Original subtitles

The beautiful waters of Loch Etive,

hemmed in by high mountains,

lie at the centre of a landscape that fuels the imagination.

There is an almost primeval feeling about this place.

The shores are wild and inhospitable

and steeped in Celtic myth and legend.

Lochs are Scotland's gift to the world.

They're a product of an element that we have in spectacular abundance -

water.

It's been estimated that there are more than 31 000 lochs in Scotland.

They come in all shapes and sizes, from long fjord-like sea lochs,

great fresh water lochs of the Central Highlands,

to the innumerable lochans that stud the open moors.

In this series, I'm on a loch-hopping journey across Scotland,

discovering how they've shaped the character of the people

who live close to their shores.

For this Grand Tour I'm exploring the origins of a mythic world

as I follow a loch from sea to mountain.

My destination for this Grand Tour is Argyll and Loch Etive,

which runs from white dogs of Connel,

through the lands of Lorn,

before turning north-east towards the high mountains of Glencoe.

Loch Etive is a classic fjord

and was fashioned by ancient glaciers that scoured out the landscape

as they made their way slowly to the sea.

The untamed shores of upper Loch Etive are truly remote.

There is no public road into this wilderness,

and no settlements along its farthest reaches.

The loch meets the sea and the Firth of Lorn at its narrowest point

where the early Gaels settled 1,600 years ago.

They called their kingdom Dal Riata

and its history is populated with heroes and their mighty deeds.

The narrowest part of the loch is the closest to the sea.

Today it's spanned by a bridge at Connel.

Connel means 'the white dogs' in Gaelic,

so called because of the tidal race that rips through the narrows

at an incredible 12 knots.

The white dogs are known in English as the Falls of Lora,

and when the tide is running

the dogs become a playground for the brave.

The tide is in full flood and to watch the sport,

I've joined kayaker Dave Bleazard

on a powerboat in the middle of the falls.

Well, Loch Etive runs out 15 miles up behind you up to Taynuilt

and then all the way up to the head of the loch.

And the tide drops,

today it's dropping by about three metres in height,

so all that volume of water, three metres of all the surface area

of Loch Etive has got to all come piling through this gap.

But it's amazing the force of water that we're looking at here.

There's great boils erupting on the surface

as if there's something alive down there.

Yeah, the bottom's not flat so there's pinnacles and hollows

and it forces the water up and it forces it down.

Yeah, it's just not a straight run through at all.

Now, if you were in a kayak over there,

what kind of challenges are you faced with?

Staying upright is the first of them!

There's plenty of boils and things are going to push your boat around,

push you sideways.

But this is strictly for experts, I'm guessing?

Yeah, the boys that are on here today are some of Scotland's top paddlers, absolutely.

Oh, he's gone, he's gone.

He's back up again.

Some of the kayakers are making use of an unusual two metre wave

that's formed under the bridge.

That's a big wave but it's not actually moving anywhere, is it?

It's a standing wave.

So that's, like, quite a strange phenomenon, is it not?

Well, in ocean terms it is. In river terms it's not.

We get a lot of waves not on the river that stand still,

and so it is, it's a river feature on the sea.

So you'll be able to have lots of opportunity as a kayaker

to just constantly surf this wave.

Yup.

And it's not gonna ever break and reach the shore.

No, that's right.

It's hardly surprising that the early traveller,

Dorothy Wordsworth, never forgot the Falls of Lora.

In 1803, she and her brother, the poet William Wordsworth,

crossed in an open boat with their horse and trap.

"The horse fretted and stamped its feet against the bare boards.

"The tide was rushing violently in making a strong eddy,

"so that the motion, the noise and foam terrified him still more,

"and we thought that it would be impossible to keep him in the boat."

Fortunately, they just managed to stop the horse

from jumping overboard and capsizing the boat.

And guess what? They never took a highland ferry again.

Paddling at slack tide, with the fury of the falls but a memory,

I make my way to one of the most ancient castles in Scotland.

The imposing fortress of Dunstaffnage

has guarded the entrance to Loch Etive for centuries.

In the Middle Ages, Dunstaffnage became a centre

of clan MacDougall power.

Now, unfortunately, they backed the wrong side

in the wars of Scottish independence

and were defeated by Robert the Bruce, who confiscated their lands

and gave them to their arch rivals, Clan Campbell,

who have reigned supreme here ever since.

With so much Campbell history imbued in its ancient walls,

Dunstaffnage is a place of legends, where the past and the supernatural

seem to be ingrained into the very fabric of the building.

Lorn Macintyre has known the castle since he was a boy.

Having spent his formative years in its shadow,

the place and its Campbell keepers have left a great impression on him.

Now, Lorn, you've known Dunstaffnage since you were a boy, is that not right?

Yes, we grew up beside Angus Campbell,

the twentieth heredity captain of Dunstaffnage

as he never failed to remind people.

Right.

My grandmother was his housekeeper in the mansion house

which burnt down in 1940, and she was really for the rest of his life

his confidante and looked after him.

He was a very colourful character.

He was a very, very colourful character.

He was I would call one of the last of the traditional lairds.

He was steeped in his own heritage but also very much steeped

in a kind of Celtic mystical supernatural heritage.

He lived I think in a world of ghosts

and he lived in a world of rituals.

When you walked up the avenue with him in the twilight

and the moon was rising,

he insisted on stopping

and opening his sporran and turning the coins over,

because he had a superstition about that,

and when you were in my grandmother's kitchen

when he was taking his coffee,

you daren't look at the new moon through glass.

Right, why was that?

Because he thought it would bring misfortune on to you.

He was enormously superstitious.

He believed somehow that these supernatural apparitions,

and there were apparitions, were part of his heritage

like the paintings on the walls and therefore just to be accepted.

The captaincy of Dunstaffnage is a hereditary title

granted by the Campbell Duke of Argyll.

In addition to a peppercorn rent,

the captains are traditionally obliged

to spend each midsummer's night in the gatehouse,

which has the reputation for being haunted by a poltergeist.

So he'd come here by himself on a camp bed

and spend midsummer's night here?

He came here when he had a torch.

He had the West Highland terrier to alert him

if any ghosts should appear and disturb him,

and then he put a light out, he stopped reading

and he was fetched again in the dawn and taken back home

and my grandmother made sure that he had not been disturbed

during the night by any spectral interventions.

And were there any spectres that he might have seen, do you think?

Well, the principle one is a lady called the Ell-maid.

I'm not quite sure how she gets her name

but she seems to have been a very real presence in this castle

down the centuries,

and one of the attributes, according to tradition of the Ell-maid,

is that she has a man's tread, a heavy man's tread.

What about you, Lorn - would you spend the night here?

I don't think so.

From what I know of the place and what I have actually heard,

and read, I think I would have to have people with me

and perhaps a very, very good guard dog.

It is spooky, it is very spooky.

Out of a strange sense of bravado,

I've decided to spend the night in the gatehouse.

I'm doing this not to challenge the claim

of the Campbell keepers of Dunstaffnage,

but to see if it's possible to get a good night's sleep

in such an ancient and haunted place.

According to Lorn, the Ell-maid announces her presence

with the sound of very heavy footsteps,

which is bad news if you're unlucky enough to hear them.

So I've got these earplugs, just in case,

and as an added precaution

in case I see anything that's particularly ghoulish and disturbing,

I've got this eye mask.

So, time for bed!

Ah. Ahh!

I'm exhausted.

After a rather fitful sleep, I leave Dunstaffnage

and its supernatural connections

and continue my journey eastwards up Loch Etive,

heading to Bonawe and the village of Taynuilt

where I come across a little known monument with legendary connections.

This standing stone, curiously called The Nelson Stone,

was the first ever monument erected to the memory

of Admiral Lord Nelson

after his death at the Battle of Trafalgar.

So what, you might well ask,

has a highland village got to do with a one-armed, one-eyed naval hero?

And the answer, of course, is balls.

Cannon balls, to be precise.

Remarkably, some of the cannon balls fired by the Royal Navy at Trafalgar

could well have been made from iron smelted here

on the shores of Loch Etive.

At Bonawe are the impressive remains of an iron foundry

built in the 18th century.

These days it's also a museum.

Now, this is a rare and rather unexpected example

of early industry in the Highlands.

And this is a lump of iron slag -

the waste product from the smelting process.

It's rough and quite heavy and you can find it on the ground

everywhere around here.

Now, the iron ore itself actually came all the way from Cumbria -

brought here by the iron masters for the smelting process.

And the reason they chose Loch Etive

was because of this stuff, charcoal,

which came from the trees round about.

Alasdair Eckersall is a ranger with the National Trust for Scotland.

He combines charcoal making with woodland conservation.

This is a kiln, a charcoal kiln? It is, that's right.

Well, I have to say it doesn't look quite as high tech as I imagined.

It's basically just a big oil drum, is it not?

It is indeed, but it's higher tech

than you would have come across in days gone by,

but there's certainly more advanced ways

of making charcoal these days, right enough.

Now, what exactly is charcoal?

So, charcoal is just the carbon element of wood.

If you take a piece of wood

and you burn it without the presence of oxygen,

everything else in the wood will disappear

and you're left with the carbon skeleton of that piece of wood.

So how do you take the oxygen out of the equation, then?

By getting a good, hot fire going but in a controlled fashion.

So using a kiln like this we can seal out most of the air.

Just let a small amount of air in.

The next phase of operations is to stack the kiln,

which means that we actually have to climb inside it to lay the wood,

which Alasdair's volunteers have prepared.

A task that would have been familiar to charcoal makers of old.

The charcoal making families would have just lived in the woods.

Some of the archive photos you'll see the very basic stone

and little thatched huts, that they would build themselves in the woods.

And the whole family would live like that? The whole family would live there.

The nature of charcoal making then meant they had to be on site

all the time watching their burn.

I'm then granted the honour of removing the centre pole

and pouring burning embers into the space to set the fire.

And how long will this burn for?

This is going to burn for about 14, 15 hours

With the lid in place and sealed with mud,

the burn will need to be tended carefully and the airflow adjusted

using four pipe chimneys to make sure the wood doesn't turn to ash.

After the smoke finally clears the following morning,

I join an anxious Alasdair

to lift the lid on his charcoal making skills.

And this is the moment of truth.

It certainly is. What's inside?

I thought there might just be a pile of ash.

But that's really impressive, isn't it?

That's come away OK. Yeah, that's not a bad burn. That is really impressive.

You can see there how the wood's kept its integrity.

We've still got the shape of the original piece of wood.

But everything else has gone out of it

and we're just left with the carbon.

You can even see the grains in the wood and the rings.

It's really quite beautiful. It's almost like a work of art.

As mist descends over the forest, I move on,

heading to a place that continues to make use

of the area's abundant resources -

oak wood and salmon.

At Inverawe Smoke House, salmon and trout are prepared daily.

Once filleted, the fish are placed on racks to be dried and cured

using the age-old process of cold smoking.

Yes, you beauty.

I help the owner, Robert Campbell-Preston,

to load up with freshly split oak logs.

He then introduces me to the arcane art of smoking.

Smoke goes under the floor here and then up through the kilns

and out through the roof.

You know, it's very simple.

Passing through the fish on its way. Absolutely.

So, I'll just pull this out for you.

Now, how you make the smoke

is really with this little contraption down here.

Is that controlling the air supply?

That controls the air and when you're coal smoking,

you don't want flame, you just want smoke.

Every fire is different.

You get to know the quirk of each fire.

Lift the lid off.

So, this is a 14/7 operation. Yup.

And the secret to good smoking, I think,

is to keep stocking the fire every four hours.

That's perfect.

Now, what you need to do to make a good heart in your fire,

what they always do is bang it, bang it, go on, bang it, bang it.

That gets a good heart going.

Puts the wood down.

And heart to the fire is really important.

Now see how you're getting...

The smoke is increasing. No, the lid's off.

The smoke's increasing because we've put fresh wood in.

Obviously the more, the fresher it is, the more smoke you get

and that's why it's so important

that you stoke the fire every three to four hours.

You love your smoke. You love it too!

Right, lid on. Now, this is important too.

Again, control it 'cause that controls how the fire works

but where you place this in here matters,

because remember, when we are smoking,

we mustn't let the fish get warmer than thirty degrees.

I'm smoking already, Robert. OK, push it in, push it in.

Push it in. That's it.

So, you must have shift work here?

Oh, yes. 7-7, yeah. We've always got somebody here.

And the fire never goes out? At night we just stoke it down.

Do they ever go out? Oh, yeah, of course they do.

Well, sometimes. They do. Sometimes.

That's when the boss starts shouting and starts to get angry.

Why the...why are the fire... Who let the fires go out?

You know, just like the wife at home.

Who let the fire go out? You know what I mean.

You're very passionate about this.

I've never heard of someone speak so passionately about smoke

in my life before.

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it?

Back on the water, I head further up the loch

in the company of Natalie Hicks, a research scientist

working with the Scottish Association of Marine Science.

Natalie has been studying the extraordinary ecosystem

hidden beneath the deep, dark waters of Loch Etive.

So, Natalie, we've certainly picked the weather to be out on Loch Etive

which, from a scientific point of view, is a really unique loch.

Yes, it is, indeed.

I mean, it's one of 110 sea lochs

that we have on the west coast of Scotland,

and for scientists, this is particularly interesting

because effectively we've got a marine-dominated system

in the lower basin here,

and we've got a more fresh water dominated system in the upper basin.

Very much like a fjord you would find in Norway.

So, what does that mean in terms of the marine life

you might expect to find here?

So, we've got a few unique species in the loch.

Most of them you do find in the open oceans.

For example, we've got a zoo plankton population,

a copepod population.

And so zoo plankton are found... What's that?

They're small organisms that feed on phytoplankton.

They form the basis of the food chain.

There's a huge population in the loch. Really?

It's an ideal environment for them.

So they can tolerate the changes in salinity

and there's not many predators but there's a lot of food.

So what kind of abundance are you talking about?

Can you scoop it out of the water?

You can scoop it out of the water and it looks like a pink soup

'cause there's so many of them it changes the colour of the water itself.

I know you've got a net. We have got a net.

We're gonna do some scooping? I think we should scoop some out and see if we can catch them.

Excellent.

The zoo plankton we are after form an important part of the food chain.

Their bodies have a very high omega oil content,

and it's what makes the fish that feed on them,

like herring and mackerel, so healthy to eat.

Natalie's method of catching them takes me back to a happy childhood

spent rock pooling with a shrimp net,

although this one is considerably longer

and has a collection bottle at its base.

You don't want to lose that, do you? NO, definitely not.

It's as simple as lowering the net into the depths

and bringing it up to the surface.

Here it comes. Have we got anything?

Let's have a look. Let's tip it into a bucket and see what we've got.

Ooh, we've got a couple of jellyfish.

Look, you can see them. Is that them?

Yup, so all those little pinky, browny things... The pink stuff.

You can see them zipping around.

Some of them are in clumps and that's what gives the water the sort of pinkish brownish colour.

Looks like we've got lucky and we've got two moon jellyfish as well.

Do they sting? These ones don't sting us.

You're safe to pick these up, that's not a problem.

There you go. Wow.

Sure it doesn't sting? Yup.

It doesn't sting, it doesn't sting, folks.

You can pick them up, but only the moon jellyfish. Yeah, only the moon.

Don't pick any of the red ones up that you see around the coast.

They definitely sting.

I'm surprised to see so many of these tiny, little...

They look like little shrimps. They do and they move very quickly, don't they?

They do. Do they bite? They don't bite.

I've never known of a copepod to bite a human.

Can we see? Go on.

Ouch! It got me.

To fully appreciate the epic scale of the Buachaille,

which I have to say is my favourite mountain in the whole of Scotland,

I'm meeting up with Murray Wilkie

who specialises in taking extraordinary mountain photographs.

His secret is to capture them

in the magical light of dawn, sunset or both.

But to do this, he goes to exceptional lengths.

I'm joining him on a trek to the summit of a hill

overlooking the Buachaille.

The plan is to camp at altitude.

So, what's the idea behind this high-level camping, Murray?

Well, it's the views you get, I think.

The sun sets and the sun rises.

When you get them, you just can't beat it, it's the best light.

You get great views but when you get the light, it's just amazing.

It's getting spectacular with every step.

Or more spectacular with every step.

Look at that. Isn't it just...

Some people wonder why you come to the mountains

and you don't really know until you get into these positions, do you?

Such an impressive view, Murray.

It's not bad. Ben Nevis in front of us.

Look. Yup.

You can make out its north face and the moors in front of that.

The essayons over there. That's right.

And if you go further round, you can see Ben Alder

and right round to Schiehallion again.

And in front of us, we've got this great chasm

of the beginning of Glencoe.

Sunset, which is what we've come for, isn't too far away.

But there's still time to put up the tent and have a blether

before the magic hour arrives.

This was the first serious mountain I ever climbed.

Oh, really? I was a wee boy.

I was about thirteen or fourteen and I was scared rigid.

Curved ridge and early December. Right.

Snow and ice. I was dragged up there kicking and screaming.

But I loved it.

I absolutely loved it, and we got to the summit

as the sun was going down, so in a way, watching the sun go down

behind the Buachaille is kind of reliving that for me.

Yeah.

Have you got any favourite mountains

that you've climbed and managed to capture the essence of

in your photography and your videos?

Yeah, I think...the one that stands out, I think -

I did a wild camp on top of Beinn Alligin, which is up in Torridon.

It was getting dark and I looked outside back at the summit

and I saw a wee flash.

I thought, somebody's out taking pictures already.

So I thought, right, I'll get out and I started taking pictures.

And as I scanned north I took a picture and you can just see...

You couldn't see with the naked eye because it was still quite light,

was a wee band of green, and just as the night progressed,

the lights became visible to the...

What, the northern lights. The northern lights.

Aurora borealis.

You know, you often see them on the cameras but you can't see them with the naked eye.

This was probably only one of three times that I've seen them with the naked eye.

The only time I've seen them on top of the mountain.

They're spectacular, though. Oh, it was amazing.

But it's strange 'cause doing what we're doing,

well, the way that you do it, it's essentially a very solitary pastime.

But you're not a solitary person.

Do you come up here to contemplate?

Do you feel because you're up high

somehow you know you're on the summit of the gods,

looking down on the rest of humanity?

'Cause we are. You see the cars driving past down there on the A82.

Tiny wee things and we're up here.

For me personally, not that I'm not enjoying your company tonight

but I do like it when I'm by myself and I don't meet another soul.

There's something...you appreciate things as well I think

when you do go back home.

We are exceptionally lucky.

The clouds have kept away, allowing the dying rays of the setting sun

to catch the Buachaille.

The Great Herdsman of Etive looks very imposing now

as I take a photograph to capture the essence of my favourite mountain.

Now, this has definitely been worth waiting for

because I've never seen the Buachaille in this light before.

He looks truly epic - a real giant, making this the perfect place for me

to end my grand tour among the legends of the west.