Scotland is celebrated worldwide for her natural beauty...
Her wild glens and moors...
..her deep lochs...
..her rugged mountains and magnificent coastline.
It's hard to imagine man has made any impact at all.
But every square inch has been affected by centuries of human activity.
I'm going to look at how man made Scotland's landscape,
and how this history has shaped the present.
This week: The Highland landscape.
Is it beautiful or is it dead?
In this room is a map of Scotland -
mountain, loch and glen.
We want you to get to know that country,
and what is equally important, to get to know the people
who dwell there and understand their point of view.
Until 1950, the Highlands of Scotland were a postcard,
famous worldwide,
Kodachrome country.
The greens were greener than any green thing had a right to be.
So were the browns, the blues,
the red of the deer.
There was very little money, and even less people in the Highlands,
but that was fine.
Less people meant more beauty,
more space for a magnificent wilderness
wrapped in heather and history.
The rivers ran with plaid.
Until 1950, the dominant emotions experienced
by visitors from the Lowlands were pride and awe.
Pride that this land was theirs to visit,
to walk in, to climb, to contemplate.
And awe, awe at the sheer scale of it.
Then in 1950 a report arrived at the Government's Scottish Office in Edinburgh,
an assessment of the fertility and future of the Western Highlands.
It had been commissioned from a young scientist, Frank Fraser Darling, three years before.
Now here it was...
and it was heresy.
"The Highlands are a devastated countryside," he wrote,
"a wet desert."
Once, Darling argued, there had been a rich natural system in the Highlands...
almost a living thing in its own right.
And humans had destroyed it.
The proverbially beautiful Highlands were sterilised, asset-stripped.
No wonder they were empty.
Darling had found an ecosystem full of holes.
Entire species had disappeared.
The loss of trees had led to the loss of woodland ants,
which would once have processed leaf moulds.
Earth worms were absent too, damaging the soil still further.
The naked hills were now covered by strong, woody heather
which was too thick for its own seeds to reach the earth.
Rabbits had no natural predators left.
Their population had exploded, their burrows destabilised hillsides.
The soil of the Highlands had been transformed from a crumbly, fertile mould to a dense, rubbery peat...
..which locked away nutritious material.
Darling's report described an ecosystem dominated by, in his words 'bottlenecks'.
Traffic jams of nutrition in which natural cycles were stalled.
God knows what the politician who commissioned the report had hoped to hear, but it certainly wasn't this.
"The land is ruined. Start again."
Darling never received any sort of acknowledgement from the Scottish Office
that the report had even arrived, let alone been read.
It was non-history.
It hadn't happened.
Oh, but it had.
And so had the history Frank Fraser Darling evoked in the survey itself.
There were reasons that the Highlands looked like this.
All of them were human.
This is Glenshiel in the West Highlands,
inland from the Isle of Skye.
It's not particularly remote, but I can't see any people,
just their traces.
These were houses once.
In 1773, this glen played host to James Boswell and Samuel Johnson.
Johnson wasn't exactly known for his liking of Scots or Scotland.
"The finest sight a Scotsman will ever see," he wrote, "is the High Road to England.
In his famous dictionary he defined oats as "food for horses which, in Scotland, is given to people."
But Johnson was no racist - he was just addicted to one-liners.
He liked the people he met here, a village of about 100 Gaelic speakers:
croft farmers, cattle herders - hospitable.
And he was sadly aware that their society was ceasing to be.
Ever since the battle of Culloden, the Government had been working
to make such a rebellion impossible ever again.
Bonnie Prince Charlie had drawn his support from Highlanders
that held to a traditional vision of Gaelic society,
in which the clan owned the land, and the laird was the clan leader.
Now those rules were being re-written,
driving a wedge between laird and clan,
turning the laird from a leader
into a landowner.
So what was the clansman's attitude towards the land? Was it dominion, was it stewardship, what?
There's a gaelic saying to the effect that everybody is entitled to take a tree from the wood,
a fish from the river, and a deer from the hill,
but in a way that didn't jeopardise the resource.
It was being done in a way that, in modern jargon, would be called
sustainable, though nobody would have used that term at that time.
With the beginnings of...
..the estates with the landlord establishing his rights over game and so on, all of that changes
so that, if I go down to a river and take a salmon out today for my own use, that that in law is a crime.
Right.
But that sort of concept of private property just would
not have meant anything in the society here in the past.
I don't think they would have distinguished between
the landscape and the land as a resource, and themselves.
They were part of it, they were integral to it.
And of course what was happening with clearance and eviction was that
that link which had been so powerful and so strong for so many generations was suddenly shattered and broken.
Throughout the Highlands, the lairds were evicting their own clansmen from their houses and glens
and replacing them with profitable sheep farms.
These were the clearances.
Some were forced to leave, some left of their own accord because
they had too little of the money that was now required for rent.
Some clubbed together to charter ships and emigrated.
The empty glens grew walls instead to keep the sheep in.
So the famous emptiness, the wonderful solitude of the Highlands is of a peculiar and upsetting kind.
In the 1950s, one of the descendants of those evicted returned to Glenshiel.
He was a MacLennan whose family had spent the intervening years in Canada.
He wrote, "Above the 60th parallel in Canada you feel as if only God has been there before."
"But in a deserted Highland glen, you feel that everyone who mattered is dead and gone."
I guess what he means is it's not so much that it's empty, more that it's orphaned.
Sheep arrived in the Highlands in huge numbers from the 1780s onwards.
They were low maintenance, compared with cows, and people.
They replaced a society with an innate respect for the land and what lived on it
with a farming practice that made the landscape into a factory for the production of wool and mutton.
They cropped indiscriminately. Woolly locusts.
They ate grass and other plants that would once have returned to the soil to re-nourish it.
They ate the seedlings of trees.
The hills were already abundantly barren.
Now the sheep shaved them closer still.
But there was worse to come,
thanks to a minister with a taste for technology.
In 1791, Alexander Forsyth became minister of the parish of Belhelvie, near Aberdeen.
Perhaps the job wasn't too onerous, or perhaps Forsyth didn't take his pastoral duties seriously.
But either way, he had plenty of time on his hands.
He liked shooting ducks
and he was sick of missing.
Forsyth's problem wasn't accuracy.
He was a remarkably good shot for a man of God.
His problem was the flintlock rifle.
There was a delay between the powder in the pan going off and the firing of the bullet.
And there was a flash too, which gave the ducks exactly what he didn't want...
..a warning.
What did Forsyth do? How did he get aroun this problem?
Forsyth made a mechanism where you wouldn't have gunpowder in the pan.
It was a detonating system, using fulminate of mercury
in a small chamber which was called a scent bottle.
Forsyth's invention was soon improved by others and became known as the percussion cap.
So what happens here, then?
This is a percussion cap.
It goes on this nipple here.
And the hammer ignited that percussion cap, and there was
no delay between the hammer hitting the cap and the powder going off. It was instantaneous.
So bad news for anything on the receiving end when this comes in?
Yes. So let's have a look at this firing, then, see what it's like. I'll stand back.
Shooting game could now become a pleasurable pastime.
In 1815, a small ad in the London Times offered the estates
of His Grace the Duke of Gordon to the 'discerning sportsman'.
This was the land in question - Glen Feshie in the Cairngorms,
one of only seven deer forests in Scotland.
It's an interesting term, 'deer forest'. Let's take it apart.
In a deer forest, trees are allowed. But obviously,
a forest isn't essential.
Any tree this tall in Glen Feshie is at least 220 years old.
Once the deer population here had increased to saturation levels,
nothing younger could survive.
By the 1830s, shooting was a business,
almost as profitable to the Highland lairds as sheep farming.
The customers were almost uniformly English.
And they were all - how do you say this? -
posh.
One of the first families to make a habit of renting somewhere Scottish
every summer to shoot things was that of the Duke and Duchess of Bedford.
Their favourite haunt was the estate here at Rothiemurchus,
a matter of miles from Glen Feshie.
Duchess Georgiana's holidays here with her much older husband
were enlivened by the presence of her toyboy.
Edwin Landseer was in his twenties -
she was old enough to be his mother.
Landseer was also an artist.
He had been since childhood when he'd impressed the Royal Academy
with his native ability as a draughtsman.
He was ambidextrous - he could paint with both hands -
which the Duchess must have enjoyed.
In the 1820s and 30s, he used to accompany the Bedfords on their holidays here,
and Landseer and Georgiana enjoyed vigorous bouts of alfresco sex whenever the Duke wasn't looking.
In between times, Landseer painted and sketched.
Landseer was as much in love with the Highlands as he was with Georgiana.
He'd become friends with Walter Scott, the writer and poet,
and even painted his portrait.
And together they made the most powerful marketing campaign
for Scotland and its landscape that anyone could have conceived.
Walter Scott's work celebrated the sheer romance of hill and glen.
And the Gaels.
And Landseer's paintings gave those historical figures a backdrop,
and some animals to go with it.
In his paintings, Scotland was nature, rugged beyond belief.
It was impossible for a Scottish sky to be cloudless.
Animals met their fate in mountain streams.
People popped up occasionally with animals for company.
He was better at animals.
In 1842, the sheer romance of the Scottish Highlands ensnared Queen Victoria herself.
She came north of the Border for the first time with her new husband, Albert, a copy of Scott's epic poem,
The Lady of The Lake, and memories of Landseer's back catalogue.
He had already painted her several times, twice on a horse.
This was take two.
The Queen kept a diary.
Of the area around what would become her Highland home, she wrote, "It was so calm, so solitary,
"it did one good as one gazed around, and the pure mountain air was most refreshing.
"All seemed to breathe freedom and peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils."
Translation - no people.
She was so happy.
Albert shot some deer.
And that was it, really.
The future of Scotland's landscape was set in stone.
It was now simply too fashionable to resist.
Once Victoria had bought the estate and house at Balmoral for £30,000,
the Highlands were inundated with English aristocracy
and with wealthy Victorian tradesmen, all anxious to do as the Queen did.
Deer forests engulfed the Highlands.
The hills came closer to the state in which Fraser Darling would find them...
..sterile.
The promotion of another animal to the status of prime target didn't help at all.
Burning heather was meant to support a decent population of grouse.
Burnt areas encouraged fresh growth -
unburnt areas provided the grouse with cover.
Excessive burning could destroy seed stocks and topsoil, cause erosion, and kill other plants and animals.
But that didn't matter.
Other sorts of animal competed with our sheep, our deer,
our grouse.
Other sorts of animals were vermin, to use the technical term.
Eagles, for instance, were vermin.
The memoirs of Osgood Mackenzie of Inverewe are full of vermin.
His estates were fairly modest.
His sheep and deer had to be protected - they were his livelihood.
And eagles were his pet hate.
They'd rip rabbits out of traps, kill lambs wholesale,
and just the sight of one would scare grouse off the ground.
"When one can see seven in the air at once," he wrote, "it's time to thin them out."
He spoke cheerfully of giving eagles lead for breakfast,
described strychnine as "a wonderfully handy drug".
Eagles were only one of many predators he killed
on a daily basis, problems that one or two barrels could solve.
Short-eared owls... bang!
Polecats... bang!
Weasels... bang! Bang!
And MacKenzie was not an unusual man.
Every private estate had at least one,
all blazing away at anything with teeth or claws.
The white-tailed eagle, the red kite, the osprey,
the goshawk and the polecat all become extinct.
If we have them now it's because they've colonised from other territories,
or been artificially replaced.
Prey animals declined as well.
Any animal that depended on hedges, copses, the heathered moorlands and hills,
any of the habitats that sheep and deer ate, and men burnt, would suffer.
Populations of voles, mice, hares, the smaller birds, all declined.
There was no room in this man-made ecology for other animals.
And all because the act of shooting things became so extraordinarily popular.
I have no idea what went on in the minds of sportsmen as they stalked and shot the deer.
I can't see the attraction. I can't get inside their heads.
But then I've never shot anything at all.
Perhaps it's time I did.
So are we ready to go? I think if we could change this jacket a little bit...
You think it's a bit bright, do you? I think it's a bit bright!
So if you just come into position here. OK.
So what should I do, then?
I'll just have a look and see what beast we'll take. All right.
Yeah, I think that one. Just about in the middle there's one standing.
Can you see it? Oh, yeah. Just here.
Just wait a minute. Let's see if he turns round a bit.
OK. Where should I hit...?
Where should I aim for?
Just aim halfway up the body, just behind the fore leg.
Halfway up the body.
There he is turning round now. OK.
And just take your time.
OK, so just relax into it, I guess. Yes. You can shoot it now.
Is the safety catch on?
Just get settled.
I can see him. He's OK. You can take him with it.
That was a good shot.
If there was a bullet in it!
My first imaginary kill, that was.
I tell you, the funny thing was I wanted to actually hit it for real.
Because you want to really test whether you...
That a terrible thing, isn't it? But you wanted to know if you were aiming it right.
There was something addictive about the killing.
As one sportsman said of another, "He had blood.
"Whenever a person kills a deer, it is like a dog killing sheep - he can never keep away from it again."
Whereas a traditional clansman might kill one for the pot and make use
of the entire animal, these kills are only for the trophy.
All they're interested in is the head -
a natural coat rack, which makes this place probably biggest cloakroom in the world.
Every summer, the upper classes surged north in greater numbers.
In 1862, the new station at Aviemore opened the floodgates to the eastern Highlands and the Cairngorms.
The transformation of a tiny Highland village into a tourist resort began at once.
Deer made things busy enough, but the annual bonanza of the Glorious Twelfth -
the start of the grouse season - saw the largest trains of all.
According to one account, one train carrying fat wallets and their owners north for the grouse season
consisted of 36 carriages drawn from nine companies,
including the London to Brighton and the Highland Railway itself.
Saloons, luggage cars, horse boxes, it was an invasion.
The network spread piecemeal, further north, further west.
For some enthusiastic sportsmen, it wasn't enough to lease
a Highland shooting estate - they wanted to own, not rent.
Merchant bankers and manufacturers came to regard a Highland estate with a deer forest as the best
possible way to prove that they'd 'arrived', that they were one with the aristocracy.
Sir Alexander Matheson, for instance,
arrived by making a fortune selling opium to the Chinese.
He retired from the drugs trade -
which, in the 19th century, was rather less grubby that it is today -
acquired 122,000 acres in the Highlands, and built this.
Not impressed, eh? It was to go with this.
After all, what was the point of spending £70,000
on an enormous shooting lodge that your guests can't get to?
Matheson's requests for a dedicated station fell on deaf ears.
So he did the obvious thing - he built his own.
It wasn't only the upper classes - smaller budgets came north as well.
Thomas Cook claimed that Scotland had transformed him
from a cheap excursion conductor to a tourist organiser.
By 1860 he'd brought 50,000 tourists to Scotland, and the Queen herself,
God bless her, had become a tourist destination.
Cook would draw up his coaches at Balmoral which, these days, is hidden behind that screen of trees.
And the tourists would regale Her Madge with a stirring rendition of the National Anthem...
at 7.30 in the morning.
One tourist, according to Cook, used his opera glasses
to get a glimpse of the Prince Consort at a window,
in his nightcap.
It's easy to imagine the Queen listening to her patriotic morning call, and remembering with a certain
nostalgia her journal entry from her first sight of Balmoral, the one about the solitude and peace.
That's why she planted this.
I mean, that was the point, after all - Highland estates weren't for sharing.
Cook's tourists - the walkers, the ramblers - all had to face
the same fundamental truth - they could look, but not touch.
It was like looking at a Landseer - they couldn't get inside the view
because it was private property.
Strictly speaking, there was no law of trespass in Scotland.
It certainly wasn't a crime simply to walk on land that happened to be owned or rented by Lord Poshbury
or Mr Muck the Liverpudlian fertiliser magnate.
Which meant that enforcing their boundaries depended on ghillies and gamekeepers employed by each estate.
There were threats of violence, actual violence and signs that said things like "Beware stray bullets.
"The proprietors will accept no responsibility for injuries received."
This was unpleasant enough, but in 1879 the nation was reminded
how much more unpleasant the process of turning Highland land into private property had always been.
In that year, the obscure estate of Leckmelm in the north west
was acquired by a paper manufacturer from Aberdeen, Alexander Pirie.
Pirie created a deer forest, dispossessed all the crofters,
deprived them of their livestock, and evicted them from their homes.
They were required instead to take up residence in a building called the barracks and work on his farm.
The older clearances resulted in empty glens.
The dispossessed were tidied away, out of sight, left to lead their lives or simply die elsewhere.
But Pirie turned his tenants into a captive labour force, dependent on jobs that only he could offer.
It wasn't slavery, but it smelt similar.
There were ripples.
The father of the man from whom Pirie had bought the estate
announced his sympathy for the crofters.
Pirie's behaviour was condemned at meetings in Inverness, Glasgow and even London.
Questions were asked in Parliament.
The crofters were finding a voice, and they weren't alone.
The Liberal Party was listening.
Their members, mostly middle class, were increasingly confident, increasingly impatient
with the very large helpings of everything that the upper classes allowed themselves.
They sympathised with the plight of the crofters and supported
the Highland Land League that the crofters formed in the early 1880s.
And in 1886, the Liberals saw the Crofter's Act through Parliament.
It guaranteed that those still occupying their crofts
would keep them, and could even dictate who would inherit.
It was the end of the clearances.
But for the crofters that wasn't enough.
They didn't want the clearances stopped, they wanted them undone.
On Lewis, crofters went so far as to invade a deer forest where their village had once stood.
They killed and ate several deer.
Their leaders were arrested and released unpunished with remarkable speed.
The reality of the Crofters Act was revealed.
The Act took the crofter by the hand, and said in a soothing voice, "We know it's not fair.
"We don't like them either, so we'll let you be rude to them.
"We'll even let you kill some deer.
"But you can't have your land back."
For some Liberals, it was precisely the absence of people in the Highlands that appealed.
The Highlands were no longer a place to live.
They had become a place to visit,
a place to walk,
a place to climb.
James Bryce, Liberal MP for Aberdeen, introduced a bill in
Parliament demanding guarantees for public access to moor and mountain.
But Parliament was a concentration of the upper class.
Most of its members passed the entire month of August with a shotgun in their hands.
Bryce's bill failed for lack of Parliamentary time, but Bryce specialised in perseverance.
After all, even The Times had run a sympathetic leader on the initiative.
Bryce reintroduced the failed bill on a further 11 occasions.
And every time his speech got plainer.
"The scenery of our country has been filched away from us just when
"we have begun to desire it more than ever before", he said in one debate.
Outside Parliament, he added direct action to plain speech.
He stravaiged.
"Stravaig - verb, intransitive.
"To wander about idly."
But in Bryce's dictionary, stravaiging meant something different - to wander about idly
whilst at the same time walking wherever one wished on private property.
On the 24th of June 1887, the day after Queen Victoria's
Golden Jubilee, Bryce and a hard core of his supporters trekked out to the heart of the Cairngorms.
And in the middle of nowhere, at the Shelter Stone,
where travellers had slept for centuries, they founded a club -
The Cairngorm Club.
We've spent two hours coming across in horrible weather getting here.
This place must have been really important to them.
It was, I think, because it's emblematic of the type of landscapes that
the Cairngorm Club and its membership were seeking to explore and enjoy.
The Cairngorms at that time were owned by a number of different, very large landowners,
several of them from the titled aristocracy.
And what did they think of the notion of stravaiging across their land?
They were, in some cases, fairly staunch defenders
of their proprietary rights, and their privacy, too.
The straivaigers, on the other hand, weren't too keen on respecting...
those so-called rights of privacy and sought - in all sorts
of mischievous, sometimes adventurous ways - to challenge
those claims to privacy.
It was becoming increasingly clear that this was a class war.
And the upper classes responded by forming the Scottish Mountaineering Club.
The SMC was posh.
One of its key members was Sir Hugh Thomas Munro, baronet.
Munro made a list of Scottish mountains that exceeded 3,000ft,
and published it in the club journal of 1891.
There were almost 300 such mountains.
Almost all were on private land.
It never occurred to him that the result would be a large body of unpedigreed people touring Scotland
to climb all the Munros, as these mountains became known.
SMC membership was by invitation only, after all.
No owner of a shooting estate would object to a trespassing baronet in well-cut tweeds,
someone you wouldn't mind your daughter marrying.
The Cairngorm Club stravaiged everywhere.
Crofters pressed for restoration of their lands,
and the sporting classes ignored them completely.
By 1900, over half the land area of the Highlands was owned by just 15 people.
Almost 40 new deer forests were formed in the last two decades of the century.
If this was a class war - and it certainly was - there was no question which class was winning.
In 1908, a bill for access to moor and mountain got as far as a full Parliamentary debate.
One Yorkshire MP noted the amount of damage done by tourists.
The MP for Windsor asked for the insertion of a clause that would make tourists invisible
and odourless. Meanwhile, Lord Willoughby de Eresby drifted off topic somewhat.
Apparently, some sporting estates had installed golf courses which he enjoyed immensely.
What if some tourist chose to sit down for a sandwich on the 18th green?
That would never do.
The bill failed.
The amount of land devoted to the pleasure of the leisured classes continued to increase.
They owned it all anyway. Who could stop them?
By 1912, deer forest covered almost 30% of the Highlands.
The posh were invincible.
And beneath the iron hand of their gamekeepers, the animal kingdom declined.
The landscape was still beautiful, of course.
But it was also almost dead.
By 1914, the gamekeeper and ghillie had secured final victory in their vermin war.
Almost all the Highland predators were extinct...
with the blindingly obvious exception of the sportsmen.
What began at Sarajevo in 1914 was a different sort of war altogether.
It ended four years later.
The working classes had sacrificed themselves by the hundred thousands in the 'war to end all war'.
The upper classes felt a sense of obligation to the survivors,
a guilty awareness too that the war had revealed weaknesses in British society.
Britain's workers had been shown to be undernourished, unfit, unused to fresh air.
In the decade before the war, several working class organisations
had shown an increasing interest in Scotland's remoter areas.
By the 1920s, they were rambling as far afield as the Trossachs,
Ben Lomond, or here on the Arrochar Alps.
The Government viewed this favourably.
More exercise meant better health.
Workers who had extended themselves like this would give better service to the state.
There was even talk of the establishment of National Parks,
not for the sake of the environment. The vision was one of fresh air,
exercise, scenic grandeur and improvement of the stock.
As the decade progressed, it became clear that there was
a spectre haunting the owners of sporting estates.
The spectre of the personal sacrifice of several thousand acres for the common good.
They didn't like it.
The campaign for National Parks gathered momentum.
A parallel movement to establish a Scottish Youth Hostelling Organisation got under way as well.
The Scots magazine published article after article, claiming that the moors and forests of Scotland
had been converted into a private park, with public access only to the mere fringes.
Several areas were nominated as suitable for the proposed park,
but the Cairngorms were the clear favourite.
Then the election of May 1929 delivered a hung Parliament.
Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald, became Prime Minister.
His support for a National Park in the Cairngorms was well-known,
and that Autumn he formed the Addison Committee to explore the feasibility of National Parks.
The owners of the Cairngorms estates began to fear that their land would be nationalised,
that they would be swamped by what one owner called "guttersnipes from Glasgow".
They formed their own committee.
King George V lent his support when a rumour spread that
part of the Balmoral estate might be destined for the park.
And the idea of a national park in the Cairngorms doffed its cap,
tugged its forelock, and went back below stairs where it belonged.
But in 1935 land owned by Lord Strathcona came up for sale in Glencoe,
including the majestic Buchail Etive Mor, a magnificent Munro, a challenging climb.
Fundraising was organised to buy the land for the new National Trust for Scotland.
It fell short, but a mystery donor stepped in with the money required.
Who, in the absence of a National Park, had provided this generous
consolation prize for Scotland's ramblers?
The president of the very posh Scottish Mountaineering Club, that's who.
Percy Unna betrayed his class.
Unna insisted on his identity being kept secret, and the following year
another donation, eventually a total of £20,000.
The money was spent on land adjoining their first purchase.
So, in a small way, Scotland had a kind of National Park after all.
The money came with strings attached, which eventually became known as Unna's Rules.
The public was to have unrestricted access. Good...
but the land was to be maintained in its primitive, undeveloped condition.
No steps should be taken to make the mountains easier or safer to climb.
And there should be no signposts or shelters on the hills.
It's impossible to deny the generosity of Unna's actions.
But equally clearly the rules reveal who was really to benefit - mountaineers.
Experienced mountaineers.
Ordinary folk could stay at ground level, look up at Buchail Etive Mor and gasp.
Unna simply believed in a different kind of aristocracy.
For Unna, Glencoe was perfect just the way it was.
His rules trapped it firmly in a bubble.
Nothing could or should change.
In fact, the bubble covered the entire Highlands.
Neither the owners of Highland estates nor the mountaineers wanted the Highlands to change.
And the tourists that Unna condemned to the foothills were very happy
there in an almost sterile landscape that had been almost uninhabited for almost 150 years.
But in the early 1930s, a young English scientist arrived in Scotland.
And the more he studied it, the more he believed that Scotland's landscape had a future...
..as well as a beautifully tragic past.
Frank Fraser Darling arrived here on Tanera Mor in Scotland's far north west in 1937.
He had come to prove that it was possible to croft.
Official wisdom saw croft farming as unable to provide more than subsistence, but Darling blamed that
on 200 years of sheep farming and deer forest which had stripped the soils of the western Highlands.
He set about re-nourishing the soil with seaweed, shell-sand, industrial slag, and manure.
After four years of hard work, the island blossomed.
Cows thrived, the sheep prospered. He restored the quality of the grasslands round about.
He grew corn, potatoes, swedes, cabbage, kale, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, lettuce, onions.
Clearly, you could make the desert bloom.
Darling acquired a reputation.
He wrote it.
After the War, the Scottish Secretary of State commissioned
Darling to produce a report on the condition of the West Highlands.
The report he eventually submitted expressed a revolutionary idea
that humans were a part of nature, not just its keepers.
He described the ecology of the West Highlands as an organism that human misuse had all but killed off.
He argued that part of that misuse was the effective decimation
of the original Gaelic culture which treated the environment with much more respect.
Darling knew that tourism would be a vital part of the Highland future.
But bringing the landscape back from the brink would require people to live there once again,
people properly trained in modern farming techniques who understood that nature needed protection.
So it wasn't just that there were too many deer, too many sheep,
too few cows or eagles or polecats or voles.
It was that there weren't enough people.
Darling's belief that the Highlands should be repopulated sat badly with everybody.
The Government regarded the almost empty bens and glens as an ideal source of hydro-electric power.
Landowners, ramblers, mountaineers all wanted those glens to stand emptier still.
Darling was passed over for the job of running the newly-established
Nature Conservancy, because he believed that man was actually a part of nature.
His West Highland Survey was ignored,
written by a man whose name was suddenly mud.
Frank Fraser Darling went to America where he became a star in the new movement for ecological awareness.
By the time of his death in 1979, environmentalism had even begun to make sense to the sort of people
who had once junked the West Highland Survey - politicians.
So in Scotland, the state has begun to apply those ideas, and a sterile landscape once
lived in only by the very rich and their employees has begun to heal.
We have national parks created by the Scottish Parliament shortly after it came into being itself.
These parks - one around Loch Lomond in the Trossachs,
one in the Cairngorms - are not simply places for recreation.
The environment is conserved, here and elsewhere, by Government bodies and private trusts.
Deer forest still covers two million acres of the Highlands.
But the law now imposes on their owners a duty of care for the environment.
In Glen Feshie, where the boom in deer forest began almost 200 years ago,
the estate owners have chosen to cull 10,000 deer
to allow nature to restore itself.
I would have thought, sport shooting, you'd want a lot of deer,
and you're bringing them down to a bare minimum. What's the strategy?
Well, the strategy is that we believe that we went too far,
or the estate went too far the wrong way.
Ten years ago, for the majority of the year, you would have probably
easily seen 1,000 deer in this stretch of the Lower Feshie.
That's a lot of deer.
It's agricultural densities. There's no hope of having any regeneration.
That would be 40 deer per square kilometre or thereabouts.
What have you got it down to, then? It was up to 40, what is it now?
Just on one.
From 40 to one? Yeah.
Probably somewhere around about three is
where the trees started to respond, where you started to see seedlings.
What other changes in wildlife have you seen?
We've seen...
short-tailed field voles, that's one of the things that's increased dramatically. We've got kestrels,
and recently actually we saw a hobby not very far away from here, which is quite a rare sight.
We've got a lot of tawny owls, there's a barn owl.
The trees and the deer are just part of it. It's restoring the ecosystem.
Has the nature of the client changed as the deer have gone down?
You need to be fit now to come sport shooting on Glen Feshie.
It's not where you walk out and suddenly, easily get into deer.
So what was it like ten years ago when there were thousands of deer?
What were the shooters like then?
The people that I saw, they were quite drunk, they were quite heavy!
Fat, drunk people shooting guns - that sounds a scary thought! Well, you know...
In Glen Feshie, Thomas MacDonnell is piloting what
he hopes will one day be a PFI National Park, funded partly by its owner, partly by the Government.
Hikers, climbers and campers are welcome in Glen Feshie,
as they are now welcome almost everywhere in the Highlands.
Private land or not, Scotland's rights of access these days are unparalleled.
But environmental stewardship was only a part of Fraser Darling's message.
One of the species that he hoped to restore to the Highlands was the human.
Little more than one glen away from Glen Feshie
lies the estate of Rothiemurchus, where Edwin Landseer and his dirty Duchess once fondled and daubed.
Its ancient forest is now a focus for tourist activity of all sorts.
And a mile beyond that Aviemore has grown, thanks in part
to the skilifts which opened on the Cairngorm mountain in 1960.
As late as the 1950s, it held just 300 people.
Its population now is around 3,000.
Because it can attract tourists all year round, Aviemore sprawls in several directions.
It isn't pretty. There's no point in pretending that it is.
But a new town in the Highlands with a growing population
and what amounts to full employment is something to celebrate.
Few places in the Highlands can attract tourists throughout the year.
But tourism is not the only answer.
Thanks to the Internet, thanks to low-impact generation technologies, a slow but steady repopulation
of the Highlands and Islands is underway.
Elsewhere there are developments that are dispensing with the lairds, which seems fitting, given that,
a century and a half ago, the lairds were happily dispensing with their tenants.
Until 1997 the island of Eigg was like any of the other estates that
spread across Scotland like a rash in the 19th century - wholly owned by one individual.
But since 12th June 1997, Eigg's inhabitants have been in control of their own destiny.
They successfully completed a community buy-out and the island
became the property of a trust, of which every single one of its 63 inhabitants was a member.
Every year, they celebrate Independence Day, and the population has been growing.
There are now more than 90 people on Eigg
and counting.
There were two new babies born last year.
That was a cause for celebration. Young Eiggers!
There's going to be ten kids in the primary school after the summer holidays
So that's quite vibrant, then. Yeah, that's great.
Presumably people are practising for more!
I'm hoping so!
A small island like this, long winter nights...
But that's great. It sounds like the community's really thriving.
And this, I guess, is the kind of heart of the island, in a funny way, the electricity.
Yeah, this our windfarm, which is probably
a bit of a grand name for...
That's not what most people think of when they think of windfarms.
But these are four six-kilowatt wind turbines and they're linked in with...
We've got three hydros in total.
And then we've got ten kilowatts worth of photovoltaic array.
Oh, right. The Eigg National Grid? Yes.
The island is dotted with houses,
houses to which the Eigg national grid will clearly never be connected.
What happened on the mainland happened here.
Once, Eigg supported a population of over 400 people.
It never will again.
Today the Eigg Trust intends to allow a maximum of 120.
There are three farms on Eigg, 21 crofts, a forestry business.
There are jobs that depend directly on tourism, and jobs that don't.
One islander works as a researcher, another manages events for a production company on the mainland.
Thanks to broadband and the knowledge economy,
it's no longer necessary to live in the town you make your money from.
The bubble that once covered the Highlands in their entirety has burst.
And now there's room for several futures.
Room for National parks, both public and private.
Room for the environment to re-establish itself.
Room for ramblers, tourists, mountaineers.
Room for people to live.
Many of Eigg's inhabitants, inevitably, are incomers. They don't speak Gaelic.
But they love the land they live in, and their children do as well.
Their children's children haven't made their minds up yet.
As little as 50 years ago, a young person choosing to stay in their Highland birthplace
was choosing a life of limited opportunity.
That's no longer true.
You know, this programme's about land, but really it's about people.
While it would be lovely to see more places like this,
it would also be lovely to see more people in places like this.
Enough, perhaps, so that, one day, stories that people are living here and now could actually be
communicated, glen by glen, island by island, not by telephone cables, but by word of mouth.
I think Frank Fraser Darling would have approved. I know I do.
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