Blaven Grand Tours of the Scottish Islands

Islands are places that have always fired the human imagination

with tales of mighty heroes and their epic deeds.

Sailing in the Hebrides,

you can see with your own eyes

how these islands inspired the myths and legends of old,

helping to shape the culture of the nation.

This isn't just beautiful scenery,

it's food for the imagination,

a storyteller's dream.

The spectacular rocky peaks of the Black Cuillin on the Isle of Skye

rise to over 3,500 feet above the sea.

This is the impressive summit of Blaven,

an outlier of the main Cuillin range.

These are mountains that inspire poetry.

The great 20th-century Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean

made many references to the Cuillin Mountains

and to Blaven in his work.

"And even if I came in sight of paradise,

"what price its moon without Blaven?"

The first recorded ascent of Blaven

was made by two drunken 19th-century intellectuals,

the gay poet Algernon Swinburne

and his friend John Nichol,

who was a professor of English at Glasgow University.

The pair spent the summer of 1857 on Skye,

mostly in a drunken stupor, it has to be said.

But between drinking bouts,

they did manage to summon up enough energy to climb Blaven,

which they mistakenly believed to be the highest mountain on Skye.

Instead of replicating Swinburne and Nichol's drink-sodden achievement,

I'm taking a different approach.

I'm going not to climb Blaven,

but to explore underground,

descending into a nether world of darkness, bones and ancient myth.

Just working our way up towards the passage.

I'm glad I've got my wellingtons on.

My guide to the underworld is archaeologist Steven Birch,

who's spent the last ten years excavating a limestone cave system

in the shadow of Blaven.

After ten minutes bent double,

we finally emerge into the bone cave,

where Steve made his extraordinary discoveries.

We were working at the site, an archaeological excavation.

Started in 2003, so several years here.

And a really amazing site came to light.

Just behind me, you'll see we've got this arching limestone cave roof.

And that was the original entrance into this cave system.

And excavations outside

uncovered a sequence of three different stone-built staircases.

What Steve and his team found in the cave

are some of the rarest and most intriguing artefacts

ever to appear in the Scottish archaeological record.

It was like a treasure trove. There was animal bone.

There was pottery. There was stone tools.

Bone points.

Bone needles. And I thought,

"Wow! Something quite exciting is happening here."

The objects in the bone cave

cover a span of almost 5,000 years of human history,

from the Stone Age to the Iron Age builders of the brochs.

Since we carried out the excavations,

we've been able to look at other cave sites around the world,

or closer to home, even, places like Ireland.

We've got inklings now to suggest

that it was unusual things going on in caves.

I think they were seen as otherworldly places.

They were this transitional place

between the upper world and world of the living.

It was a place where you could

perhaps communicate with the ancestors

or to make special offerings to those deities

who dwelt in these very unusual places below the ground.

So this is a sacred site, then, isn't it?

Or was a sacred site?

It all points to people visiting this site,

almost as a pilgrimage-type site on a periodic basis.

Maybe just family groups coming at certain times,

periodically through the year.

But then, we have evidence to suggest

that perhaps big groups of people were coming

at certain times of the year, maybe on these big Celtic festivals,

like Samhain or Beltane.

It's amazingly atmospheric.

The hairs on the back of my neck

were beginning to rise as you were describing that scene.

But there is something almost tangible about, or elemental,

the past, here.

-Have you ever felt anything?

-Yes.

I think, you know, even lifting the objects out off the ground.

I think every object that came out, some more than others,

they do give a tingle, as you say, on the back of your neck.

And, certainly, working in this site, especially in the early years,

there was only three of us in the first year,

working inside this passage.

And making that journey from the cavers' entrance down the streamway,

sometimes, you know, making that journey alone,

you have a little look over your shoulder,

you think you've heard something, or maybe it's a presence.

I think, yes, there is something very tangible

about this place being underground.

-The ancestors are just behind us.

-Yes, that's right.

'Back on the surface,

'Steve shows me the layout of this once sacred site.

'This is where he made the most remarkable discovery of all,

'a fragment of a musical instrument.

'An ancient lyre.'

So here it is.

What is this?

So, this is a laser-scanned model, if you like,

of the original lyre bridge.

Well, the original has been dated by material

associated with it in the fireplace, if you like,

and it's dated to between 400 and 500 BC.

And that's a very significant find, as far as you're concerned.

Yes. Yeah, I think because it's so unique.

You know, it's the earliest evidence in Western Europe from this time

of a stringed musical instrument.

Is it really? Wow!

And I imagine, the technology to produce that 2,500 years ago

would have been relatively sophisticated...

That's right, that's right.

..in order to make those precise grooves.

And that's perfectly angled, as well,

to sit on the body of the musical instrument.

That's right. We're still learning more about it as time goes on.

So we can not only look at how the object was manufactured,

but how it sounded, as well, with a replica.

And what tunes they would have played on it.

What type of tunes they would have played.