Original subtitles

Scotland is one of the most beautiful,

most photographed countries in the world.

And for me, it's a place best seen from the sky.

It's absolutely stunning, seeing it from this angle.

Not something you get to do every day.

This viewpoint always has the power to astound.

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.

Much of Scotland might seem a natural wilderness

but almost all of this has been transformed by people.

In this episode, I want to explore how the view from the air

offers clues to how we've lived off the land over thousands of years.

From ancient fields on remote islands...

It's on edge, isn't it? Next stop's America out there.

..to how loggers have changed our forests...

Aye, you're knackered after every day, like,

but it is good. It's really rewarding.

..and revolutions in farming.

In the last couple of generations,

there's been a huge change in how we farm from my grandfather,

who would've had a horse-drawn plough.

Scotland's land reflects who we are and who we've been.

If we want to restore and protect it today

we have to understand what we've done to it,

the good and the bad, going all the way back to the very beginning.

Did you climb a lot of trees as a child?

Climbed a lot of trees...

..but never climbed these beautiful Scots pines.

My only chance of reaching the top of our Scots pine

is with the help of tree expert Tim Chamberlain.

This tree is a real treasure.

It's part of the ancient Caledonian Forest.

So you can see, there's lots of surface lichen and things

and there are some dead branches.

Just be as careful as you can when you...

I will. I will be. It's a special tree.

I'll be gentle with it. Yeah.

And just enjoy. I will.

I've never climbed a tree this way before.

It's hard work and nerve-racking...

..but definitely worth it,

because I'm actually climbing back through time

to discover what Scotland looked like thousands of years ago.

Wow! Look at this.

HE CHUCKLES

This is the Glen Affric Forest, just north of the Great Glen.

OK, I'm not in a plane or a helicopter, but at 20 metres up,

I think you can still say this is the view from above.

You can see both ways down the glen, across the loch,

up to those beautiful snow-capped mountains.

It's truly breathtaking.

Before there were aircraft...

..this is how you got the high viewpoint. Climbing a tree

or climbing a mountain.

There was no other way.

But take to the skies and you can see just how big this forest is -

the largest, least disturbed ancient forest in the whole of Britain.

It covers 24 square miles.

Go even higher and all the forests of Scotland, old and new,

are spread out below you, covering nearly a fifth of the country.

Large as the Glen Affric Forest is,

it's still just a shadow of its former self.

5,000 years ago, the original Caledonian Forest reached its peak,

stretching across more than three quarters of Scotland's landmass,

in some places reaching quite literally from coast-to-coast.

Nice. Back down to Earth.

There we are. That was absolutely fantastic.

As today, the ancient forest was full of Scots pine, oak and birch.

Though some of the animals have disappeared, the bears and wolves,

this forest is what most of Scotland once looked like.

And now people are trying to resurrect its former splendour.

In this area, you can see new young pines sprouting up

and because it's natural regeneration from the parent trees,

they're scattered all across the hillside.

But just close by, there are almost no young trees.

The clue as to why is visible from the air.

This six foot high fence runs for miles.

It prevents red deer from entering and then eating the young trees.

Beyond the fence, I could see what they get up to

given half a chance.

Remarkably, this willow tree is probably 30 years old

but it's barely half a metre tall.

It's a victim of grazing red deer that nibble the tips.

And there are more red deer now in Scotland than ever before.

Perhaps over 400,000.

Go back 60 years and you can see what the deer have done.

This photograph from 1954 shows some hillsides bare of trees.

But look at the exact same view today

and trees are gradually making a comeback.

Eventually, a much larger area of Scotland

will be returned to its natural state from 5,000 years ago.

The long-term goal is to have around a quarter forested by 2050.

But why did these huge forests disappear in the first place?

The answer lies here in the huge collection of aerial photographs

held at Historic Environment Scotland, where I work.

Thousands of images that reveal how our ancestors lived,

farmed, fought, and why they chopped down trees.

By the time of the Iron Age, around 800BC,

the people of Scotland were building increasingly impressive hill forts.

An astonishing 1,600 can still be found

scattered all across the country.

In aerial photos, you can't miss them.

Forts in Angus...

..The Borders...

..and Lanarkshire.

But not all my work is done in archives.

We're just doing final checks before we set off on a flight

from Inverness. A flight to search for the hidden traces

left behind by our ancestors, often only visible from above.

VOICE ON COMMS

Clark Priestley, my pilot, has over 6,000 flying hours.

We're travelling from Inverness, eastwards for 40 miles

to a hillfort called the Tap O' Noth, built around 400BC.

Nothing beats looking down at ancient sites from the air.

This extraordinary feature ahead of me

was once thought to be the mouth of a volcano.

And you can see why. But it wasn't nature that made this.

It was us.

From above, you can see why the Tap O' Noth

was the perfect site for a fort.

Whether for its defensive capabilities

or simply for projecting power.

It looks pretty desolate now.

But long ago, several hundred people lived here.

You can still see the stone ramparts, now collapsed,

which kept them safe from enemies.

But from our helicopter, you can also make out the faint traces

of an outer wall.

And within this wall, a pattern of small circular shapes,

the footprints of a hundred or so huts

that the people of Tap O' Noth called home.

It's seen a few things in its history.

I'm sure it can take the careful landing of a helicopter.

We've been given permission from the landowner

to set down in the flat central section of the fort.

I want to get up close and personal

with the impressive ramparts that encircle the summit

because they hold a remarkable clue

to the fate of many of Scotland's trees.

Dr Gordon Noble, an archaeologist from Aberdeen University

is an expert on Iron Age hillforts.

It started blowing a hoolie on the hill,

so we have to tuck ourselves into the shelter of the ramparts.

So, Gordon, today perhaps illustrates the drawbacks

of building high up on a hill in Scotland.

Indeed. I mean, we're inside Scotland's second highest hillfort,

and you can see really how extreme the weather can be up here at times,

and really just the huge effort that went into taking all the resources

up here to build this spectacular hillfort.

But it's not just a tough place to pick to live,

the ramparts themselves tell a story.

One of the most fascinating features of this site, though,

are these rocks, aren't they?

Basically this is melted rock.

You've got this vitrified melted mass here around about the rocks.

The fire has gotten so hot that the rock has actually melted.

The core of the rampart has actually created a fused mass.

And this stuff is almost, you know, it's harder than concrete now.

The fire could have been accidental or deliberate.

Perhaps the people who lived here

set light to the very walls that surrounded them,

creating a bonfire so hot it melted rock.

How much wood would they have needed both to melt this

and actually for the construction of the fort?

Well, this is what we don't think enough about really, you know.

When you see a fort like this, you could just see

all the stonework, the huge amount of rubble.

But, actually, the main strength of this wall

would have been through timber.

And hundreds if not thousands of trees being felled in the Iron Age

to great forts like this.

We want to see just how hot a fire would have to be to melt stone,

so we've asked local welder Sergei to help us out.

So can you guys put your safety goggles on?

Our test stone is the same type

that makes up the ramparts of the Tap O' Noth.

Got an infrared thermometer so I'll take a starting temperature.

25 degrees at the moment.

Let's see what it gets up to, OK?

So this is the same process that happened up on the hillfort.

Yeah. We just accelerate it a million times.

A million times? They didn't have that kind of equipment.

No, no, no.

That's incredible.

You see the bubbling up?

818 but a max of 1150.

So that's the kind of temperature they were getting up there

in order to melt the stone.

So this is just a tiny piece.

Can you imagine this on a site that size?

The scale of that size. Hundred metres long, 30 metres wide.

Yeah. And all of the walls. Yeah.

What do you think of it, Sergei?

Beautiful. Look at it.

It's turning the stone into marshmallow.

I mean, you'd almost think that rock couldn't do this.

No, it's just amazing. Isn't it?

Sergei, thank you so much for doing that for us.

That was amazing. I enjoyed it, it was a great experience as well.

THEY LAUGH

So, to melt the walls of Tap O' Noth,

massive fires of a thousand degrees Celsius would have been needed.

Other hillforts all around Scotland also went up in flames,

perhaps as many as 70.

Just imagine all those trees which had to be cut down and burned.

And because the walls were destroyed,

the hillforts were rarely used again.

But while Tap O' Noth was abandoned,

people have continued to live in its shadow.

Today, at the bottom of the hill is the pretty village of Rhynie.

And right next to Rhynie

is a standing stone from the time of the Picts,

the people who ruled here 500 years after the hillfort.

This is the Craw Stane.

It's an absolutely beautiful piece of Pictish carving.

At the top there's a leaping fish, very probably a salmon,

and below that, what's known as a Pictish beast, some kind of animal,

potentially a kelpie - that famous mythological Scottish water sprite

leaping into the air. It's absolutely stunning.

40 years ago, in the same field, another Pictish stone

was found by farmer Kevin Alston.

I was ploughing and hit this big stone.

The plough back then didn't have the spring release mechanism

so when you hit a big stone you really knew it.

It knocked you off your seat.

And what did you think when you actually saw the carving?

Well, it was quite a find, yeah.

Unusual to find an actual figure of a Pict.

It's nice to have found the stone

and let everyone see him.

Face-to-face with a Pict.

An extraordinary view of an ancient man and his axe

who once lived off the land at Rhynie.

Apart from the standing stones, the field appears empty,

but it turned out to hide a surprising discovery.

Back in the dry summer of 1982,

an aerial photograph was taken of the field.

When Gordon looked at the photo closely,

he saw something remarkable,

a series of strange circular patterns.

The shape of the marks alongside the standing stone

led Gordon to suspect...

..it might be some sort of pick Pictish settlement,

lost for centuries.

So what did you think when you saw those strange symbols

in the photograph?

Well, it was really, really exciting to be honest.

You know, it really showed that the standing stone

wasn't just standing by itself,

it was clearly part of this complex of monuments.

And these crop marks are amazing.

It's almost like a magical process, really.

But the only way to see them is from the sky?

Only way to see them is from the sky.

Gordon and his team uncovered a set of buildings

once home to a wealthy and fashion-conscious Pictish tribe.

They wore bronze jewellery.

This is a cloak pin in the shape of an axe.

And enjoyed a refined tipple.

Remains of wine jugs from the Middle East were found here.

The archaeologists now know what the settlement looked like.

Once again, they used lots of timber,

building a wall over 15 feet high

with a walkway made of oak sourced from far away.

An imposing timber hall was built inside.

This was a power centre of international importance.

A Pictish palace.

The material that we're uncovering gives us connections to...

..ultimately to the Byzantine Empire,

western France and to the Irish Sea regions as well.

So this place could be hugely significant

in the story of Scotland itself? I think so.

And there's so few of these Pictish settlements known,

to actually find one and to find these standing stones,

these Pictish stones actually in context

with this high state settlement right next to it is really exciting.

That's the power of the view from above.

You start off following faint clues only visible from the sky.

And soon you're unravelling whole new histories.

It's remarkable that an aerial photograph

has given us a connection to one of Scotland's most enigmatic peoples

and shown us a glimpse into the way they lived 1,500 years ago.

The Picts ruled the northeast of Scotland

because so much of the best farmland is here.

Without farming, there was quite simply nothing to eat.

But throughout our history, people have also lived off the land

in the most unpromising of places.

I'm travelling to one of the Wonders Of The World.

It's off the island of Mull on a much smaller island. Staffa.

Staffa can be difficult to reach,

but skipper David Kilpatrick knows these waters well.

I mean, there's a whole network of islands around here

but this is one of the smallest, isn't it?

Yes, there's no safe anchorage at this island. Or a good landing.

And that's important.

If you go out to Lunga there, or any of those...

..some of those other islands,

then the anchorages are safe and secure.

Staffa hasn't got that.

And when people talk about somewhere being remote, I mean,

what does remote mean to you?

The Outer Hebrides.

JAMES LAUGHS

Staffa, it's on the edge, isn't it?

Next stop's America out there.

Almost all visitors come to this island for just one thing.

This is Fingal's Cave.

It's 20 metres high, 80 metres long.

Columns and tiers of basalt rock.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that people made this,

but what this cave goes to show is that,

despite all the many, many things we've done to our landscapes,

there's still perhaps no better architect than nature.

Fingal's Cave has been world-famous for over 200 years.

In 1847, they even had a royal visit.

Queen Victoria was rowed inside,

though presumably on a calmer day than today.

She wrote in her diary,

"When we turned the corner to go into the renowned Fingal's Cave,

"the effect was splendid.

"Like a great entrance into a vaulted hall."

We now know that these extraordinary pillars

are products of Scotland's volcanic past.

The lava here cooled so slowly,

it solidified into these distinctive near-perfect hexagonal shapes.

But I've not come to Staffa

just to admire its great geological Cathedral.

What's perhaps even more remarkable

is that for hundreds, maybe even thousands of years,

this tiny remote island was farmed.

Up above the cliffs are the ruins of a 19th century hut,

which gave shelter to Victorian tourists.

But explore further and you'll see how even here,

seemingly on the edge of the world, people lived off the land.

From the air, a circular hollow is revealed,

once a pen for Highland cattle.

Ancient fields come to life.

The distinctive ridges, the rigs, made by ploughing or digging,

which pushed the earth into a mound

and furrows in either side for crops and to drain off water -

evidence of the toil needed to produce food from the tough soil.

And these field marks can be found across the entire island.

We've even found out exactly what they grew.

Grains of barley from the island

were dated back to an astonishing 1800BC.

Yet, we've no written records of Staffa until the 18th century.

We know for certain that two extended families lived here,

perhaps up to 16 people.

Boswell and Johnson met some of them on their 1773 tour of the Highlands.

They were less surprised with the fact that they were living here

and more by their indifference to the beauties of Fingal's Cave.

They wrote, "When the islanders were reproached with their ignorance

"or insensibility of the wonders of Staffa,

"they had not much to reply.

"They had indeed considered it little

"because they'd always seen it."

Staffa is proof of the lengths Scots have gone to

throughout history to put every inch of our land to work.

We don't know for sure what help these islanders get

through the brutal winter nights,

but if they had barley, we can take a very good guess...

..whisky.

This is the island of Islay, home to no less than eight distilleries.

I've come here because it's a chance to glimpse the past,

to see how whisky used to be made by our great-great-grandparents

back in the days when it was distilled at home,

with barley, water and peat all on your doorstep.

I'm on my way to the smallest distillery on Islay - Kilchoman.

It's also the first new distillery to open on the island

for over 120 years and it's not just its modest size

and its youth that sets it apart...

..at this distillery, they're reviving the old original way

of making whisky, based around a single farm.

The man running it is named after the island itself,

he's Islay Heads.

Hi, Islay. Morning, James, how are you today?

Good. I've caught you hard at it. Yeah.

We're just evening out the malt floor here,

so we get an even germination of the barley.

How do you do it? Well, if you grab a rake, we'll show you.

You just start at one end, take all the peaks out the barley.

We're going back to where distilling came from.

Back to farms where it all started.

The farmers would have extra barley from their crops

and they would distil it, maybe to entertain friends

with a bit of craic in the long winters,

maybe to sell a bit or barter a bit.

We've been going right back to the barley grown on the farm

and everything processed on the farm,

at the distillery itself.

So nothing goes any further than the farm gate.

15 years ago, this was just a simple farm with cattle and fields.

But in 2005...

..it became a distillery as well.

New buildings were put up for stills,

the cattle shed turned into a warehouse.

It's all on a scale more like the old illicit whisky stills

once hidden away on farms.

In just a single year, 1823,

Scottish law officers shut down an astonishing 14,000 stills,

many of them on Islay.

Illegal distilling was a way of life.

So is there an element of that rebel spirit

with what you're trying to do here?

I wouldn't say maybe "rebel",

but we're trying to do things traditionally.

We try to take our time with everything.

And nothing's machine led, it's all led by the spirit.

But by taking this traditional approach,

can you only ever get so big?

Yes. We could probably only ever get so big.

But I don't think that's a bad thing.

This is where the magic happens.

This is where the spirit's distilled. At 2,000 litres,

it's just larger than the smallest legally allowed still.

The size limit was and is about

stamping out illicit home whisky making.

The thinking was that larger stills meant legitimate business,

whereas small ones meant someone was cheating the system...

..and the taxman.

As with the old distilleries,

the ingredients to make the whisky are all close at hand.

The farm has several fields of barley.

But you need more than just the barley crop.

The water for the whisky comes from a burn

a few hundred metres up the hill, channelled into the distillery...

..and close by is the final ingredient.

This is something that's thousands of years in the making.

A mass of wet, decayed vegetation. It becomes this - peat.

And it doesn't look like much just now,

but when you burn it and you smell it, then it smells of Scotland.

Peat gives Islay whiskies their distinctive smoky taste.

Vast peat bogs cover much of the island.

The peat is cut out of the ground

to fuel the fires that smoke the barley...

..part of the process known as malting.

Real Scotch needs at least three years maturing in a barrel.

But the more patient you are, the better.

Islay was keen to introduce me to a ten-year-old whisky.

So this is where it ends up?

This is where it ends up, in the warehouse.

This used to be a barn for cattle?

So there used to be about 80 to 100 cows in here.

And we've maybe put it to a better use than it was previously.

And where are they now? They're out on the hill...in the rain.

They can't be happy.

Before it's bottled, the best whisky to taste

is straight from the cask. You want a dram? Yes, please.

Slainte. Slainte.

Oh. Warm the cockles of your heart.

It really does. On a cold day like this.

It's absolutely perfect.

Just stay in here for the rest of the day, will we?

It's not just alcohol that's distilled to make this,

it's Islay itself.

The soil, the earth, the Atlantic air, the barley, the water.

When you drink this, you're drinking in a whole landscape.

Jamie, do you fancy some?

Thanks.

Oh, yes.

Thanks very much. I'll have that.

JAMES LAUGHS

By the early 1700s,

the traditional Highland way of life had been going on for centuries.

People continued to make a living off the land...

..but rebellion was in the air.

The government acted.

For British soldiers to travel rapidly through the mountains

to subdue the Highlanders, new roads were needed.

Today, a mountain bike is perfect

for exploring the remarkable remains of one of those roads.

Here, it stretches for 12 miles,

rises to a staggering two and a half thousand feet above sea level

and it remains pretty much just as it was

when it was first built, nearly 300 years ago.

This route takes you north-westwards from Laggan.

At Corrieyairack it was and still is the highest road in Scotland.

And then it descends into Fort Augustus

at the southern tip of Loch Ness.

In total, 250 miles of roads were built,

crisscrossing the Highlands.

George Wade was the general in charge.

His new roads would let troops march much more rapidly between bases.

Fort Augustus was at the heart of this military network.

Wade's road is challenging enough on a bike, but nothing compared

to the hardships of constructing it back in 1731.

British government soldiers, known as redcoats, did the hard graft.

The road required not just one construction party, but six.

Over 500 redcoats.

They were always accompanied by a drummer,

presumably to keep morale up when either the migdges

or the rain got too much.

The idea was to build the roads to a standardised width of 16 feet.

But when the going got tough, as it almost inevitably did,

they reduced that to ten feet.

Let's see how they did.

And there we are, ten feet.

Absolutely bang-on.

Most of the new road was routed along the floor of the glens.

But then they faced the mountains at Corrieyairack,

a high pass topping out at 2,500ft is the only way through.

The chief surveyor Edmund Burt knew that to get a road up

such a steep slope, you'd need some seriously sharp bends.

Edmund Burke wrote about how challenging

this section of the road was

and how impressive their efforts had been to conquer it.

He remarked rather wistfully that

the only way to truly appreciate the scale of the achievement

was to see it from the sky.

"Nothing could give you a general view of it", he wrote,

"unless one could be placed high above the mountain in the air."

Impossible back then.

But today, Edmund, we've brought our drones,

so albeit three centuries on, your wish is granted.

A remarkable series of hairpin bends, 11 in total,

take you to the summit of Corrieyairack Pass,

the highest point along the route.

A punishing ascent, whatever your mode of travel.

By the end of October 1731,

the soldiers had finally completed the road into Fort Augustus...

..and celebrated with roast oxen and a barrel of ale.

There's a rich irony to the story of this road.

It was originally built to help the redcoats

control the unruly Highland clans,

but actually it was Bonnie Prince Charlie's Jacobites

who were the first army to use the road,

racing down it 15 years later, in 1745, on their way to war.

Rather than a barrier to sedition,

this was rebellion's route one,

a high speed, high quality revolutionary road.

Even today, this route remains in use.

But now instead of soldiers marching up and down,

it's electricity pylons.

Eight years ago, work began on the Beauly-Denny transmission line

to link hydroelectric stations and wind farms

in the north of Scotland to the south.

Once the pylons were up,

helicopters attached the electricity cables between them.

The modern day Edmund Burt in charge of this section

is Alistair Brand.

General Wade and his engineers, they were fairly clever

and they chose the most easy and practical ways

of linking up their road infrastructure.

And this section of the Beauly-Denny line runs to Fort Augustus.

And for this section we follow the route of General Wade's road.

Behind us is the Corrieyairack Pass.

It's 1,750 metres above sea level

and it's the highest transmission line in the British Isles.

So we've basically followed his route.

Can you imagine what it must have been like

for those soldiers building the road?

Well, we have a lot of modern equipment

and we're able to return to the warmth and comfort

of hotels and accommodation.

These guys were really pretty tough.

Would you have fancied that job? I wouldn't have fancied that job.

JAMES LAUGHS

At about the same time as Wade's roads

were penetrating the Highlands,

so new ideas of how to live off the land were emerging...

..ideas which would come to change our country forever.

Each year, tourists flock to the Scottish islands.

They come for the beauty, the peace and quiet.

And compared to most of Europe, few people live here.

But it hasn't always been like this.

Take Mull.

Today, only 3,000 people live on this relatively large island.

But you only have to look at the land from above

to see just how different things were two centuries ago.

Abandoned villages dot the landscape...

In the 1840s, the population of Mull was three times greater

than it is now. Over 10,000 people.

This land was packed.

Then, very suddenly, people started disappearing from here,

and villages all across Scotland.

It was one of the most drastic social changes in our history.

The often traumatic birth of Scotland into the modern world.

The Clearances.

I've come to the remains of the village of Shiaba

on the Ross Of Mull to find out more.

This place once teemed with 140 people.

I'm meeting world-renowned historian Professor Sir Tom Devine,

who's fascinated by the story of this village.

Nobody can experience this without being deeply moved and impressed.

You know, the complete absence of people.

Only the remains of parts of their houses.

It is an extraordinary place

and I don't think there's anywhere like it...

..as a memorial to clearance anywhere in any other part

of the Western Highlands and Islands.

The clearance of Shiaba was especially shocking

because it had been such a successful and thriving township.

From the air, you can grasp its original extent.

More than 20 houses, a school building...

..a mill for grinding corn.

Down by the sea, two fishermen's cottages...

..and a tiny chapel for the Sabbath.

Shiaba is one of the most fertile parts of Mull

and ridges from ploughing and old field boundaries still stand out.

By this time in the morning, it would have been a bustling place.

The kids would be perhaps preparing to go to school

because there was a schoolhouse.

The rest of the community, they're hard at work.

They could be doing anything from ploughing

to leading cattle up to the high country for grazing areas.

They may have been digging vegetables and potatoes.

The whole ethos of these places was hard toil.

There would probably be singing as people worked,

and then, of course, the smell of the cooking pots

as lunch started to approach.

Very closely related, many of them.

We find names constantly recurring among the population

like MacGillivray, MacKinnon.

So it would be a strong, coherent and stable community.

The people of Shiaba were all tenants.

The land was owned by the Duke of Argyll

who lived at Inveraray Castle on the mainland.

The Duke was one of a small handful of aristocracy

owning huge tracts of Scotland.

Although the Duke of Argyll

was still in formal control of the estates,

he had a thrusting young son whose name was The Marquis Of Lorne,

who eventually became the Duke.

And it's quite clear from his correspondence

that he was determined to increase the rental of the entire estate.

The way to do that in that period was to put land down to sheep.

His reasoning was simple.

Sheep were more profitable than people.

It was all about ruthless efficiency.

Squeezing the best return from the landscape, whatever the human cost.

The landowners called it improvement.

The Marquis Of Lorne served an eviction notice to the villagers.

To begin with, they thought it was a ruse to raise their rent,

but they soon realised this was no bluff.

In desperation, the villagers of Shiaba sent the Duke a petition.

The oldest resident, Neil MacDonald, lived here.

On the 1st of June 1847 he wrote,

"I'm now verging on 100 years of age.

"It would be a great hardship and quite unprecedented

"to remove a man of my age who, as is natural to suppose,

"is drawing close to the house appointed for all living."

His pleas and those of the other villagers were ignored.

In the summer of 1847, the villagers were evicted.

So I think the people eventually just accepted the horrible reality,

that this was the end of their way of life.

Some headed for the growing city of Glasgow.

Most travelled to Canada.

A number died on the voyage,

though a few made a success of the new country.

A settler in Ontario wrote home.

"I've seen John MacGillivray who left Shiaba

"going to Owen Sound where he bought 200 acres of land,

"all paid down cash."

For some, at least, it was actually the hope of owning their own land

without any factors, without any managers,

without sheep farmers, and certainly without any landowners.

So, for some of these people it was ironically, not at the time,

but for some of them eventually, it was a good deal.

Not quite everyone left Shiaba

The McKinley family were allowed to stay in this cottage.

The father became the shepherd,

looking after the thousands of sheep that had taken over the land.

It must have been a lonely existence.

A community of people replaced by a community of livestock.

The McKinley family finally left in 1937,

after the roof of their home blew off in a storm.

A map from the time confirms it wasn't just Shiaba

which became a ghost village.

Close by, the townships of Serphen...

..Kilvickeon and Scour were cleared, and many others...

..a story repeated in much of Scotland

as an astonishing quarter of a million people moved on.

Today, Shiaba stands for all those places that have long gone.

It's that silence which is melancholic and sad.

So it is a place of sadness,

but it's also... It's a monument to an old way of life

which has disappeared.

An ancient way of life that, you know, as Scots we should remember

because that's where our forefathers and foremothers came from,

and which existed for centuries.

This isn't a story about ruins.

It's a story about people.

It's a story about people's enduring connection to the landscape.

This was something that had to happen for Scotland.

Scotland had to change, it had to become a modern country

with a modern economy.

But how we changed, that's something we could have done differently.

There was an inhumanity about how we treated people,

an inhumanity that this site memorialises forever.

Clearances of the Lowlands often took place

before those in the north of Scotland.

You can see just how they changed the land and maps from the time.

Here's East Lothian in 1755.

Farms of almost completely open fields.

No boundaries or borders.

But by 1895, every field is enclosed with hedges or walls.

Yet one of the key revolutions in farming

happened much more recently, within the last generation.

I've come to the town of Dirleton in East Lothian

to meet a local farmer who can tell me all about the changes

that have happened to his own farm.

Changes that have had a powerful impact on the landscape

all across Scotland.

Bob Simpson has worked Castlemains Farm since he was a young lad.

The farm covers over 500 acres, growing everything from barley

and potatoes, to beans and sprouts.

Each autumn, Bob ploughs his fields for next year's harvest.

Hi there, Bob. Come in to the warmth. I could do.

Good to see you.

So, Bob, how long's this farm been in your family?

Our family's been here since 1892.

So we've been over 100 years on this farm.

I'm the fourth generation of the family to farm here.

How have you seen it change over the years?

In my lifetime, the fields have got bigger.

In the old days, we had generally fields of 15 to 20 acres.

Now we're farming fields that are 80 acres, 90 acres.

We've got one block that's behind us that's 108 acres.

These changes are most obvious through aerial photography.

This image from 1946 shows Dirleton

surrounded by the many small fields of Castlemains.

40 years later, and the view is transformed.

Many small fields have been merged into fewer much larger fields.

These huge fields were the result of a single dramatic change,

the end of the horse and plough.

And it happened surprisingly recently.

Probably the biggest change was the mechanisation in the early '60s,

when the days of the horse ploughing finished in the '50s

and the advent of the tractors came in the '60s.

So machinery has got significantly bigger

in the '70s, '80s, and up to today.

We've got a picture here of my first combine and this is from 1958.

It's a Massey Harris 735.

These old tractors and combines,

they're far more manoeuvrable in small fields.

But as the machinery got bigger,

you had to increase the size of the fields.

Where our ancestors grew kale,

these fields nearby Castlemains Farm now grow it's close relative...

..Brussels sprouts.

Once we only harvested when the light allowed.

These days, machines work around the clock.

It's 8am, and the harvester, supervised by Tracy McCulloch,

is hard at it.

So these are our Christmas sprouts.

We sell about a quarter of our Brussels sprouts

at this time of year, so it's full steam ahead.

It used to be that all the sprouts were harvested by hand,

but you can see with the size of the field here,

doing that by hand now would be a really hard job.

And it is hard work doing it with the machines as well,

but at least we can get through it a lot quicker.

In the last couple of generations,

there's been a huge change in how we farm

from my grandfather who would have had a horse-drawn plough,

to now, where we have huge machines

to do a lot of the work for us and help us.

We're really passionate about what we do.

We love growing good quality vegetables

and seeing them on the shelves

and it's something to be really proud of.

Ways of life have come and gone.

People have flocked to the towns and cities

but the dominant story of our landscape

has remained the story of that great revolution

in human behaviour from thousands of years ago -

farming.

Over the centuries, as farmland took over, so our forests shrank.

Huge numbers of trees were cut down to make way for fields

and to provide valuable timber.

It couldn't last forever.

By the early part of the 1900s,

forestry in Scotland was at an all-time low.

Just 5% of the landmass was covered.

Then came the establishment of the Forestry Commission.

Huge plantations sprang up all across the country.

Today, 19% of our landscape is forested like these woods below me.

They'd planted fast-growing foreign trees

such as Sitka spruce from Canada.

At 50 years old, these trees are ready for harvesting.

In a way, it's all just a type of really slow farming,

with trees as the crops.

That's why I've travelled to the mountains of Strathcarron

and the Forest Of Achnashellach.

Up to now, this plantation would have remained untouched,

as the steep slopes make it so hard to get the trees out.

But not any more.

The loggers are highly skilled and need steady nerves.

I caught up with some of them over lunch.

You've got to work in very inaccessible areas.

Do you ever find that struggle just getting to where you've got to work?

It is. it is.

It's pretty muddy ground, you know, but it's not too bad.

I mean, it must be really hard work.

Aye, you're knackered after every day, like, but...

Nah, it is good. It's really rewarding.

Everybody can build muscle, that's no problem.

But the hardest part is the rain and weather.

Once the trees are down, the loggers face a bit of a problem.

A deep gorge and river lie at the bottom of the steep slope.

And the trees have to be shifted to the other side.

Calum Duffy is the man to solve it.

So is logging something you've always done?

Yes, I've been brought up with that.

My father and brother are both loggers as well.

My father won the British chainsaw championship two years in a row.

So I come from good stock.

So you've got a lot to live up to?

I have, aye. Constantly, yeah.

I mean, has that surprised you, when you have to come

and try and cut on slopes as steep as that?

The trees grow very well on steep slopes.

The ground is very well drained, just absolute grade A timber.

It's great timber, but just hard to get to?

Yes, exactly. But that's just what we do, you know,

and we really enjoy it, the challenge.

Calum has risen to that challenge.

His team attaches heavy-duty cables to the fallen trees.

A powerful pulley lifts up the whole tree.

Sometimes three at a time, up to four tonnes in weight

and carries them across the deep gorge.

On the other side, a machine cuts them into manageable logs...

..right next to the all-important road

for the timber to be driven off.

Every day Calum's team cuts down 70 tonnes of wood

and a fresh payload zips across every six minutes.

Despite all this logging seen here at Achnashellach,

the area of forested land across Scotland continues to rise.

But the design of some new forests is changing.

So we're removing the commercial forestry

which is the Sitka spruce, larch etc,

because there's ancient Caledonian pines all through this valley here.

So we are removing the commercial forestry

and we're hoping that this will recede

and this whole area will go back to natural forest.

This is what many of the new plantations will look like.

More light, more space, a wider variety of tree species

to allow plants and animals to thrive in the undergrowth.

It's a carefully managed recreation of the original native forests.

Soon, the dense regimented blocks of Sitka spruce

that dot our countryside will become rarer,

changing the picture once more, as we view the land from above.

What a site like this shows

is that it takes no time to bring a forest down

but a long time to bring it back.

You don't plant trees for you.

You plant them for your children, or your children's children.

We may never see the return of the original native forests,

but at least today we can see their seeds being sown.

Ways of life can endure for hundreds of years

and then disappear almost overnight,

scarring the earth and scattering people.

From the furrows of early farms,

to modern machines which harvest on an industrial scale,

but however we live off the land, we need to look after it.

There's no better than the view from above

to understand how we've marked and changed these landscapes over time.

The challenge today is to think carefully

about how we're going to mark the landscape into the future.

What we're going to leave for the generations to come.

Next time in Scotland From The Sky...

..we'll be exploring the history of our industry.

How the drive to use our natural resources

took businesses to the remotest places.

How heavy industry lives on in our landscapes

and in our memories.

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

And I'll follow in the footsteps of my father

to Shetland and the oil boom.

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