Original subtitles

Escape with us on a remarkable railway to the far tip of Scotland.

We'll travel along coasts and to castles.

Exploring the remote corners of this beautiful country.

The colours are so dynamic.

It just makes a beautiful picture.

On a railway line that explores Scotland's wild side.

We're just, piece by piece, putting it back together.

Its extraordinary landscapes.

It's pretty amazing that that's what everything around us is built upon.

And a place with a tragic past.

They thought that what was happening to them...

..was punishment from God.

We'll meet the people who work and live along this special line.

It's stunning. You have to be here to experience it.

And get to see the wild and rugged Scottish Highlands along the way.

This is no ordinary railway journey.

This is one of the most scenic train journeys in the world.

The Far North Line, Scotland.

Historic Inverness.

Sitting by the great River Ness.

It is the capital of the Highlands.

And where our journey is about to begin.

We're about to embark on a trip on the Far North Line.

Britain's most northerly railway.

Our train is a Scotrail Class 158 diesel multiple-unit.

It leaves Inverness at 10:41 on its 167 mile journey.

From Inverness, we skirt the shores of the Beauly Firth to Beauly.

Before heading north to Dornoch Firth where we'll alight at Ardgay.

The Far North Line then loops inland to Rogart

before again heading to the coast to Golspie.

We continue north past Helmsdale

to the vast expanse of The Flow Country.

Stop at Forsinard and then on to Thurso.

After 4-and-a-half hours, we'll reach our destination,

the historic town of Wick.

Surprisingly this line was built in several stages between 1862 and 1874.

This was due to the many private estates that then owned the Highlands.

John has worked for Scotrail for 26 years.

And knows the line and its history intimately.

This was a railway built primarily for freights promoted by landowner interest.

Being a landowner in these parts

wasn't necessarily a route to prosperity.

And certainly no use unless you could

sell your products and these might range from

cattle, to myrrh, whiskey, flagstones.

As the private estates stretched across large swathes of coasts and countryside,

they demanded the railway did the same.

Creating a unique and varied route.

I think its the alternation of coastal and inland scenery,

which is the special magic of this line.

These great slices of coastal scenery interrupted by dashes inland.

Our train now tracks along the Beauly Firth.

It is fed by two rivers, the Ness and the Beauly.

And was once the site of an ancient glacier.

The scenery is absolutely beautiful in Scotland.

Because of the colour of the gorses,

the mountains, the lochs, the rivers.

It's just absolutely awesome, no matter what time of the year you come.

After just 15 minutes, our train arrives at our first stop.

Beauly.

There is no finer place to come to find one of Scotland's quintessential tailors.

An emporium of authentic tweed that has been in business for over 160 years.

We're known as the Highland tweed house.

And these shelves here have been stocked with these beautiful

bolts of tweed ever since we were founded in 1858.

Making a tailored suit is a work of art.

From choosing the cloth, laying out the pattern on the tweed,

to cutting various pieces out before they are sewn together.

There's a real sort of theatre and drama to it.

Real passion for craftmanship and a great attention to detail.

Many of the distinctive tweed patterns

are inspired by the earthy colours of the Scottish countryside.

Tweeds typically were a camouflage to be worn on the land for fields.

You would tend to find that the estate tweeds embody colours

that are prevalent on those pieces of land.

You know, you might see the purples of heather, the yellows of gorse, the browns of bracken.

It's only a short walk to the Beauly, one of the countries best salmon fishing rivers.

Set in the beautiful Highland scenery,

you can understand why Beauly in French means "The beautiful place".

Today, Peter and his dog are walking upstream in search of the perfect pool to catch some fish.

So we're out on this beautiful bit of river today,

to see if we can find one of those elusive summer salmon.

Come to hell. Good girl.

Sit.

We've got a bit of a swirly wind and trees behind us.

I'm going to use a single spey cast today.

A spey cast is about keeping the fly in front of you.

It never goes behind you,

The salmon are born upstream in the two tributaries that feed the Beauly river.

When four to five inches long, they migrate down to the sea where they mature.

Before they return to their birthplace to spawn.

In salmon fishing, one of the key things is knowing where the fish are.

They're not evenly distributed through the river.

Salmon sometimes rest on the riverbed,

which is known as a lie.

I want to cover a lie on the far side where there's a stone.

I'm having to use a fairly long line.

And fishing a shooting head to try and get a decent line out.

So make a loop and out it goes.

Then, patience is the key.

A lot of the time you're not going to catch a salmon. A salmon's a bonus.

Today, it's really bright and salmon don't have any eyelids.

So when they're looking up to see the fly, they can't see it against the bright sun.

That's making fishing very challenging today.

So I'm going to let the dog have a swim through the pool, wake them up.

Doesn't seem to do any harm, it's an old gullies trick, might be worth a try.

The river connects you to nature more than anything else.

But there's no doubt it can connect you to yourself as well.

I always put fish back these days.

Letting them breed and making more salmon.

It's a fish.

Bloody hell, after casting at the same spot all that time.

That was a salmon.

Well, well.

As we leave Peter to the absolute joys of fishing,

we continue north to Dornoch Firth.

We'll explore more of the Highland's finest landscapes.

We're about 44 miles into a new Scottish train journey.

Travelling on the Far North Line to the extraordinary coastline of Caithness.

Whatever your reason to visit this land of mountain, moor and loch,

the train is just the beginning.

It's always the start of an adventure when you go far from home.

Especially by yourself. And I think that's what makes this trip special for me.

After Beauly, our train heads north to Tain.

And tracks along the edges of Dornoch Firth.

Until Ardgay where we'll stop to explore the wilds of Alladale

and nearby Croick church.

We'll then travel inland to Rogart before returning to the coast at Golspie.

And the magnificent Dunrobin castle.

There are parallels with New Zealand and Switzerland and places like that.

But I think Scotland can hold its own as far as beauty's concerned.

We're an hour and a half from Inverness as we pull...

..into the station at Ardgay.

This area is famous for its expansive moors and stark beauty.

But it wasn't always like this.

10,000 years ago, the area was covered with the dense Caledonian forest that teemed with wildlife.

At Alladale Wilderness Reserve, a beautiful remote glen,

they want to bring back the rich woodlands with an ambitious rewilding project.

Reserve manager Innes has worked the land for 30 years.

He leads the dedicated team restoring the area and its wildlife.

And today we join him as he heads up through Alladale to check on progress.

The area we're in at the moment, we planted in 2010.

We planted approximately 80,000 trees in here.

Predominantly Scots Pine on the north slopes.

There's a mixture of birches and rowans and other native broad-leaves.

Over the last 18 years, they have planted over a million trees

across this 23,000 acre Highland paradise.

Hopefully, through the next few decades, this will become a wooded landscape in places again.

Giving us clean air to breathe you know.

Physically having helped plant these trees in the area we're stood in at the moment,

selfishly I want it to happen a lot quicker than it is.

You can't beat nature, you know.

It's not just the woodlands they are reviving.

The biodiversity was much richer in the past.

And today it's predominantly deer that live here.

So Innes is working to slowly re-introduce native species.

Like the red squirrel.

We brought back the red squirrels in 2013.

Well, they're a native species so they belong here.

We took 36 red squirrels to some wooded areas.

The more habitat we create here, the more areas we get for the red squirrels the better.

The whole countryside could be for everything.

It's not just about creating this woodland, it's about creating something

that's going to be important for the birdlife that's going to us it in the future.

And the squirrels hopefully once the trees get established.

It's a massive jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece putting it back together.

At the west end of Alladale, Innes has found their herd of Highland cows.

Another part of the rewilding jigsaw.

There are regrazing plans for the reserve.

The cowpats that the cattle are producing, great for insects.

Insects help feed the wading birds.

It's important to have big grazers like this.

They're heavy-hoofed animals as well. They're great for aerating the ground and breaking the surface.

Every now and again we run them through some of the wooded areas.

It's great for opening the ground up for trees to reseed naturally.

There is no quick fix to rewild Alladale.

But their pioneering work will undoubtedly benefit many future generations.

Come on.

Come on, guys.

When you going to have your calf, girl?

We're back on board our Scotrail train as it weaves inland.

And heads towards the county of Sutherland.

Beautiful. Lots of gorse everywhere. That's a real...very Scottish thing.

There's lots of fields of gorse bushes, which is very yellow.

And the colours are so dynamic.

It just makes a beautiful picture.

But in the past, this area was the backdrop to the Highland clearances.

This is when landowners forced the local families off their private estate.

At the time, people were crofters, farming in the glens and paying their dues to the landowners.

A simple, sustainable way of life for many in the Highlands until the clearances.

The famine set in and the reputation of the landowners

nosedived when they were seen as perpetrating almost a form of genocide.

The windows of Croick church tucked away near Dornoch Firth,

reveal the story of Glencalvie's clearances.

18 families, 90 people in total, were cleared from their homes where they had lived for generations.

They sought refuge in this graveyard.

This is the important window that we're very proud of.

When the families were cleared and sheltering in the graveyard,

they scratched their names on the glass.

Although the crofters paid rent, the landowners wanted to make more money,

by introducing lucrative commercial sheep farming.

People of Glencalvie that were cleared in 1845,

had never fallen behind in their rents at all and weren't a burden on anyone.

The landowners were actually quite ruthless.

They cleared everyone from their homes.

A very sad part of Scottish history altogether.

And instead of a valley having, perhaps 90 people living in it,

there were hundreds of sheep and one shepherd.

Two centuries on, the windows of this Croick church tell of the anguish

of the displaced people of Glencalvie.

So we can actually see the names that were there.

There's the name of one of the shepherds.

There's also a lady's name of Babs. Her name was scratched on it.

And I think the saddest thing of the windows of all,

is the one that says, "Glencalvie, the wicked generation".

They though that what was happening to them

was punishment from God.

How sad is that?

Many of the people who were forced to leave their homes

during the clearances were never able to return.

We've now travelled 60 miles since Inverness as we cross the Kyle of Sutherland at Invershin.

TRAIN ANNOUNCEMENT We are now approaching Rogart. This is a request stop.

Please mind the gap when alighting from this train.

At Rogart station, passengers might catch a quick glimpse of an old shunter

on the move, right behind the station house.

This is a Ruston 48DS Shunter dating from 1950.

Its spent its days shunting in Newcastle docks and it's actually

the smallest locomotive that ever worked on the UK system.

It's been with us for about 15 or 16 years now.

His passion for trains isn't limited to just the shunter.

Frank and his wife Kate were on a cycling holiday in 1992,

when they spotted Rogart station building for sale.

Within a year, they had moved in.

We scratched our heads for about a year and a half trying to think what're we going to do with this.

And we decided we would try and convert it into accommodation.

In 1994, we got some carriages in and things have taken off from there.

Nearly 30 years on, their fleet of renovated holiday homes

are a quirky mix of carriages and former railway buildings.

People like sleeping in a train because A, it sounds romantic,

B, many people did it when they were kids

and C, it recreates the concept of the camping coach in the 1930s

where the railway company would actually convert some coaches

and put them into remote wayside stations.

I have told people that you don't know where you're going to wake up in the morning.

It depends on where your dreams take you.

It's time to leave Rogart and continue our journey.

This next stage of the line was built in 1868.

It ran though only as far as Golspie on the North Sea.

Until the third Duke of Sutherland, one of the richest landowners in the country

fancied having his very own line conveniently to his ancestral home.

The Duke of Sutherland actually built a 17 mile stretch on the line

which became the longest single stretch of railway anywhere in Britain to have been conceived,

funded and delivered by one individual.

And if one had one's own railway line,

one would, of course, have one's own beautiful station.

We're now coming up to Dunrobin Castle station.

A request stop serving the seat of the Duke of Sutherland, the man who built this railway.

Dunrobin castle.

The Duke's family seat.

Inspired no less by French chateaus and the gardens of Versailles.

The castle dates from around about 1275.

Built by Robin, Earl of Sutherland.

There's been a number of extensions since then.

And the largest extension was built in 1850 by the second Duke of Sutherland.

The castle was designed by Charles Barry.

And immense figure in 19th century British architecture.

He designed the Palace of Westminster and the second Duke wanted something equally as grand.

The vision that Charles Barry would have been asked to create by the family, the fairy tale castle.

Scott has worked here for over 24 years.

A job that stretches from managing the 100,000 visitors a year

to a daily bit of timekeeping.

Every week, sometimes twice a week, the clock has to be wound up.

Thanks to Charles Barry, Dunrobin's clock bears some striking similarities with Big Ben in London.

So it's not perfect.

Does need tweaking from time to time.

Sometimes it goes out of sync.

So, sometimes you have to come up here to release the bells and release the time so it'll catch up.

Dunrobin has 189 rooms.

and is one of the grandest houses in Scotland.

With its magnificent location perched high above the North Sea,

it's straight out of the storybook.

If you can afford to build a French chateau in the Highlands of Scotland,

then you can also afford your own train.

He was very often driving his engine backwards and forwards on the line.

He built this line, maybe quite an eccentric thing to do at the time,

but it has really shaped the north Highland, the way that it is now.

Back on our train, we follow the Sutherland coast towards Helmsdale.

With views out across the North Sea.

We'll then venture inland along the Helmsdale river

until we arrive in the incredible Flow country.

Before finally reaching the magnificent Caithness coastline.

We're halfway through our journey along the Far North Line

as it heads to the top Eastern corner of Scotland.

This four and a half hour trip has a multitude of stunning, varied landscapes

from countryside to castles and the coast.

I enjoy travelling by train.

And we can see the scenery in this part of the world.

Slight different from anywhere else in the country.

At Helmsdale, our train leaves the coast to reach the vast Flow Country.

We'll stop at the RSPB reserve at Forsinard.

Before crossing Caithness to Thurso and Castletown,

where the local stone made such an impact.

Finally the last port of call will be the historic town of Wick.

So the scenery has now changed with a vengeance with our turning inland

from Helmsdale to follow the course of the Helmsdale river up Strathulie.

Our train follows the river for 15 miles.

An area famous for gold panning and wild salmon fishing.

But then it enters a remote sparsely populated area.

That is one of the worlds rarest habitats.

This is the spectacular Flow Country.

An expanse of unique peak land and rolling mountains.

It's hard to describe but it's almost like being on the edge of civilization.

This small station house at Forsinard

is the visitor centre for the Forsinard Flow's Nature Reserve.

Managed by the RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Paul leads a special team of RSPB conservationists

tasked with preserving this unique an important natural habitat.

The largest continuous area of blanket bog in Europe

and our reserve is 21,000 hectares.

A hectare's roughly the same size as a rugby pitch.

So you're looking at about 21,000 rugby pitches.

And this is only a small part of the larger Flow Country area,

which is roughly 4,000 square miles.

So it's quite a substantial landscape.

The peatlands store up more carbon than all of the standing forestry in the UK.

The peatlands around us here are actually an incredible part in our fight against climate change.

Blanket bog is continuous peatland.

So after the glaciers strip away everything that's there

and it takes very specific climactic conditions to form peat.

It needs to be quite cool and very damp.

Part of Paul's work is to do regular peat depth surveys

to determine how deep a particular section of peat is.

Peat formation in the blanket bog has been forming for thousands of years.

Only forms at about a millimetre a year.

So, actually your fingernails grow faster than peat accumulates.

These peat sections are about a metre long

so they're roughly 1,000 years of peat depth per section that's going in.

So that's it hitting the bottom there. So it's about 3,500 years of peat accumulation.

The results of these studies help Paul and his team to monitor the health of the peat.

We also look at restoring and repairing damaged areas

that have been knackered by inappropriate and agricultural forestry operations.

If we can keep our peatlands in good condition then we can restore more carbon underground.

But if we allow it to be damaged, then we risk losing that carbon to the atmosphere.

Visitors can get a much better understanding of these remarkable peatlands from higher up.

From here, they can see that the Flow Country is a water world

made up of a mysterious pool system.

We don't really know how they are created.

It's likely it's driven when erosion eats away at the edges of smaller pools

and forms them into these larger ones.

So over time, they start to amalgamate together.

These magnificent pool systems are the natural habitat for thousands of plants and bird species.

When you do take the time to look at it and look a bit closer,

you start to find these small plants, lizards on the boardwalk,

and dragonflies buzzing around. And that's when you really start to see what's special here.

Among the many wonders of the Flow Country are the sphagnum mosses.

These plants are so highly absorbent,

they were harvested and used as wound dressings in World War One.

Sphagnum mosses are the building block of which a blanket bog is constructed.

Because there's no oxygen, there's not bacteria to break down the vegetation.

The sphagnum, instead of breaking down, basically gets transformed into peat.

You get accumulation of that peat.

Individually, they're quite small and fragile looking.

It's pretty amazing that that's what everything around us is basically built upon.

Back on board our train, our journey continues through the heart of Caithness.

There is no shelter for the railway line.

And this far north, it's very exposed, especially in winter.

John recalls one particularly extraordinary year.

On 28th January 1978, the evening train from Inverness to Wick was

busy, with over 70 passengers, but climbed into terrifying conditions.

After leaving Forsinard, it suddenly ground to a horrendous halt.

And there they stood.

A southbound locomotive sent to rescue them

also became trapped in the snow.

Many people went to help that night.

Even though the blizzard of 1978 was one of the most severe in living memory.

Despite the near whiteout conditions,

eventually all the passengers were airlifted and safely returned home.

As our train continues north, we reach Georgemas Junction.

From here it splits to go to Thurso.

And along the way, another of Caithness' famous features comes into view.

Its stone.

Building dry-stone walls is an ancient craft dating back thousands of years.

They're built using the local Caithness flagstone, a rock that is highly sought after.

Thurso is the countries most northerly stop.

And just a mile east from here is Castletown.

The flagstone village.

It isn't just the walls that are made of Caithness stone.

It was used to build this extraordinary harbour too.

George, who was born and raised in the area, is a dry-stone walling master craftsman.

This is dry-stone walling. It's the same principles as farm walling.

You'll see that around the farms in the countryside in Caithness.

But its been applied on a much more massive engineering scale for harbour construction.

The principle of dry-stone walling is that it works on friction.

Caithness flagstones are flat and strong.

And no mortar, neither cement or lime, is used to hold them together.

If the wall moves and the mortar and the cement cracks, water gets trapped inside the structure.

Then it can expand and start blowing things out.

A wall without mortar is free draining.

If you took a dry-stone wall apart, the wall inside would be dry, because it's designed to shed water.

The harbour walling Castletown was built 200 years ago in 1825.

It still stands strong today.

All of the stones are held together by the friction between the stones.

And then when we get to the top layer,

we put these vertical stones on the top.

Here they're gigantic because it's a harbour but even on the agricultural walls,

they have vertical stones on top which puts pressure on that last layer and holds it in place.

If the last layer is held in place, then all the other layers underneath are secured as well by that.

As the tide goes out, the full extent of the walls clever engineering is revealed.

The outside has been built in a unique way for withstanding big storms.

If they were all nice and flat and even, then the wave would hit them all at once.

It'd be a much heavier load on the stones. But when they're rough like that,

they break up the force of the wave into lots of different impacts rather than one big impact.

Castletown's small harbour was once one of the busiest harbours in Caithness.

It used to export the precious Caithness flagstone around the world.

Back in the day of the 1800s, stone from here was being exported to London, New York, Boston,

Paris, Sydney, all around the globe from this tiny little harbour.

It's quite an achievement.

To this day, the stone continues to occupy a special place in Caithness.

It still drives a thriving modern industry.

Caithness is proud of its history with Caithness flagstone.

It's one of the oldest industries up here.

And it's certainly one of the oldest industries that's still flourishing today.

Big selling point of the Caithness flagstone is its very, very flat nature.

And its extremely high flexural strength.

Caithness flagstones formed 400 million years ago,

at the bottom of a colossal lake stretching from Orkney to Moray.

As the water levels changed, the fine sediment settled and fused together over time.

You can see the horizontal strata of the stone which is perfectly flat.

The various layers of sand and minerals that have been compacted over millions of years.

That have gone into forming the Caithness flagstone.

21st Century technology is used around the quarry,

but not for one key point, splitting the stone.

The ancient art of chasing the crack is always by hand.

We can't machine split the stone.

It takes a level of skill and understanding of exactly where to split the stone,

the forces and the pressures to use to split the stone.

John has been perfecting this art for 17 years.

We've got 13 layers in a quarry.

And what we do is, we split it down into the different thicknesses

using natural grains.

I'm using the wing of the hammer and knowing how hard to hit it.

Listening to see if it's opening up cos it should be.

The stone can then be cut to size using modern laser guided diamond saws.

It is then ready to be shipped around the world.

It's nice to be one of the last remaining quarries

that still uses the modern and ancient technique.

Generations of different techniques and generations of different skills.

Back on board our train, we're heading to our final stop, Wick.

A town with a rich fishing history and on one of the countries most spectacular coastlines.

We are in the county of Caithness on the final part of our journey on Scotland's Far North Line.

It's been a relaxing journey today.

You're seeing so much, different landscapes.

This is what makes it one of the beautiful journeys.

Not only in Scotland or the UK but in the world.

We have travelled over 150 miles since we left Inverness.

And now arrive at our destination.

Wick.

This former Viking settlement is the main town in the far northeast of mainland Scotland.

The place intrinsically connected to the sea.

Wick's now quiet harbour was once the buzzing herring capital of Europe.

The Wick Heritage Museum is home to the Johnston Collection.

An incredible 50,000 digital images.

Ian is their chairman.

These photographs were taken by Alexander Johnston.

He was the first of three generations that was to

photograph in Wick and its surrounding areas.

He left an enormous visual social history of this area.

Alexander Johnston's photographs from the 1860s

captured an era when Wick harbour was a hive of activity.

They showed the countless boats returning with their daily catch

and the land based industry that supported them.

We reckon that there was probably, at its busiest time, around about 1,000 boats in the harbour.

So it was a very busy and congested place.

All of these boats were unloading herring.

There was teams of herring girls ready with their knives. They were the gutters of the herring.

Very proficient they became at the gutting.

The best of them could do 30 or 40 herring in a minute.

The herring, known as the silver darlings, were then packed into barrels, salted and sealed.

There was a schooner waiting to take the completed barrels away for export to the Baltic countries.

The herring industry gradually declined after World War One

when fish stocks began to dwindle.

But Johnston's photographs remain a powerful testament

to the long gone glory days of Wick's fishing industry.

There's stories behind all of these photographs.

The people that were engaged in various occupations.

Every picture tells a story.

Before Wick's heyday, local fishermen had to take their chances

and unload their catches along the rugged coastline of Caithness.

One popular natural harbour was at Whaligoe.

But it was at the bottom of a 250 foot cliff.

To reach the sea in 1792, 365 steps were painstakingly built

using the local Caithness flagstone.

Charles grew up in a village nearby and has known the Whaligoe steps all his life.

200 years ago, it had been quite a brutal piece of living.

This place has been crammed with bolts.

And people docking fish down there.

The women carried the fish from the bottom,

up the stairs and they walked to Wick which is seven miles away.

This steep exhausting path was never going to be able to compete with the big harbour.

By the mid 1800s, there could be 20 boats using Whaligoe.

while 1,000 went to Wick.

And when the boats stopped coming altogether, the steps began to crumble and were nearly forgotten.

Like his mother before him, Charlie helps to repair and maintain the steps.

To keep them safe for visitors.

I get a great feeling working here.

It feels as if the place wants to be repaired.

I would say there's a fair bit of spirit on the go here.

It's stunning. You have to be here to experience it.

The soaring sea stacks and magnificent cliffs of Caithness

will always be a fitting end to anyone's journey.

We've travelled past idyllic rivers,

and explored the wild corners of Scotland.

We've crossed the unique Flow Country.

And capped it all...

..with Caithness' extraordinary coastline.

All along the Far North Line. Indeed, one of the world's greatest train journeys.