Original subtitles

In the far north of Scotland, there's a huge area of wild country

where sometimes there seems to be more water than land.

Remote and windswept, this loch-studded landscape

is the north's Empty Quarter

and one of the most sparsely populated areas in northern Europe.

But it wasn't always like this.

Lochs are Scotland's gift to the world

and are the 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 fjordlike sea lochs,

great freshwater 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 shape the character

of the people who live close to their shores.

On this Grand Tour, I'll be travelling under wide skies

through a wilderness

where life can seem to exist on the margins of what is possible.

My journey starts with a train ride

to a station in the middle of nowhere,

goes with the flow across miles of featureless moorland

to a river with a glittering past,

then loch hops through space and time

to discover why people were pushed to the margins.

Journey's end is on the shining sands of a tide-swept beach.

I'm crossing a vast expanse of country far from any public road,

travelling on Britain's most northerly railway line,

which connects the town of Caithness to the cities of the south.

This is Altnabreac - one of Britain's remotest railway stations.

When you get off the train here, you really are in the middle of nowhere.

It's 10 kilometres to the nearest road,

39 kilometres to the nearest supermarket

and a very long way indeed to the nearest pub.

Meeting me at the deserted platform at Altnabreac Station

is retired rail worker Lewis Sinclair,

who spent 32 years walking the line,

maintaining this track in this lonely corner of the rail network,

and when the winter snows hit hard,

this is how they kept the trains running in the 1970s.

That was them trying to open the track after a big snowstorm.

The train had got buried. Good grief.

It's completely buried. Completely buried.

It would have been over 20 feet at that time.

They were stuck on there the whole Saturday night, Sunday morning on the train,

and then the helicopters came and rescued the people off the train.

That's a great shot. That's a snow plough? Yes.

That's a small plough.

That's a SMALL one? (LAUGHS) Yeah, that's a small one.

And that's the big plough, is it? That's the big plough.

Look at the depth of the snow there - a good 15-foot drift.

That's the one that got buried, just...

The snow plough got buried? Yeah.

How would you get it out, once you'd found it?

Just dig.

Moving hundreds of tonnes of snow? There would've been a big squad.

Like a chain gang. Yeah, a chain gang.

Amazing winters in those days. Oh, yes.

I would be cut off for quite a time here.

I remember they were cut off for six weeks at one time.

Lewis heads home by train,

down the track that he tended most of his working life,

and I continue my journey by foot,

through almost unimaginably gloomy weather.

The view ahead is obscured by clouds hanging in the treetops,

which seem to press in on me from either side.

I come at last to the first loch on my journey -

Lochdubh, the Black Loch.

Dominating the eerie scene is one of the hunting lodges

that the station was built to serve.

At one time it was at the centre of a vast sporting estate,

but the guns are silent now and today it's a private house.

Despite the grandeur,

there's definitely something spooky about this place,

and I can't help thinking that the house really would make

a great location for a horror movie.

So I'll not tarry long on the shores of Lochdubh.

With a quickening step,

I gladly leave the trees and the dark loch behind,

and the landscape suddenly opens out under wide skies -

so typical of Caithness.

The country here is full of Gaelic placenames -

a reminder of an earlier way of life before the coming of the railway

and sporting landlords.

Now, most of my knowledge of Gaelic

actually comes from ordnance survey maps,

and I happen to know that the loch behind me is called Loch Mhuilinn,

which means 'the mill loch',

and the wee burn that flows from it

is marked on the map here as Alt na Mhuilinn, or 'the mill stream',

which indicates there would have been a mill here at one time.

The question is, where is it?

I'm not looking for the remains of a big old-fashioned mill

with a large vertical waterwheel,

but something much simpler.

That's because the traditional type of mill used here

was a very primitive affair

and little changed over many centuries,

and was common in Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland.

Unfortunately, I can't find the remains of the mill

that gave its name to this burn.

In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone living here.

But this wasn't always a wilderness,

and we have the evidence to prove it

in this fascinating if slightly unwieldy atlas.

Named after the man who made it, it's called Roy's Great Map,

and was commissioned by the victorious government army

after the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

According to Roy's military map,

back in the 18th century there were several communities out here,

with names like Dalwhillan, Dalnaha, and even The Glutt.

But there's nothing left of this now-forgotten way of life -

in fact, today this is more like a human desert.

Continuing through this wilderness,

I enter an increasingly remote landscape.

Here the ground becomes ever more waterlogged.

Stretching as far as the eye can see,

there are lochans and pools everywhere.

This watery mosaic is all part of a vast peat bog

known as The Flow Country.

The name Flow Country was first used

to describe these wide open but rather soggy spaces

by surveyors from the Nature Conservancy Council in the 1950s.

They recognised the unique importance of this environment

and used the Old Norse word 'floi', meaning a flat, marshy area,

to describe this fabulous wilderness.

I want to investigate the nature of this vast tract of the Flow Country,

which covers a total area of 2,000 square kilometres of northern Scotland.

Roxane Anderson is a scientist who specialises in peat -

the stuff that makes up most of what you see out here.

Along with her field technician, whose name happens to be Pete,

they show me how a peat bog is an accumulation of dead plants

that haven't fully decomposed due to the waterlogged conditions.

Roxane, we're standing on blanket bog,

so it's smothering the landscape.

Absolutely. It's just covering.

This is why they're called 'blanket'.

It really is covering the whole landscape.

It is the largest blanket bog in Europe,

and potentially even the largest in the world.

So it's really significant. It is.

Another aspect that's really significant

is the amount of carbon that is stored in the peatlands.

This is significant in, for example,

Scotland's fight against climate change,

because if we have peatland in good condition

and that enables the carbon to be stored,

then it helps to reduce the amount of carbon

that's emitted in the atmosphere.

Roxane is keen to show me how the peat not only locks in carbon

but is also a record of the climate in the past.

To see into history, Pete first takes a core sample

of...well, the peat.

This is from the top at 50 centimetres,

so you're looking at the most recent vegetation to the oldest.

So, 50 centimetres would be...yeah, a few hundred years, maybe.

A few hundred years. That's amazing. That's incredibly well preserved.

And you can still see all the vegetation.

And then by the time you get deeper, there's hardly anything at all.

Is it completely decayed away?

It's much more decomposed but... No, no!

..even at the very bottom you can still find remains of plants,

and that's one of the interesting things about, you know, peat -

is that if you know how to read it,

it's basically like a history book of what happened in this landscape

for the last 9,000 or 10,000 years.

And the vegetation over the thousands of years

would have changed, would it,

or is it the same vegetation growing all that time?

It has changed a little bit.

About 5,000 years ago,

there was a period of...the climate was a bit warmer and drier.

That allowed the pine to rise. Really?

But then it got wet again,

and so we can see the rise and fall of the pine in the peat as well.

So as the climate got wetter, it would've killed off the pine forests.

Yeah.

Today this blanket bog is recognised as both an important carbon sink

and a very special habitat for flora and fauna.

But this wasn't always the case.

In recent decades,

the Flow Country was severely damaged by afforestation,

and huge plantations of spruce and pine still blight the landscape -

the legacy of government policy in the 1970s and '80s,

when the super-rich were encouraged to tax dodge

by investing in tree planting.

Many peat bogs were drained, and the rivers that they fed were starved.

Even worse, there was a scheme to exploit the peat

on an industrial scale, and turn it into electricity.

60 years ago, these huge mechanical beasts crawling over the bog

were deemed a symbol of improvement.

Jim Johnston helps me to paint a picture

of a very different period of Flow Country history.

Jim, can you describe what this amazing contraption is there?

I mean, it looks like a tank with a garden shed on the top.

There would be a number of machines like this one

which would be ditching the bog,

and picking up the milled peat off the surface.

And why were they milling the peat?

To supply heating material to a very large power station

which was standing just a few thousand yards or so away

which was operating on a very modern system - a closed-cycle gas turbine,

and the idea was that you would clear that peat completely

while generating all this electricity,

and then you would create farms on the cleared ground.

The purpose of it was to make something better

out of what they regarded as the wastelands of peat.

In the end it didn't run properly, which was rather a shame.

But of course these days we see peat as valuable in its own right

for different reasons.

Because of global warming, it's seen as a carbon sink

and perhaps a defence against global warming.

Well, in those days, the worry was that there was going to be another ice age

rather than that things were going to heat up.

It's incredible what a difference a few decades can make

to our perception of the landscape.

The Flow Country has gone from being seen as a wasteland

to being seriously considered as a World Heritage site.

If peat were once regarded as a version of "black gold",

then a few miles to the south is the real stuff.

This is the Kildonan Burn,

which drains from the lochans and bogs of the Flow Country.

The Gaelic name for this place is Baile An Or - "gold town" -

and remarkably it was home to Scotland's very own 19th-century gold rush.

Yvonne Creedy tells me how locals still pan for gold

for very special occasions,

and shows me how it's done.

Get rid of some of these bigger stones.

So, we're getting down to finer and finer sand here.

Yeah, and you want the black sand - that's what holds the gold.

See here? That's a bit of gold.

That is gold, isn't it? Yes. Uh-huh.

We've found gold. This is really amazing!

How often do you find it?

I mean, is it every once in a blue moon?

Am I exceptionally lucky?

Uh, there'll be... That's neat, isn't it?

Well, where there's one piece, I think you probably attract it.

Spin it round. You've got more, you see?

Look at that! Is that all gold?

That's all gold there, yes.

That's Kildonan gold.

Not enough to make a ring, but enough to make me feel very happy.

That's brilliant, Yvonne.

Enriched by the experience and thrilled by my gold find,

I head for my next destination, Strathnaver,

and the beautiful and melancholy Loch Naver.

Walking through Strathnaver is like taking a hike through history,

and I can't think of a better guide to the area

than Roy's old Military Map.

I just wish there was a pocket-sized version of the thing.

But it gives an absolutely fascinating insight

into what this area was like some 250 years ago,

and there've been some very significant changes.

Roy's map really is a beautiful piece of work,

but it also provides evidence for a great human tragedy.

We've already seen that the map shows settlements that are no longer here,

and as I continue my journey,

the absences seem to haunt the whole landscape.

You can see from the map

that Roy has marked several villages along the loch side

and further north up Strathnaver.

Now, many of these places no longer exist.

They and the inhabitants vanished long ago,

and all thanks to the greatest and perhaps the worst landlord in Highland history -

the Duke of Sutherland.

The name Sutherland is synonymous with the brutal Highland clearances

of the 19th century.

But the Highland clearances started out

as part of a program of agricultural improvements.

Now, the idea was to give over the good, fertile land

to large-scale and efficient sheep farms,

and to move the people who lived here to the coast,

where they were expected to take up fishing.

In Strathnaver and across the county of Sutherland,

over 15,000 tenants of the Duke were evicted from their homes,

all in the name of progress.

As the sheep moved in,

the 13 families who lived here at Rosal were moved out.

The only evidence that people ever lived here

are these few scattered stones,

but eyewitnesses from the time

reported savage cruelty and destruction

on an almost biblical scale.

Now, this was written by Donald Macleod,

who published a horrifying account of events.

"All the houses in an extensive district were in flames at once.

"I counted 250.

"Little or no time was given for the removal of persons or property,

"the people striving to remove the sick and the helpless

"before the fire should reach them.

"The cries of the women and children, the roaring of the affrighted cattle

"altogether presented a scene that completely baffles description."

As for the Duke of Sutherland and his agents,

they described what happened as a "benevolent action,

"necessary humanely to order the new arrangement of this country."

The legacy of this arrangement

continues in the empty wilderness left in its wake.

The suffering of the people of Strathnaver

has put me in a serious and reflective mood

as I continue to my next destination - tiny Loch ma Naire.

In legend, Mo Naire is the name of an ancient Celtic water goddess.

Legend has it that the waters of this tiny wee loch

have wondrous healing powers,

and in the old days, people came from all over the north,

seeking cures for diseases that had baffled all medical skill.

Now, given my own rather precarious state of health,

that sounds a wee bit like a cue for a dunk,

although I have to say I'm not particularly relishing the prospect.

That looks decidedly chilly.

Oooh!

I have to say that for a spa resort,

Loch ma Naire isn't what I would have expected.

It's totally deserted, and the fabled waters of this northern Lourdes

might look blue and clear but, boy, are they chilly.

Now, according to tradition, you have to perform certain rituals

for a cure to be effective,

and the first of these is to make an offering to the goddess of the loch.

Now, custom had it that you threw in a silver coin.

Now, I've got 20 pence here.

I'm just hoping that's going to be enough.

There we go.

Next, you had to call out your disease

and then dunk your head under the water three times.

So, uh...this is very embarrassing, but...

Please, Goddess, cure me of my unfortunate verruca.

Three times. Here we go.

One!

Two!

Three!

I've actually found something here.

It looks like an old coin from a previous visit to the loch.

Now, also, legend has it that your offering has to be a fresh one,

otherwise you would acquire the disease

of the person who threw this in.

So, I think this is dirty money.

Now, I feel a whole lot better already,

and I can feel that verruca rapidly disappearing.

Perhaps the experience of chilly Loch ma Naire

has had a positive effect on me after all.

I have a spring in my step as I head for the next loch on this Grand Tour

and a body of salty Atlantic water

on the cold northern coast of Scotland.

I'm speaking about the Kyle of Tongue, a shallow arm of the sea

that splits the land on either side and penetrates into the Flow Country

towards the magnificent peak of Ben Loyal.

Apparently, Tongue comes from the old language of the Vikings

when they held sway in these northern parts.

The Norse word 'tunga' means, uh, well, 'tongue'

and refers to the tongue-shaped spit of land

that projects across the loch,

almost dividing it in two.

Today, the tongue carries the road bridge that spans the Kyle.

I'm here to learn about a little-known episode in Scottish history.

The year is 1746.

The Highlands is awash with rebel Jacobites,

supporters of the exiled Stuart Kings

under the leadership of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Opposing them is the Hanoverian Government in London.

It's just a few weeks before the culminating action

of the whole era - the Battle of Culloden.

A French ship loaded with gold and guns destined for the Jacobite army

sails into this kyle,

pursued by a heavily armed British frigate.

In the ensuing engagement, there was much at stake.

Would the Jacobites get their desperately needed supplies?

And what happened to all that gold?

Local farmer and keen historian Allan MacKay

helps me speculate about a wee battle,

no more than a skirmish,

that could have had huge consequences.

Who knows what would have happened if the gold had got to Inverness?

Changed the course of history.

Well, I was going to say, because in many ways what happened here

could have been a tipping point in history.

Yes. I mean, there was a lot of gold.

It was £13,000 worth.

So is there any evidence of the battle that took place?

Well, there's cannonballs. Cannonballs!

Cannonballs have been recovered. (LAUGHS)

There's...round here they were found in...stuck into rock.

Into the rock crevices?

There was a cannonball recovered

which I actually happen to have in my hand here.

A genuine cannonball fired by, presumably, the Royal Navy

firing at the Jacobites.

Good grief.

Allan tells me how the Jacobites abandoned their heavily bombarded ship

and made a desperate bid to get their precious cargo of gold

away from the British soldiers, who were in hot pursuit.

The two parties met at Lochan Haken,

and this is where the gold was supposedly deposited.

Do you think there was gold there?

There was a cow appeared in with a gold coin stuck between its cleats and its feet.

The coin does exist, I believe, in Dunrobin Castle,

so I think if there's any gold in the loch,

they'd have recovered it - the people in the area.

Did it find its way into the community, do you think?

Well, there was a family which did become very wealthy.

Right. And it wasn't my family!

It wasn't your family? That's very tragic.

It is, yes. (LAUGHS)

Leaving Allan, I wander out across the beautiful sands of the Kyle.

It's hard to imagine that a fortune was brought here

and then lost again beneath these wide skies.

Countless tides have ebbed and flowed since then, of course -

almost washing away the memory of those turbulent times,

when a fortune destined for a prince could have changed history.

There might not be any Jacobite gold to be found here,

but this is surely compensation, and a view to treasure.

Ben Loyal, in all its magnificence, is absolutely priceless -

making this the perfect place to end my Grand Tour

through the Flow Country.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2019