sad.

Because along with a lot of people, we had a lot of fun down here.

Tarlair was THE place.

Yeah. We had a lot of fun down here.

A lot of people not here now that did enjoy it.

Do you think there is a future for it?

As a swimming pool, I'm afraid it's finished.

Yeah. Kids nowadays don't want to swim outdoors.

THEY LAUGH

I've been working in the pool up the road for 30-odd years. No.

This is alien to them.

They don't want to come and swim in fresh water.

Why is that, do you think?

Too damn cold!

But from the ruins,

Tarlair emerged once again as a place for people to play.

The concrete Art Deco curves were a perfect training ground

for local skateboarders.

Among them, Rhys Archibald.

He grew up in the town of Banff, just two miles from Tarlair.

He is now one of Britain's top freestylists.

Me and my buds would skate after school,

and just as kids we would roam around,

trying to find the next best thing.

It was out of the way, no-one would interrupt us,

they would allow us to skateboard here.

We weren't doing anything destructive,

we were just having fun on skateboards.

I guess it's a bit unfortunate that it's a bit of a forgotten bit,

but it's also a bit of a pro

that nobody would come and move us along from this.

So this is really where you honed your skills?

Yeah, yeah. Getting down my skills,

the peace and quiet just allowed me to concentrate

on what I was feeling, what I was thinking.

It was a good area for creating stuff

and after landing a really cool trick,

it was nice to look out to the sea

and think, "Oh, this is very peaceful and nice."

I'm determined to try out Tarlair for myself.

I'd never learned to ride a skateboard...

..so there's only one option.

In northern Scotland,

in October.

There's a campaign to reopen Tarlair and you can understand why.

It's such a spectacular setting.

So spectacular in fact,

that I have decided I want to take a dip for myself.

I mean, how cold can it be?

Don't answer that!

It's bitterly, bitingly freezing.

I told myself that generations of Aberdeenshire schoolchildren

had done just this.

Maybe without a wet suit.

And stepping out, the film crew were as supportive as ever.

Whoo! Whey! Nice one.

Take two?

That was a good rehearsal.

Shall we run the next time?

The craze for lidos, begun in the 1930s, lasted scarcely 50 years.

But there's one use of our coast that's endured

for thousands of years.

Protecting Scotland from its enemies.

Tucked away in the South West of Scotland,

Loch Ryan might seem an unlikely location

for those hunting remains of a war against Germany.

This is a place best known today

for getting the ferry to Northern Ireland.

But look hard enough

and you can discover how this sea loch played a pivotal role

in defending Britain's coast.

I'm on the western side of the loch.

The ferries come and go from the other side, over there at Cairnryan.

and beside me is what looks like

a totally unremarkable field of cattle.

You'd never know that this was a military landscape,

designed and built on an incredible scale.

At least, not from down here you wouldn't.

From above, you can see the remains of 60 concrete parking stands

and a network of taxiways.

Built around 1942, this site may look like an airport,

but it's not. At least not in the conventional sense.

There's no runway, for a start.

But then, you didn't need one...

..because this was Britain's biggest space for seaplanes.

Amazing, colossal aircraft like the mighty Sunderland,

used to defend vital British convoys and to attack German submarines.

The Sunderland could stay on patrol for 14 hours,

remarkable for the time.

This concrete maze was their base,

and they took to the water down this massive slipway.

Donnie Nelson grew up here, and as a young boy

he would watch these monstrous seaplanes come and go.

There is a lovely photograph of a Sunderland

being towed along the road, as usual.

They would bring it up this road here, onto this slipway here,

but somewhere along the road it met the local bus

from Kirkcolm village into Stranraer.

So, there just wasnae enough room for the pair of them.

They stopped the Sunderland at the side

and the bus slowly crept past. Double-decker bus.

And this photograph was taken,

shows it in beneath the wings of the Sunderland.

And that happened regularly.

In 1949, Donnie enlisted in the Air Training Corps

and he and his pals got a chance to take to the skies.

The first time I was on one was after the war

when I was old enough to join the ATC.

And I can remember on one occasion,

there was 86 boys aboard a Sunderland.

And do you remember the sights and sounds in the aircraft?

Oh, it was tremendous, noisy. Very noisy, the Sunderland was.

And then when it actually started to move

on the run down the loch prior to take-off, it got worse,

because you were getting the waves, the noise of the sea.

And all of a sudden it went all quiet again and just lifted...

..and we flew across to the Isle of Man and then across to England.

Followed the railway line back to Stranraer. It was great fun.

It was lovely to fly in. Beautiful.

And Loch Ryan's military importance went far beyond seaplanes.

On the eastern side of the loch,

a 1942 aerial photograph shows the village of Cairnryan

in the midst of construction works.

What was being constructed was a massive pier,

700 metres long.

One of three that were built,

only this one survives, and only just.

It was assembled entirely by the Army at a breakneck pace.

It was to be operational, as soon as humanly possible.

The port had a sombre purpose.

It was built as Britain prepared for the worst.

If harbours on the Mersey and the Clyde were destroyed,

then Cairnryan's three huge piers stood ready to take over...

..bringing in food, supplies and fuel from across the Atlantic.

We should be very grateful that in the end we didn't need it.

The wartime threat of invasion has gone...

..but patrols continue around Scotland's coast.

No longer hunting German U-boats...

..but fishermen, working in restricted areas,

catching young fish and threatening the future of the industry.

So how do you find where a boat is working...

..somewhere out in the vast seas around Scotland?

The answer is to be found in an aircraft hangar near Inverness.

This small plane, callsign Watchdog 65,

carries a huge array of cameras and radar...

..on the lookout for fishermen

who are doing things they shouldn't be doing.

We're there, we don't try and hide.

It's like the policeman on the side of the road

in his fluorescent jacket with his radar gun.

The colours of the aircraft alone would tell you

that we're not frightened about being seen.

Paul Warriner is the systems operator onboard Watchdog 65,

and he invited me to join him and the crew

on a night-time mission.

Flying fast and low into the night,

in search of any boats doing anything fishy.

Paul and I are squeezed into economy class at the back of the plane.

His role is to direct the pilots towards his target

and track them with his toy box full of gadgets.

Half an hour after take-off, flying north of Wick,

we're in sight of our first fishing boat.

Paul's job is to shoot video

that can identify the registration number of the ship...

..good enough to be produced as evidence

if there is a suspicion of foul play.

And it's not an easy task at 200mph, 3 miles distant and in the dark.

The target continued to evade us.

It was time for Paul to explain the aircraft's secret weapon.

More than an hour into the mission

with thoughts turning towards a warm dinner,

Paul's plotting a course for one final attempt.

Paul's film will go straight to Edinburgh

and will be compared with vessel logs and GPS data

to see if anything illegal has happened.

A surreal experience.

I feel like I have just taken part in an elaborate video game.

It's pitch dark out there,

you can only really see the control panels

and it's all about circling these ships

and just trying to get their name, to get their reference number,

as evidence that they're there.

They may not be doing anything wrong,

but they may be and that's the crucial thing.

But that's the game, that is what they are doing.

It's fascinating to be part of it.

The fishing patrols are just the latest chapter in the story

of how we've watched over our coasts.

But in recent years, there has been a twist in that tale.

The very coast that we've been defending...

..is now on the attack.

Today, climate change and coastal erosion are a genuine danger...

..to homes, communities and our historic buildings.

Buildings like this.

Fort George.

It was engineered to be impregnable,

built for the forces of George II

in the years after Bonnie Prince Charlie's failed rebellion.

But there was one foe its designers didn't count on.

The sea.

I'm taking a walk round

the perimeter of the fort with David Harkin,

a colleague of mine from Historic Environment Scotland.

David is an expert on the impact of climate change

on our most precious buildings.

What potentially could happen to somewhere like Fort George

over the next 100, 200 years?

Fort George is really on the firing line for things like coastal erosion

and sea level rise, so there could be damage to parts of the fort.

The section that's seen the most damage is here

on the northern flank, facing straight onto the sea.

And while these mighty walls may seem invincible,

the sand and soil supporting them is looking the worse for wear.

So, David, what is it we can see here?

I mean, this is a great example

of why this part of the coastline is so vulnerable.

You've got quite a thin layer of topsoil

and then you've got a raised beach deposit down here.

So if you look quite closely, you can see it's sand

supporting sort of pebbles and gravel and whatnot.

It's quite a soft deposit and that's why it's so vulnerable

to the impacts of wave action.

And how much potentially are we losing of this every year here?

There's sort of anecdotal evidence

from people that work around the site and visitors and whatnot

that suggest that we are losing, some winter seasons,

up to a metre of ground is lost because of successive winter storms.

And the evidence is more than just anecdotal.

In 1941, an RAF officer took this aerial photograph,

showing the land below the northern wall.

Today, seen from a drone,

the retreat of this coastline is clear.

Coastal erosion and sea-level rise are very much natural processes.

They have always happened and they will always happen,

but what makes it different now

and what makes it different with climate change

is the rate at which this change is happening.

So, in the past 20 years or so, sea levels in Scotland have been rising

by about three millimetres a year.

That's higher than the UK average

which is around about 1.4 millimetres a year

for the 20th century. So what that shows us is in the past 20 years,

the rates of sea level have gone up. That it's getting faster.

Do you think that the idea that people could lose their history

will impact on their ability to change their behaviours?

What people need is they need to react to something that they love.

And who doesn't love coming to historic sites like this?

And, in Scotland, we are incredibly lucky

to have such a rich and diverse historic environment.

It's part of our everyday lives, it's part of our DNA, essentially.

It's who we are as a nation.

And people love coming to sites like this.

So, I think if people know that the impacts of climate change

means that they might lose this,

then that is potentially what they need

to sort of inspire them to take action.

The experts agree. Over the next century,

Scotland will almost inevitably lose some of its historic coastal sites.

The only question is how many.

Take any beach, bay, dune or cliffside

and you will find the traces of us, of people.

These shorelines have represented opportunity,

survival, threat and adventure over many thousands of years,

but not a day goes by without the inevitable shift

of this physical border.

From the coming and going of the tide

to the never-ending process of erosion, rising sea levels...

..what we see when we look down on our coast from above

is a landscape rich in history and memory.

But it's also a landscape that never stops changing.

At once enduringly vibrant and dangerously fragile.

Next time on Scotland From The Sky...

..I use the view from above to find out how we've lived off the land.

Mysterious marks in a field reveal how our Pictish ancestors lived.

We explore how we farm the most spectacular and remote of islands...

Slainte. Slainte.

..and discover why whisky is our national drink.