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, back from the brink of extinction.
The story of the men who brought Scotland's forests back to life.
Today, I'm time travelling on Loch Maree in Wester Ross.
I'm going to a place where time has stood still.
It's a place that allows us to glimpse how Scotland might have looked like thousands of years ago,
before man made his presence truly felt.
Out here, on a group of islands, stands a rare remnant
of the great pine forest that dominated Scotland's landscape.
And survives practically undisturbed by man,
thanks only to its remote location.
OK. Thanks. Thanks, Ewan.
It's like a fairytale forest, isn't it?
There's just something slightly unreal about it.
Then you're looking up, straining to see the top of the canopy.
I've been dying to come here for 25 years.
25 years ago at university I heard about this relic
of ancient Caledonian forest on an island in a Scottish loch.
And this was it.
These islands are left to experience all that nature has in store for them.
And here in Wester Ross, more often than not, that means rain.
22 glorious days out of every 30.
Which makes it so wet in fact,
that this forest is officially classified as rainforest.
The wet climate has a remarkable effect on the ecosystem.
Look at these!
These are mosses, believe it or not.
This whole thing is a huge hummock of moss.
Beside the biggest, prickliest bushes.
And that,
now that is a juniper.
Normally this quite a small bush but...
There's no berries on it, but this is huge.
And underfoot, springy heather.
It's tricky to negotiate.
And then there are the trees themselves.
From one end of the island to the other, you find Scots Pine,
Scotland's symbolic tree,
in every part of its life cycle -
from young saplings to old, dead trees
still standing undisturbed among the living.
The entire landscape still just as nature created it.
This place has barely felt the hand of man.
These islands contain some of the most ancient and pristine woodlands in the country.
The pines here, they grow to maybe 250-years-old, but they're part of
an uninterrupted genetic line that goes back almost to the ice age.
This is as close as Scotland gets to the wild.
In the first few thousand years after the ice age,
Scotland's forests grew vast,
and covered maybe as much as 60% of the landscape.
And it wouldn't only have been Scots pine that grew.
The trees included oak, birch, hazel, rowan and alder.
And back then it would have been truly wild.
Scotland's forests would have shaken with bear, beavers, boars, wolves,
wild cows, wild deer and of course, us.
We were part of that natural landscape,
ourselves a creation of nature. Hunters and gathers
who depended on the forests for the basics of our survival.
So much of that earliest knowledge has been lost in time.
But thankfully, not all.
'In Glen Nant in Argyll, I've arranged to meet
'one of Scotland's leading wilderness instructors.'
Hello, how you doing? Pleased to meet you.
'A man called Patrick McGlinchey,
'who I'm hoping will teach me some of the skills
'our ancestors would have relied upon when they hunted and gathered here.'
So what's that, a shelter? Yeah.
This is my camp.
This is your camp? Come on round and I'll introduce you to it.
That is a work of art. This is luxurious. Look at this!
What's this? Is this for firewood? No, that's bark. See this stuff here?
This is elm. Wych elm.
Now, you can strip that off
and we end up with strips like that, and we take the outer bark off.
Then what we can do with lots of natural fibres
like barks and nettles... It's like you're running a shop here!
..is you can make cordage.
This is some of the natural fibres you'll find in the UK. The colour's amazing.
We have mainly oak and birch here.
We have some mountain ash,
and we have a lot of hazel.
'Hazelnuts were a nutritious staple of the hunter-gatherer diet,
' one that we still eat today.
'But there are plenty of other natural forest foods that we've forgotten about.'
The woodland's full of wonderful material.
It's just knowing what you're looking at.
We're going to go over that way, because I can see a little hawthorn,
and the hawthorn's leaves at this time of year are edible.
You've just got to be careful, because it's not called the hawthorn for nothing. Yep.
OK.
Don't be shy. Is there a trick?
Just pinch the tops. Try and not get the twiggy part in.
These are delicious.
See, I don't taste anything.
Should I taste something, or is my palate's just not ready?
You're expecting pizza or something.
I'm expecting an infusion of taste.
Well, you will, because we're going to add to this.
Here's an interesting little plant, Iain.
This is common sorrel.
Tell me what that does to your tastebuds.
It's a real fizz, isn't it? It just bursts out.
We don't take too much, just enough to fill a hole, as they say.
'Scotland's hunter-gatherer population was maybe as low as 10,000.
'For our them, one small patch of forest like this
'could provide not just food, but tools and vital fuel for
'the skill that set them apart from the other creatures of the woods.'
Right, long strokes. More use of the bow gives you more revolutions.
Start to build up the speed. You're going to get smoke very shortly.
Now, that wee squeak there was the wood spirit laughing at you.
Oh, aye? OK.
The wood should be warm now. I can see some smoke coming off, or dust.
Just take that out. You've got it going there. I can tell by the smoke.
Well, I'll hold it for you.
See, how can you do that? I tell my kids not to play with fire.
They shouldn't, either. Anyway, well done that man.
That was fantastic. I thought I'd lost it.
I just thought, it's not enough. No, no. That's really good.
That's my first fire.
Its funny, that's a salad that's got nothing you'd normally get...
Normally sense of what everyday supermarkets would have.
But it's packed full of taste.
How did those ancient peoples keep everything in balance, though?
Stop taking too much? Well, they moved around the landscape.
They didn't always take from one area, they moved with the seasons.
When we gathered these plants up,
we only took a handful of leaves from one.
A handful of leaves from the hawthorn. We didn't destroy it all.
That's what it's all about.
What's been so fantastic about this is just that feeling
that you're seeing the familiar in a completely unfamiliar way.
These are living places. Places that give us sustenance, give us fire.
Resources that, for our ancestors, were absolutely commonplace,
and yet today seem exotic and alien.
The woods are just the most wonderful place.
I might not go home.
Wild man of the woods.
Scotland's small, mobile population of hunter-gatherers left little trace.
Their footprint in the forest was so light,
that even after four millennia, pristine forests
full of wild animals still covered up to 50% of the land.
But change was coming to Scotland's landscape
on a massive scale.
The future for much of our native forests was bleak.
Nowhere more so than here on Rannoch Moor...
..where they disappeared almost entirely.
What happened here?
Did man turn destructive?
It's amazing what you find in the peat.
Over the years, tree stumps like these have given rise to
all sorts of fanciful speculations about Scotland's forests,
and about the role of man in destroying them.
Often, invaders have been given the blame -
the Romans, the Vikings, and those perennial scapegoats, the English.
But it just doesn't add up.
One, two, three...
'By digging down into the peat,
'pollen scientists like Richard Tipping have found
'evidence of a much less fanciful story.'
'He's discovered that trees thrived here until about 5,000 years ago,
'when they suddenly stopped thriving.'
Ah, that's all right. And then slide it up again.
And...there.
This is the messy bit. That's our core. OK.
And... I love this moment - the reveal.
This is the first time you see what's down there.
Here it comes. And that's it.
What we have here, in this brown gunge, is peat.
More importantly, what we have here
is a record of how this particular site changes through time.
What are you looking for in there?
Well, we start to pick up colour changes.
So here, from around here upwards, we have a dry period on the bog,
perhaps a dry climate.
Down here it's wetter. Much, much wetter.
And does that mean rainfall?
These are when climate appears to change very abruptly.
'So what did that mean for the trees here?'
What we think happened was that the climate shifted.
It became cooler and wetter.
Both cool and wet conditions mean that the water table in this peat bog starts to rise.
Now, these pines are adapted to that. All their roots are shallow,
but if you get water right to the surface, then there's nothing
else they can do except die of oxygen starvation, effectively.
It's great to think of these barren flatlands, like here
on Rannoch Moor and all the rest, in a completely different way.
As a big, thick forest. Populations of pine trees across Scotland,
from here on Rannoch Moor, way up to the north mainland of Scotland,
all seem to have died at the same time, about 4,000 years ago.
People have described this as the collapse of a population.
It's the complete failure of the pine ecosystem to cope with rapidly changing climate.
There's quite a lot in a cylinder of black mud, isn't there?
There's a story. Yes. An amazing story.
'So around 4,000 years ago, thriving forests all over Scotland
'drowned suddenly, and never came back.'
Nature changed Scotland's forests,
left behind a trail of devastation that man would never match.
It's estimated that around half the trees that were once here
just couldn't grow when it got cooler.
Man wasn't to blame - not then.
Not yet.
Man really began to impact on the forests just as this period
of climate change ended, when we settled down to become farmers.
When we started farming in earnest,
at least a quarter of Scotland was still covered in thick forest.
But farming changed everything.
We moved around less.
Instead we stayed put.
We grew crops and kept animals.
As we created permanent communities,
our axes and our animals began to take their toll on the forests.
And in the new clearings we raised monuments to long forgotten gods,
like these in Kilmartin Glen.
We cleared the land as we needed to. As a species, we advanced while
the forests, they retreated - acre by acre, glen by glen.
But they were never quite abandoned.
After all, they were our life support system.
There are no written records to tell us
what happened to our pristine forests, to our wilderness.
What we do know is that the human population boomed.
It soared from an estimated 10,000 back in hunter-gatherer times,
to maybe as much as 500,000 by the start of the Middle Ages,
which meant our life support system had more life to support.
So we became experts at forest management.
And we celebrated each year when the forests grew abundant again.
This is Beltane, an ancient festival of renewal.
Which, as you see, has been recently revived...
..if not completely re-invented.
Among all this mystical mayhem are two central characters,
the May Queen and the Green Man.
In this version of Beltane, the Green Man is killed with fire
and brought back to life. His death and resurrection
tell a story of renewal, and of the new life
that returns to the fields and to the forests each springtime.
In mediaeval times, the Green Man was a popular figure,
and the idea he represented was widely understood.
But by then celebrations like Beltane masked a bigger problem.
The most sought-after trees of the forest were in serious decline.
It's fantastic. The noise, the smoke.
It's got this kind of mystical, otherworldly feel to it.
But the thing is, renewal and regeneration, they were pretty practical affairs.
I mean the forests were carefully managed
such that the plants and trees that you needed on a daily basis
were nurtured so that they came back year after year.
What didn't come back, what didn't grow fast, was prestige wood.
Big wood, if you like.
Wood of a stature that you needed for big ambitions and big structures.
Prestige wood mainly from oak trees, took hundreds of years to grow back.
As we turned farming settlements into proper towns,
our consumption of it soared.
By 1424, wood was scarce enough that the Scottish Parliament
made stealing wood three times a capital offence.
But scarcity didn't stop bishops wanting bigger cathedrals,
or nobles wanting stronger castles.
Or kings wanting the most extravagant thing of all -
warships, bigger and better than those of their enemies.
James IV of Scotland was a man who wasn't short of ambition,
and in the 16th century, with England and Scotland regularly at each other's throats,
that ambition was firmly fixed on military might.
He wanted a flagship for a navy he dreamed of creating.
Not just any flagship would do.
James wanted to build the biggest ship in the world.
It was so vast that a new dock here at Newhaven in Edinburgh
had to be dug to build it in.
And, as the giant wooden hull took shape,
the spectacle was recorded by the poet William Dunbar.
"Carpenters, builders of barks and ballingars
"Masons lying upon the land
"And shipwrights hewing upon the strand."
It must have been an amazing sight. The only problem seems to have been
whether there was enough Scottish wood to complete it.
The evidence is patchy, but in 1505, the year before they started
to build the Great Michael, the Scottish Parliament declared
that the forests of Scotland were utterly destroyed.
And 60 years later, one chronicler lamented
that the Great Michael had used up all the wood in Fife.
What we do know is that wood had to be brought down
from Morayshire, some from Stirlingshire.
And some even imported from France and from Norway.
Despite the vast amount of wood that James invested in his ambition,
Scotland was never destined to be a naval power.
At least, not for long.
Just two years after the Great Michael was launched,
James IV was killed in battle,
and his mighty flagship was sold off cheap to the French.
By the start of the 16th century, the great natural forests
that had cloaked Scotland when man started farming were no more.
Perhaps as little as 10% of Scotland still contained its natural forests.
And they were increasingly characterised
as the haunts of wolves and the concealments of men.
Those wolves were persecuted mercilessly.
Burned out of their dens,
cubs hunted down each year.
Eventually they had nowhere to hide.
The forests were so small that they were eradicated once and for all,
and they went the way of beaver, bear and boar.
Off into the past.
And left Scotland's landscape irreversibly changed.
What man had taken away, he would now have to try to put back
by creating man-made forests.
Planting new trees was a simple first step, and nurturing them
over several decades, if not generations, was the next.
It was a task that was taken up by some of Scotland's
biggest landowners, who smelled profit in the air.
Here at Blair Castle, John, the 4th Duke Of Atholl,
took up tree planting in the 18th century with such a vengeance
that he's known today as Planter John.
His tree of preference was something his grandfather
had originally introduced, and was only now coming to maturity -
a coniferous tree called the larch.
That larch over there looks rather tired and ragged, doesn't it?
It's partly because it loses its needles in winter,
which means that at this time of year it looks bald and its branches are drooping.
But it's also because that particular larch was a gift
to the Duke of Athol in 1737, which makes it nearly 280-years-old.
That tree became the object of Planter John's attention,
and the focus of his ambition,
because under that bark is a kind of miracle wood.
The larch is a rather remarkable tree.
Originally from the Alps, it's hardy, not needy.
It grows well high up hillsides, and on poor soil.
And what's more, its wood doesn't rot easily in water.
A property which made it the foundation of one very grand design.
Planter John imagined that he might, on the bare Perthshire hills around the castle,
plant enough larch trees to satisfy the demands of the entire British navy.
And in doing so, he would make a fortune.
The Duke set about his business with utter zeal
and he kept incredible records.
Some might say obsessive.
This beautiful, leather-bound book is where the Duke of Atholl used to
note all of the records of planting that was going on around the estate.
And I just love the comment at the start.
He says, "Woods and forests as they were, as they are,
"as in all probability they will be."
So this was his ambition for the future,
and records of what was happening.
Gosh, the detail is unbelievable.
Every time he writes the word 'larch' he puts in red.
The date and then 'larch'. Larch, larch, larch.
This is a guy who loved larch!
About 450 acres were planted, with about 400,000 larch,
which comes to £375.
And then another thing, "60,000 hard wood spruce" - which is not in red.
Not very impressive I think, that's 60 quid.
And 700,000 Scotch fir,
which is only £35.
Clearly, what's coming through is just how valuable the larch is.
This isn't so much someone who's doing some personal accounts here.
This is a personal ambition, a vision, a strategy really.
The Duke sent a consignment of 800 larch trees
of 60 years' growth to the Admiralty in 1816.
They were impressed.
So he planted more...
and more...
..and more...
..until his estates were transformed.
By the middle of the 19th century, the Planter Dukes of Atholl
had put in 21 million trees on the hillsides of Perthshire.
The fortune Planter John dreamed of seemed finally to be within reach.
But it wasn't to be.
The grand design of making a fortune by selling the wood to the navy
for warships came to nothing, because the navy went metal.
Iron-clad hulls came in
and Planter John's successors were left with rather a lot of trees on their hands.
Planter John once wrote
that planting should be for, "Beauty, effect and for profit."
And, although it didn't quite have the happy
ending he'd hoped for financially,
it did succeed on the other two fronts.
Thanks to him, this part of Perthshire became famous as a beauty spot.
Albeit an unnatural one.
Showing wild, romantic Scotland clad in the trees
of the Central European Alps.
The ambitions of estate owners like the Duke Of Atholl
created a buzz around trees.
Inspired by the Enlightenment and by the possibility
that man could improve upon the hand of God,
the planting of exotic species took off
and spawned both fashion and competition.
OK, you need to check all your buckles on your harness.
Make sure everything is done up properly.
Tree hunters in the pay of wealthy landowners,
ventured around the globe looking for trees
that might catch on at home.
They harvested seeds by gun or by hand,
often climbing to the very top for the healthiest cones.
And sometimes they made discoveries that changed the face of Scotland.
Discoveries like this species, the Douglas fir.
I reckon I must be about 35 foot or 15 meters above the ground,
which is about the average height of a Scots pine.
But not a Douglas fir.
I have got loads to go.
This is going to be a long haul.
I'd set out to climb to the top of this tree,
all 35 meters of it.
But with the sun going down, and progress slow,
I had to abandon the climb, about three quarters of the way up.
The tree that defeated me, the Douglas fir,
is named in honour of the famous Scottish botanist who discovered it.
HE GROANS A man called David Douglas.
Who appears to have been a more successful tree climber than I'll ever be.
That feels better!
In 1825, David Douglas was sent on a mission by the Horticultural Society
to the uncharted Pacific North West of America.
There he encountered Douglas firs growing undisturbed
in virgin forests, ancient giants that utterly captivated him.
He harvested some of their seeds and sent them on their long journey,
to his patrons half a world away in Britain.
One of those patrons lived here, on Scone Palace estate.
Douglas despatched his seeds back any way he could, land or sea.
Some made it, some didn't.
This one did.
He picked it up as a seed somewhere
on the Pacific coast of America almost 200 years ago.
Over there, they grow for 800 years.
So that one is just a youngster.
Which makes it even more painful that I didn't get to the top.
Seeds and seedlings of rare and exotic trees
collected on expeditions abroad changed hands
for up to 15 guineas, a small fortune back then.
And affordable only by those with money to spare
and status to show off.
Wealthy landowners happy to confirm their own good taste
by planting a pinetum or an arboretum in a corner of their estate.
Trees like these had never been more fashionable.
No magnificent garden could be complete without them,
but they weren't merely displays of wealth.
They served another purpose which with the advent of photographs
and mass travel, we've kind of glossed over.
It allowed people to see, to feel, to smell other parts of the world.
Trees were sources of knowledge, even enlightenment.
These are fantastic. Come and look at this.
This is the giant sequoia.
Look at the texture of the bark.
What's great is it's soft and cushiony.
Look.
That's not because I'm dead macho,
that's because this is just really soft.
I think you could eat some of these.
Never entirely sure.
No, not that one!
This is a cypress, one of the cedar family.
It's got gorgeous leaves.
Smell really rich,
they are fantastic.
That tree there is the same as this one.
It's a Sitka spruce.
I mean look at it, it's fantastic!
It's just a big umbrella of branches.
The west coast of America, the shores of Chile, Japan, China.
Morsels of the world and a flavour of its wonders,
were planted, grown and marvelled at across Scotland.
In the pursuit of beauty and knowledge,
the planters and gardeners of the 19th century created gorgeous
spaces and enchanting groves, all designed to delight the eye.
These were remarkable individual indulgencies,
living works of art and they completely changed
the face of the nation's gardens and estates for ever.
But the thing that this passion for planting didn't do
was to re-forest the bare hillsides of Scotland.
There were still pockets of healthy old forests,
oak in the west and pine in the north.
And new forests of larch in Perthshire.
But it wasn't enough.
By 1870, only 4% of the land was wooded.
So 96% of Scotland was barren.
Quite simply, we were consuming much more wood than we were growing back.
Our appetite sated only by imports from the Baltic
and from the vast virgin forests of the British Empire.
Some voices called for the state to step in and manage the forests,
like it did in other countries.
But their warnings fell on deaf ears.
And a time bomb slowly started ticking.
The time bomb finally went off in 1917,
when Britain was three years into a war that demanded total mobilisation.
Wood was vital to the war effort.
But as German U-boats blockaded Britain,
the imports of timber that we'd come to rely on couldn't get through.
As the blockade turned into a crisis,
the short-sightedness of a previous generation came home to roost.
We just hadn't planted enough trees.
We almost lost that war, not like Germany,
from a lack of food, but remarkably, from a lack of wood.
The crisis highlighted an ongoing national weakness,
one that demanded immediate government action.
It was time for the state to step in.
Which is how, on November 29th, 1919,
two lords happened to be racing each other
by train from London.
One lord was heading to Devon and the other,
Lord Simon Fraser Lovat, was heading for the north of Scotland.
It was a sporting challenge
undertaken from the comfort of a first class carriage,
but it had a very serious purpose.
Before the war, Lord Lovat was something
of a voice in the wilderness calling for state forestry.
But to be honest, no-one paid him much attention.
When the war started he made himself useful as the man in charge
of supplying wood to front line troops.
So it was only natural that in peace time,
he was given responsibility for Britain's new forestry organisation,
the Forestry Commission.
The race from London was to see who could plant its first tree.
When he got off the train in Morayshire,
he was handed a telegram telling him that he'd lost the race.
The first tree of the Forestry Commission
had been planted in Devon, by his deputy.
Undeterred, Lovat went on to plant the second tree instead.
This was a man on a mission.
"Trees will grow where no tree should, or would," he vowed.
His organisation would grow a whole new supply of wood,
plant enough trees to keep Britain going for five whole years,
longer surely than even the worst future blockade would last.
Lovat's first problem was that trees,
and good land to grow them on, cost money.
And the post war British government was broke.
And it soon became apparent that Lovat's new foresters
would have their work cut out for them
because the type of land the new Forestry Commission
could afford to buy was some of the most exposed,
rocky and all together unpromising farmland in the entire country.
So the Forestry Commission set up experimental forest sites
like this one at Kilmun in Argyll,
to determine which trees would thrive and how.
Here, they planted in lines, they planted in squares,
they planted close together and far apart.
They planted high up the hillside and low down the hill.
And they planted trees from all over the world.
What they discovered was that species from the Pacific North West
had done particularly well.
Species like Douglas fir,
Giant Redwood, Wellingtonia,
Western Hemlock and so on.
But the one that very early on performed best was Sitka spruce.
Sitka Spruce, whose seeds had also been sent back by David Douglas almost a century earlier.
So in this X Factor for trees, spruce comes through.
Why was spruce so good?
Its indigenous conditions are very similar to the west of Scotland.
It's used to wet, it has its feet in the wet all the time,
it has coastal fog coming in. Dripping on, coastal precipitation...
Mountain slopes presumably?
Steep slopes. So it is very well suited
to the British Isles, Western Europe, the coast in particular.
This tree thrived in places where others faltered.
In wet, peaty soil and at unpromising altitudes.
it simply out-competed all other species.
It grew tall. It grew straight.
And it grew very, very fast.
And experiments at places like Kilmun
showed that it thrived even when planted merely 1.8 meters apart,
which meant it could be positively crammed into any site.
Spruce's moment didn't come immediately.
It took 20 years or so for spruce to become the Commission's favourite tree.
And by then, the world had changed.
The Forestry Commission of the 1950s didn't seem to have noticed
that its original five year mission had been overtaken by events,
that sea blockades were a thing of the past.
And that no amount of wood would help win a war against the A-bomb.
They carried on planting like it was 1919.
At first platoons, then companies of them and regiments.
Slowly but surely, whole armies.
Wooden soldiers waiting to be called into action
in the event of a future war that never came.
By sticking to its mission, the Forestry Commission
created one of the most amazing and dramatic
landscape transformations Scotland had ever known.
But creating tomorrow's timber was not without its consequence.
Right across Scotland, renewal was taking place.
But the securing of the timber supply
resulted in something completely unexpected,
Frankenstein forests.
Human-made and all the more unnatural for it.
Square, dark, dingy, ugly, silent,
unappealing, unattractive.
Lacking in wildlife.
I hate these places.
Apart from being poked in the eye every few minutes,
they're just so dark and dingy.
There's that lack of sunlight as well as the fact
that on the ground here is just a carpet of needles.
That makes the soil acidic which means it's impossible
for a lot of the natural life to just erupt out of the forest floor.
Am I glad to be out of there?
These places, these plantations, weren't like forests
as we had known them before in ancient times.
Instead, they were crops.
Trees that were invasive and foreign and had one function
and one function only, to be chopped down.
The Forestry Commission was largely unconcerned
about these unnatural new forests.
Timber production came first and Sitka was its wonder wood.
But not everyone agreed with the new orthodoxy
that forests should be only for supplying timber.
Professor Hugh Steven and Dr Jock Carlisle from Aberdeen University
were gentle dissenters, rebels in tweeds and brogues,
and very sharp ecologists.
To them, the value of the forests
went beyond the mere timber they contained.
They realised that Scotland's forests
had arrived at a crucial moment.
One where any remnants of old native pinewoods,
the sort of woods that once covered great swathes of Scotland,
might soon be completely swamped by the new, unnatural Sitka spruce plantations.
And that unique habitats and ecosystems
could be on the verge of vanishing for ever.
So they set out on a research mission
to discover exactly what was left of Scotland's ancient pinewoods.
Tucked away in the central highlands,
they came across the spectacular Scots pine forest of Glen Affric.
Although it wasn't exactly untouched by human hands,
it had survived with very little interference.
With a team of foresters, Jock Carlisle spent a few summers
collecting samples here and in Scotland's other isolated pockets of pine.
They shot down cones with a shotgun, they harvested lichens and mosses.
And bit by bit,
they created a picture of Scotland's native pine woods.
It was magical.
The book they wrote captures in vivid detail
the sort of rich, natural habitats that existed
in the pine forests that had once covered Scotland's landscape.
In some ways it was a manifesto against progress.
"To stand in them is to feel the past,"
they wrote in the book's introduction.
And the idea of "feeling the past"
influenced a whole new generation to resist
the rampant spread of soulless spruce forests.
Foresters like the young Finlay MacRae,
a follower of Steven and Carlisle and another gentle rebel.
Well, you know, I'd heard a lot about Glen Affric
and it was a place...
I envied anybody that worked here and I always felt
that this was the sort of the jewel in the crown
of the Forestry Commission.
If I'd been asked where do you want work, I would always have said,
"Well, Glen Affric appeals to me because of the nature of the place."
And what was it that appealed to you?
Natural forest.
It was put here by a greater hand than ours, you know?
That appealed to me.
There it is, for all the world as if it was sprinkled from some
great duster and landed here and grew, and that's interesting.
Let's put it this way. I would dodge off to Glen Affric at times.
Was this your hiding place? Very often.
Finlay was eventually put in charge
of his hiding place by the Forestry Commission.
So what was the policy of the Forestry Commission at that time?
Well, the policy was changing all the time.
When I came into forestry, which is a long time ago now,
there was a very big swing to spruce.
And spruce is something that has taken over. You're not a fan?
I'm not a fan of spruce and I don't like...
I don't like these square blocks on some of our hillsides.
You know, they don't appeal to me at all.
And they are fenced off square and they are planted square
and a lot of the folk that are planting them are square themselves.
Finlay MacRae discovered that the Forestry Commission had already
planted young spruce trees among the ancient pines.
So when Finlay took over Glen Affric, he quietly removed them.
Sacrifice tomorrow's timber for the sake of conservation.
Though he didn't always spell out to his bosses what he was up to.
It's almost like you were off the radar up here.
You seem to be adopting on the quiet, a slightly different policy.
I suppose I might have been a crank.
A crank, it's a great word!
Did they give you trouble? Did they give you trouble?
Yes. Some people did. And some people saw me as extremely old-fashioned.
Old fashioned? Which I am, or was then.
I'm not so old-fashioned now
because everybody is creeping back this way, aren't they?
When Finlay MacRae left Glen Affric in 1985,
it's future as a native pine wood was largely secure.
The Forestry Commission was slowly changing its policies
and people in its ranks who favoured conservation
were no longer considered cranks and rebels.
Its mission was still to provide crops of timber,
but gradually it also became a protector and promoter of our woodlands.
Bringing the public back into the forests.
Today, woodland conservation is not only engrained
in the Forestry Commission's DNA, but has developed a life of its own
and sometimes the trees themselves are no longer the star attraction.
Welcome to the Loch Garten Osprey Centre.
Just to give you a quick introduction to the birds you can see.
This is EJ, our resident female.
She has been here for seven years
and she has raised 11 chicks successfully.
She has a fantastic time over here.
In 1954, ospreys returned to the Abernethy Forest on Speyside.
As soon as the news got out, bird lovers flocked to see them.
Around 14,000 people came in the very first year.
Soon, the Loch Garten ospreys had become
fixed in the public's affection like some wonder of the natural world.
But popularity brought its own problems.
The birds' nesting habitat was inadvertently disturbed
and the eggs were regularly stolen.
Gradually, the RSPB realised that the bird's needed protection.
Protection from us.
So in 1988, it bought the forest to hold as a bird sanctuary for ever.
And since then, it has become one of the most important protected habitats in Britain.
This forest, as well as being a breeding ground for ospreys,
this forest is now a breeding ground for capercaillie, and lots of other species.
I mean something like 3,000 animal,
insect and plant rare species are found here.
Which means that this forest
has a slightly different function from many others.
The function of this forest is simply not to change.
The RSPB has a 250-year vision for the Abernethy Forest
and their intention is that it will look then just as it does now.
For the moment, Scotland's foresters have found a balance
between conservation and planting, conserving the old,
creating the new.
Around 17% of the country is now covered in trees.
But the transformation is still not complete.
The target is to restore around a quarter of Scotland's landscape to forest,
as much as there was when man first started farming.
We still have a way to go,
but it's a restoration that anyone can be part of.
On 1st January in the year 2000,
a group of volunteers got together and planted these.
The first trees of a vast restoration project
to recreate the woodland that once covered this Borders hillside.
Since then, the Carrifran Wildwood Project
has planted half a million more trees.
Trees of the species that would once have grown here before they were cleared.
It's been a long time disappearing
and we are putting it back rather suddenly,
and it won't look natural for a good many years.
And they've done it entirely voluntarily,
funded with hard won grants and donations.
I would hope to be able to come back in 20 years,
when the trees will be pretty well established.
Pretty much across... You will be able to get an impression of how...
You'll be able to see whether it has really worked.
For me, the enjoyment is just getting out
and meeting the other guys and you get a bit of fresh air.
Could be golfing, but it's trees.
No, it wouldn't be golfing, for me!
I'm with you on that one.
Right, so I should pack this in a bit more, shouldn't I?
What's happening here takes imagination and a bit of faith.
They're planting for the future, but not planting for tomorrow.
It's going to be mature forest here in something like 100 years or so.
The people that are working on this won't live to see it in its glory.
If fact, neither will I, neither will you.
And there's the rub.
In our busy world, with packed lives and short attention spans,
it takes visionaries to stand back and imagine a landscape
that only their children and grandchildren will see.
I guess we just need a few more visionaries.
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