Original subtitles

PAUL MURTON: Many of the lochs of Scotland's south-west

are hidden away in the rolling hills and forests

of the ancient lands of Carrick and Wigtownshire.

Remote and often overlooked,

these shining jewels in the landscape

have played a surprising role in Scottish history.

Scotland's lochs are a product of an element

we have in spectacular abundance -

water.

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

that there are tens of thousands of lochs in Scotland,

and they come in all shapes and sizes.

We've got long fjord-like sea lochs,

great freshwater lochs of the Central Highlands,

and innumerable lochans that stud the open moors.

In this series,

I am setting out on a loch-hopping journey across Scotland.

Meeting the people who live close to their shores,

and discovering how lochs have influenced an entire nation.

For this Grand Tour, I'm heading from a sea loch famous for farewells,

to the highest point in the south of Scotland,

following the trail of Scotland's national hero.

My journey starts at Loch Ryan,

explores the coast,

before heading inland to thread a watery way from loch to loch,

following Robert the Bruce to the hidden lochs of Galloway.

This is Loch Ryan.

It was here in the spring of 1307

that forces loyal to the exiled Robert the Bruce landed from Ireland

to join the 'king without a kingdom'

on his campaign to secure Scottish independence.

Robert the Bruce landed successfully a few miles north of here.

But not so his brothers, Thomas and Alexander.

When they sailed into Loch Ryan with a force of 18 war galleys,

they were met by an army loyal to the English.

And in the carnage that ensued,

they were captured, imprisoned, and then executed at Carlisle Castle.

Meanwhile, their brother Robert soldiered on,

heading east through country he had known since childhood.

The Bruce launched his invasion of Scotland's south-west from Ireland.

Today, the Irish connection continues

with frequent daily ferry crossings from the port of Cairnryan

to Larne on the coast of Ulster.

But in all its long history, Loch Ryan was never so busy

as it was during the Second World War.

Huge structures sprung up on and around the loch.

Multitudes of boats and submarines and seaplanes were moored,

and thousands of military personnel poured in from around the world.

War is a serious business,

but for a group of young boys growing up on the banks of the loch,

all this activity and all these huge machines,

spelled excitement and adventure.

Down at the old jetty, where the flying boats were once hauled ashore,

I meet up with one of those boys.

Born in 1932,

Donnie Nelson has bittersweet memories of those long war years,

the RAF and their flying boats.

Do you know how many flying boats were here?

I should imagine there would be anything between about 20 and 50.

Oh, really? As many as that? Oh, aye. Oh, aye.

What was it like as a boy growing up here

with all this activity around you?

It must have been quite exciting, I imagine. It was very exciting.

The aircrews were very good at saying,

"You get out here and we'll take you flying."

That must have been absolutely brilliant. It was great!

I can remember on different occasions

flying south on a training flight as far as the Isle of Man

and then cutting in towards the north of England over Carlisle,

then following the railway line back to Stranraer.

Really? Yes!

During the war, flying boats were deemed essential,

and one British model in particular, the Sunderland,

became the bane of the German U-boat fleet.

This long-range bomber featured machine-gun turrets,

bombs, aerial mines, and depth charges.

With such a dangerous array of guns protruding from it,

the Germans nicknamed it the 'Flying Porcupine'

and Donnie remembers it well.

I can remember being in a Sunderland and there were 60 or 70 boys in it.

Climbing all over the plane.

Everybody having a go in the second pilot seat.

Everyone having a shot... Oh, aye, yeah.

..at flying it? Everybody.

You'd be sick with the aircraft tossing all over the place.

(CHUCKLES) It must have been like a dream come true for a small boy.

It was great fun.

But despite the thrill of these amazing machines,

Loch Ryan remained a dangerous place, even after the war,

as Donnie and his friend Paddy Breslin found out to their peril.

We've come high on the hills above the loch

to visit a strangely out-of-place concrete wall

standing over 70ft high.

During the war, pilots were guided by concrete arrows set in the ground

towards the wall, which was a practice target.

This could be the most bombed structure in Scotland.

Now, Donnie, this huge wall behind us

has got quite a fascinating, significant history?

The RAF used it.

There is a record that 617 Squadron

at one time actually practiced their bombing.

Is that the Dam Busters? The Dam Busters, yes.

Whoa. And it was used extensively.

Quite often if you were in Stranraer,

you could hear bombs exploding up here.

Not long after the bombers stopped using the wall for target practice,

a truly tragic episode happened here.

Donnie, Paddy, and their gang

were throwing around what they thought were spent bombs.

It's an episode that has never left Donnie.

One of the boys picked up one of these burnt-out husks

of incendiary bombs.

There were 600 odd of them lying there,

put in a pile ready to be taken away.

And he tried flinging it over the wall, but it bounced back.

So, we all had a go.

Picked up one each and one of them bounced back and burst into flames.

It turned out there were over 600 of them lying there, as I said,

and one live one in among them.

And it burst into an intense white flame. We panicked.

Paddy stepped in in front of me, and it exploded.

And the next thing, I picked myself up a few yards away,

my head was absolutely ringing with the sound of the explosion.

And then I heard Paddy shouting and I turned round

and he was lying there, both legs were broken into bits and pieces.

And they took Paddy to hospital, but he died that night.

That's terrible. And this is after the war?

This was after the war.

So, in a sense he was a casualty of war after cessation of hostilities. After it.

So that stands as a memorial, that wall, doesn't it? It does.

To Paddy. To Paddy.

Alright, Donnie, I've got you a wreath.

In memory of young Paddy,

Donnie lays a wreath up against the wall of the forbidding bomb target,

a place where he truly left his childhood behind.

"For Paddy Breslin. A great pal."

I head next for Stranraer,

principal town in the area, lying at the head of Loch Ryan.

The first port was developed here in the mid-18th century,

a time of almost constant naval warfare,

but also a time of discovery and adventure.

One traveller who left Loch Ryan,

sailed into the frozen unknown of the High Arctic,

and lived to tell the tale.

His name was John Ross.

With sea salt flowing through his veins,

he joined the navy at the tender age of nine

and sailed all over the world.

The great goal of his life

was to be the first to discover the fabled Northwest Passage -

the elusive northern route from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Arctic exploration defined his life and his legacy.

Hello, Paul. Nice to meet you.

Museum Curator, Jaime Enstone,

tells me more about this remarkable man's life in the High Artic.

They would have set out from here on an expedition

and no-one would have any idea when they were gonna get back.

I think they expected sort of a couple years or whatever.

But, of course, until you get there

you don't know what you're going to find.

So, it was difficult to know how long they were going to be away.

And I think it was very limited windows of when they could even try.

Certainly, over winter, you would have stood no chance.

It would have just been landlocked in ice.

Almost every year, eager explorers would set off

looking for a route through the maze of ice and islands

off Canada's north coast.

John Ross's second expedition

is perhaps his most famous,

because he went missing for four and a half years.

Icebound, the crew only managed to move seven miles

between their first and third winters.

John Ross eventually returned

and published an illustrated account of his adventures.

But how did he and the crew survive such hardship?

So, he kept the crew together for four years? Mm-hm.

They had a camp, and they went out from camp on various expeditions.

He was very good to his crew, actually,

and they did even make up classrooms.

Not many of his crew could read,

so he was teaching them to read and write.

How on earth did they survive? He was a very adaptable character.

And he actually...they actually befriended the Inuits,

because they took on the diet of the Inuits.

They ate seal, blubber, and things like that

which contains high vitamin C.

So they used local knowledge from the local people in order to survive. Yep, yep, yep.

In his own words,

John Ross reported that the crew were,

"Reduced to the last stage of debility by want of provisions."

So I'm astonished to find this tin of beef in the museum collection,

which went with him.

It wasn't opened until 40 years after his Arctic ordeal,

when he finally gifted it to local aristocrat, the Earl of Stair.

In the face of actual starvation, Ross would not open it.

But why?

Tinned beef. Yes.

What was wrong with it? (LAUGHS) I don't know.

But clearly it wasn't very appetising,

and he eventually presented it to Lord Stair on his birthday,

as a birthday gift.

It was opened, and it was tasted, and it was found to be quite good.

Quite good. I'm hoping they survived.

Yes, they did. They lived to tell the tale.

Well, braver men than me. Yeah.

The significance of the tin of beef must remain a mystery,

but it was at least 57 years old

by the time the young Earl of Stair dined on it.

John Ross must've had a truly iron will.

He continued looking for the Northwest Passage into his 70s

and then retired to Stranraer.

It wasn't until the 20th century

that a route through the Northwest Passage was finally achieved.

Just to the east of Stranraer are three lochs -

the White Loch, the Black Loch, and Soulseat Loch.

When John Ross was a wee boy, his father was the minister

of a now ruined kirk overlooking the White Loch here.

Now, at that time the god-fearing Earl of Stair would row his boat

every Sunday to attend services, and the two became firm friends.

The Earls of Stair play a huge part in both Scottish and British history,

although it's the second Earl I'm interested in,

because he had the ambition and foresight

to lay out these unique gardens.

He was also one of the most famous military men of his generation,

commanding forces at most of the major European battles of his time.

He became a field marshal

and commander-in-chief of the whole British army.

Making my way to the ruins of Castle Kennedy,

the Earl's first home,

which stills forms the centrepiece of his famous gardens,

I meet head gardener, John MacArthur of that Ilk.

This is the correct way to address a clan chief,

because John is also the chief of Clan MacArthur.

Now that's a real feather in his cap.

Now he was a great military man, the second Earl.

Did he use his military background in any way to

landscape the castle gardens?

We believe he did.

Some of the embankments, they look very similar to features

in notable battles.

We have one area called the Gun Emplacements

where you can imagine there would be guns positioned to fight battles.

But how did he actually physically go about landscaping such a huge area?

Well, the story went that he had his own private army,

and when they weren't fighting battles,

they were used in the construction of the embankments.

Quite a handy workforce. I bet you don't have an army, do you?

Uh, no, we have three full-time gardeners and a groundsman.

A very small army. For 76 acres.

The Earl was also a man of his time.

This was an age of reason and progress,

and the nobility were keen to show

how nature could be tamed within the grounds of their estates.

The Earl's status introduced him to the impressively ornate gardens

of the English aristocracy.

And his travels to France had also planted in him

ideas of symmetry and landscaping on a grand scale.

He was no doubt influenced by Versailles,

where he was working in France. Uh-huh.

And if you look at the landscape at Versailles,

there are striking similarities to some of the landscapes here

at Castle Kennedy Gardens.

So he was bringing over continental ideas to this

corner of south-west Scotland, back in the 18th century?

That was quite a novel thing to do. Very much so, yes.

Leaving the gardens, I come to the small village of Castle Kennedy,

which was built to house workers on the Stair estate.

And it's not far from here

that I pick up the first traces of a lost route

that at one time ran all the way through Galloway and Dumfriesshire.

Now, this private house behind me, was once upon a time,

Castle Kennedy's very own railway station.

And from there you could have bought tickets to Dumfries and beyond.

But sadly, no longer.

(TRAIN WHISTLE)

The Portpatrick to Dumfries railway,

which opened in stages from 1861,

connected towns such as Glenluce,

Newton Stewart, Creetown

and Castle Douglas to Dumfries and the rest of the rail network.

But the old line became a victim of the controversial cuts

implemented on the advice of Dr Beeching in the 1960s.

When Dr Beeching's axe fell,

all the communities along a great stretch of the Solway Coast

was suddenly cut off from the rail network.

And with the loss of the trains, an entire way of life disappeared.

There are clues to the old line all over Galloway -

stations, sidings, embankments,

and in many places just lovely pathways to follow,

if you're determined enough

and don't mind straying off the beaten track.

I've found a stretch of the old line a few miles east of Castle Kennedy.

Now, clearly, I can't get any further

along this stretch of the old railway line,

because there's a barrier here to stop anyone crossing over

the old viaduct, which spans the water of Luce.

Now it's hard to imagine today with all this jungle around

what a busy line this was in its heyday,

with passenger trains and goods trains

rattling through the countryside.

But, fortunately, we do have an accurate record of those times.

A film made by a self-confessed steam enthusiast.

It's absolutely brilliant.

Local hotelier, Dan MacLachlan, shot this film on a summer's day in 1965

just days before the line closed forever.

A eulogy to the age of steam in Galloway

when the pace was slower,

allowing soot-stained firemen to tend their boilers,

post packages to be exchanged, or simply to allow the trains

to gather steam to tackle the Galloway Hills.

The sympathies of filmmaker Dan Maclachlan are very clear.

He loved steam trains, and he loved this line,

and I for one am grateful for his lovely film.

The old line ran inland through the Galloway Hills

offering connections to the tiny settlements around Loch Ken,

which is my next destination.

Folklore, fables, and fishermen's tales

grace many of Scotland's lochs.

Ask any tourist and they'll tell you,

the Loch Ness Monster

is the most internationally known thing about Scotland.

But some lochs harbour real monsters.

I've joined Robin Ade to learn more about Loch Ken

and the huge predatory pikes for which it's famous.

And one particular 18th-century pike for which it's infamous.

Loch Ken is famous for its pikes.

It certainly is, yes, because of the 72-pounder.

The Kenmuir Pike.

That's the size of a small shark.

It's huge. It can eat a 10-pound salmon easily.

Good grief. Who caught the Kenmuir Pike?

John Murray, the gamekeeper on the Kenmuir Estate caught it.

And the Laird had been complaining

that he wasn't getting very many fish on his table,

so John went out and came back with this fish,

and asked if that was big enough.

(CHUCKLES) It must have been huge fish.

Absolute monster of a thing. Crocodile-type thing.

Do you know how long it was? Ah...60 odd inches.

Good grief. That's over five foot.

Yes, about five foot long.

A man-sized pike. A man-sized pike.

A man's head would fit in the mouth of a fish like that easily. Really?

Yes, because it would even with a good 30-pounder.

That's a frightening thought, if you were to ever fall in.

You say there's lots of pike here,

and a pike is a veracious and ruthless predator.

So, there must be an awful lot for it to predate on?

Oh, a hell of a lot of things.

All the other fish species, plus the ducks. Ducks?

They take ducks freely. Oh, yes. Especially the baby ones.

Oh, dear. Ducklings are a delicacy? Ah, yes, indeed.

Robin's claim that they eat duck is well founded.

In fact, there's a story that John Murray noticed ducklings

just disappearing from the surface of the loch,

and the quick-thinking ghillie used one to bait the monster.

A bit of digging has turned up a literary reference

and an image of its skull,

sent to a gentleman's magazine in 1798

by none other than John Murray's boss, Captain John Gordon.

Who writes, "It was the largest pike perhaps ever taken in Great Britain."

And let me tell you, 72lb would make it

THE largest freshwater fish ever taken in Great Britain.

But he also sensationally claims that,

"There are no less than 22 rows of teeth in the creature's jaw."

And you can clearly see them in his drawing.

Now, is fact and fable intertwining down here on the banks of Loch Ken?

Robin and I go for a pint at the Ken Bridge Hotel.

Painstaking research and good draughtsmanship have allowed Robin

to produce a life-size image of John Murray's historic pike,

allowing us to further investigate the jaw of the species.

It's enormous, isn't it? It's a colossal thing.

They're more of an alligator or a crocodile than they are a fish, these things.

He shows me the skull of a pike one-third of its size,

and I can confirm that the rows of teeth do indeed

look vicious and deadly.

So I'm kind of somewhat relieved, that as usual,

I went fishing and caught nothing.

I'm intrigued by the story of the monster pike

and John Murray the gamekeeper.

Apparently, Murray was held in great affection by his employers,

who paid for a headstone when he died in 1777.

He's buried in a kirkyard not far from the head of the loch.

Now, here it is.

John Murray's gravestone.

The man who landed the monster pike of Loch Ken.

And it's an interesting example of the stonemason's craft.

And John's profession is symbolised here with the gun,

his folded fishing rod, a powder cask,

a partridge or a pheasant down there,

and his faithful hound dog, of course,

and an inscription by his employer.

"In Memory of John Murray."

But intriguingly, around the back of the gravestone is a poem,

apparently composed by a local minister.

It's very weathered and almost illegible, but I can read,

"Ah, John, what changes since I saw thee last

"Thy fishing and thy shooting days are past

"Bagpipes and hautboys thou canst sound no more

"Thy nods, grimaces, winks and pranks are o'er."

Now, it sounds to me as if John Murray was quite a character -

perhaps the sort of man to tell fishermen's tales.

For the last part of my Grand Tour I'm returning westwards,

following a section of the Southern Upland Way -

the 212 mile, coast to coast,

long-distance path that crosses southern Scotland

taking me to the lochs of the great Galloway Forest

and into the heart of Bruce Country.

Robert the Bruce knew this country like the back of his hand

and he developed new tactics here.

Using local knowledge and the lie of the land,

he fought a guerilla war against the English.

And after he defeated an enemy force near Clatteringshaws,

he headed for the hills where he set a trap for King Edward's men.

In the hills above Loch Trool,

the glen enters a narrow defile known as The Steps of Trool.

And it was here on the steep, craggy slopes

that Bruce's small army waited with hope and fear.

Would they pull it off?

According to the epic poem, The Brus, written by John Barbour in the 1370s,

Bruce's enemies were forced by the narrowness of the path

through the woods to move in single file,

and this made them fatally vulnerable.

The poem describes what happened when Bruce saw his advantage.

"At once the noble king took the banner from his standard-bearer

"and cried, 'Upon them! For they are vanquished all!'"

Bruce's foes were routed,

and although the action was more of a skirmish than a battle,

it was an important morale-boosting episode

and turned the tide for Bruce,

paving the way for ultimate victory at Bannockburn seven years later.

Many accounts of the battle emphasise Bruce's tactic of

rolling boulders down on the heads of his enemies.

Now, I have to admit that until I came here,

I was just a wee bit sceptical about this story,

until I saw some of the boulders for myself.

They're lying on the hillside, and in amongst the trees here.

So perhaps after all, they could have been used

as ammunition to help defeat the English.

Bruce's victory is commemorated today with a massive boulder -

exactly the sort you'd imagine crushing his enemies.

Erected in 1929 to mark the 600th anniversary of Bruce's death,

the stone honours the symbolic father of the nation.

Now, the Bruce's Stone also marks the starting point for a trek

up the highest hill in the Borders, the mighty Merrick,

which is where I'm heading next.

At 2,766 feet, Merrick doesn't boast Munro status,

but rises higher than any point in Scotland south of Ben Lomond.

And to the south, there isn't anything higher

until you get to the Lake District in England.

The ordnance survey map for this area is an entertainment in itself,

purely because of the curious names of the hills, glens and ridges.

I could traverse the Rig of Gloon, cross over the Nieve of Spit,

climb the Shalloch of Minnoch, and descend of the Rig of Jarkness.

What they might mean I have no idea,

but I like the sound of them.

Now here we are at last,

the summit of the mighty Merrick,

and the trig point marking the highest point

in the whole of Galloway.

In fact, there's no-one higher than I am

for hundreds of square miles.

And as you'd expect, the view from here is absolutely superb.

So away to the south-east on the horizon

I can just make out the hills of the Lake District.

And away to the west over there through the mist,

you can actually see Ailsa Craig.

And, of course, in front me

you've got the rolling green countryside

leading all the way to Loch Ryan

and the start of my Grand Tour of the Galloway lochs.

Superb.

Following whisky and shoals of herring,

my next Grand Tour takes me from Campbeltown to Loch Fyne.

Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2019