West of Skyfall 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.

In this series, I'm continuing my island grand tour,

visiting the most northerly of the Shetland Islands,

exploring the Outer Hebrides

and discovering the secrets of some of the remotest places in Europe.

To see them through the water like this, it's amazing!

Scotland boasts a wonderful array of islands.

In fact, there are nearly 300 of them

and that's not counting the myriad of stacks, rocks and skerries

from the Atlantic Ocean to the North Sea.

For this grand tour,

I'm on an island-hopping odyssey

where I'll meet characters, heroes and stories

inspired by some incomparable scenery.

The route for this grand tour starts on the mainland,

takes the oldest ferry to Skye,

then sails to the tiny island of Soay,

before arriving on Canna.

The landscape of the mainland opposite Skye

feels ancient and primeval.

And is just as remote as many islands I've visited.

Yet people have lived here for thousands of years.

And the evidence is impressive.

Nestling in these wooded glens near Glenelg

are some of the best preserved Iron Age buildings in Scotland -

brochs, which are uniquely Scottish.

Wow! Look at this!

Now, surprisingly, not much is actually known

about these magnificent structures,

although archaeologists say that they were built about 2,000 years ago

during the Iron Age.

Though, exactly why or for what purpose remains a mystery.

And some people maintain they were like early castles,

status symbols for powerful local chiefs.

Now, other people argue they were defensive structures

for use by the entire community during times of crisis.

But nobody knows for sure, which, in an age of certainties,

I find quite inspiring.

These ruins remind us

that so much of our past remains mysterious.

No wonder that storytellers of old

filled this gap in our knowledge

with heroes and creatures of the imagination.

This is Arnisdale,

which lies opposite the Isle of Skye.

Just beyond the village is Arnisdale Lodge.

A century ago, this was the childhood home

of the novelist Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond.

Arnisdale Lodge was also the inspiration behind Skyfall,

the highland home of Britain's most famous spy.

Andrew Lycett is the biographer of Ian Fleming.

To what extent is the fictional life of James Bond

parallelled by the life of his creator?

Well, this was the home of Ian Fleming's father, Valentine.

He bought this place, Arnisdale Lodge,

just before the First World War.

And this became a sort of family home

for his particular branch of the Fleming family.

Valentine Fleming was brought up to be

sort of an archetypal English gentleman.

He was sent to Eton.

After that, he went to Oxford University.

He did all the right things.

He rowed when he was at university.

But, you know, really sort of being a country gentleman

was what he...

He was going to be a professional gentleman of leisure.

-Exactly. This was...

-Hunting, shooting, fishing.

-..Edwardian times.

Despite his pretentions to be an English gentleman,

Ian Fleming's father, Valentine, came from a poor Scottish background.

He was actually born in Dundee,

where his father had made a fortune in banking.

It was a classic rags-to-riches story.

Inheriting enormous wealth,

Valentine Fleming was able to indulge his fantasies

and play the gentleman when he bought Arnisdale.

Shortly before the First World War,

he had these kind of atavistic yearnings to get back to Scotland.

It was a foothold in Scotland

and a place where the clan could congregate?

Definitely, yeah.

They had this kind of romantic vision of their Scottishness

and, of course, this was something that Ian Fleming

kind of held on to.

Arnisdale gave the young Ian Fleming his first taste of Scotland,

playing in the grounds of the lodge with his brothers

in the run-up to the First World War.

Then, in 1917, his father Valentine was killed by enemy action

while serving in France.

To honour him, the Fleming family

erected this ornate war memorial at Glenelg.

Now, what effect do you think that would have had

on the young Ian Fleming growing up,

to have lost his father at such a young age?

I think it was a significant impact.

Definitely you could argue that

there were important elements of Bond that played back

into, you know, his memory of his father, definitely, yeah.

Not far from the war memorial,

I come to the village of Glenelg,

a place which, for centuries,

has been an important gateway to the Hebrides and beyond.

Kylerhea is the narrow stretch of water

that separates the mainland on the right from the Isle of Skye.

To cross the kyle, I'm taking the ferry.

But it's not just any old ferry.

This one is unique!

The good ship Glenachulish, for that is her name,

is the only turntable ferry still operating in Britain.

She's been plying these waters for over half a century.

There were once many similar little ships in Scotland.

Their swinging decks enabled traffic

to drive aboard from simple jetties, which larger vessels couldn't access.

On board, I'm shown the ropes

by skipper and Glenelg man Donnie MacDonald

and his dogs, Mac and Kim.

Good. Lovely.

But skippering a turntable ferry

is a bit more complicated than you might think.

I'm going to go to the other wheel now.

Right. See you on the other side.

I'm right behind you.

So you're swapping sides. You've got two wheels on the boat?

Yes. The ramps are up in front of you, so you can't see anything.

-Right. You can't see a thing, can you?

-Can't see anything, no.

I've two got yachts coming down, as well,

so I'll need to go back to the other side.

-Busy stretch of water this, isn't it, the kyle.

-It is, it is.

-In the summertime, it's very busy with yachts.

-Look, no hands!

Donnie leads me on a merry dance,

as I try to catch up with him.

Do you ever forget which side you're on?

Yeah, gets confusing a little bit after a while.

How many crossings do you do a day, Donnie?

-Sometimes up to 40.

-Really?

-Maybe more than that, yeah.

-Right.

-So you're just constantly shuttling back and forth.

-Yeah.

So do you enjoy this,

-if you go backwards and forwards up to 50 times a day?

-Yeah.

-Is it not slightly monotonous?

-No, I don't think so.

Every crossing's different, with the tides and the wind.

Of course, crossing the kyle would be much trickier

without the help of able seadogs Mac and Kim.

They keep the seals off the boat.

-To keep the seals off the boat?

-Yeah.

Is there any danger of that?

Well, that's what Mac... He barks at the seals all the time, so...

So he's done a good job so far,

because there never been a seal come on the boat.

-I'll have to go to the other wheel now.

-Righty-ho.

-So you also have a young lady on board.

-We have, yes.

-Does she put her back into it?

-Oh, she certainly does, yeah.

-Does she?

-Yes.

She's very good, Izzie.

She's looking to be the new skipper.

-Is she really?

-Oh, yeah.

-Right.

How do you feel about that?

Och, I'm OK with that, yeah.

I'll be retired soon, anyway.

Izzie is definitely a woman with ambition.

She started working on the Glenachulish as a volunteer.

I would love to be skipper one day of this very ferry.

Erm, but...

-Really?

-Yeah.

The first female ferry skipper of this ferry.

-Really?

-Yeah. That would be amazing.

And how would you get to do that?

Well, I have to be 18 to take my skipper's ticket licence.

-Right. So you're restricted to one area?

-Yeah.

-Confined to the kyles, you'd be?

-Just these narrows, yeah.

Would that be a big enough ocean for you?

Yeah, I'm sure it would be, to start off with.

And then maybe go higher and higher.

But, yeah, to start off with, this would be great.

Delivered safely across the kyle,

I travel through the south of Skye towards the Black Cuillin.

To my mind, these spectacular rocky peaks

make up the finest mountain range in Scotland,

rising 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.

The type of tunes they would have played.

From the cave of the ancients, I head west

towards the seldom-visited and tiny island of Soay.

'My skipper on board the Heather Grace is Ollie Davies,

'who hopes to show me a basking shark.

'Every summer, shoals of these great fish

'make their slow way among the islands of the West Coast.'

Basking sharks are absolutely enormous.

They're second only in size to the whale shark,

the biggest fish on the planet.

And it's wonderful to think that these gigantic creatures

are swimming so close to our shores.

If I could only see one...!

The basking shark grows to over ten metres in length.

An average fully-grown male weighs more than eight tonnes.

But these leviathans of the deep are harmless plankton-eaters.

Well, I've not seen any basking sharks.

Have you seen any basking sharks recently?

There's not been many about, but, erm...

..a few years ago there was 27 we counted between Elgol and Soay.

I don't know if it's a case of their feeding habits have changed,

or has the temperature, the water temperature changed,

meaning that they're not feeding in this area now as they used to.

Well, it hasn't warmed up much, has it, this year. Let's face it!

Not much chance for basking if you were a shark.

No. Absolutely not.

It's almost unthinkable today,

but these graceful creatures were once hunted

for the oil which was extracted from their huge livers.

And one of the most celebrated hunters was Tex Geddes.

In the 1940s, Tex pioneered shark fishing in these waters

and based his operations and his family on the island of Soay.

-You knew Tex Geddes, did you not?

-I did, yes.

I was, erm...

I started my fishing career aboard Tex Geddes's boat.

And he was a fantastic storyteller.

He would keep a room entertained for hours.

If there was a few drams going,

the night would fly by.

One of the old characters...

and there's very few old characters left,

but he was certainly one of them.

This is Soay, once home to Tex Geddes

and a whole community of crofters and fishermen.

Today, Oliver is just one of two permanent residents.

At the old pier,

a welcoming committee of enthusiastic midges awaits us.

This is the platform here, where the sharks were cut up.

And across there is the accommodation

that they used to stay over there.

Is that because it was rather a smelly old business

and they needed to keep some distance between where they lived

-and where they worked?

-Absolutely.

Still days like we've got today,

one would think the smell would linger.

I bet it did!

Scattered around are rusting artefacts

from the industrial archaeology of the Hebrides.

Steam winches for dragging carcasses ashore.

Tram rails.

Vats for boiling shark livers.

And taking pride of place,

the shark factory power supply.

An almost complete railway engine

that once pulled carriages along tracks on the mainland.

I actually had somebody inquiring about it

and he was actually seriously thinking about renovating it.

Putting it back on the tracks?

But he thought it was actually

-a little bit too far gone for renovation.

-Mm-mm.

And this here is an interesting relic of the past, as well.

-Yes.

-Now, what's this?

That is the actual shaft of one of Tex Geddes's harpoons.

And this would have been fired from a harpoon gun?

That would have been fired from a harpoon gun

with the harpoon on this end,

which then released into the shark.

-So a fragment of the true harpoon.

-Absolutely.

A relic from the past.

I don't think we can hang around for much longer.

These midges are absolutely ferocious, aren't they?

-They certainly are.

-I don't know how people worked here.

But I suppose they might have used some of that shark liver oil

as a kind of skin-so-soft barrier against the worst of them.

Fleeing the dreaded midges, we head back out to sea.

And then, something magical happens...

PAUL CHUCKLES

Beautiful creatures.

Just cruising there,

like torpedoes.

They're having a good look at us.

Oh, he's turning on one side and looking right up at me.

Hello, dolphin!

To see them through the water like this, under the boat,

it's amazing!

Whoa!

It's fantastic! What an experience.

And just as suddenly as they'd arrived, the dolphins are gone.

Leaving Soay, I'm heading west again,

crossing the seas that Tex Geddes knew so well,

to the beautiful island of Canna,

which lies at the epicentre of the old Celtic world of myth and legend.

At 8km long and a couple of kilometres wide, Canna isn't big.

And explains why it's part of a group of islands

known as the Small Isles, which include Rum, Eigg and Muck.

Today, Canna is in the keeping of the National Trust for Scotland,

having been given to the nation

by the last laird of Canna, John Lorne Campbell,

the celebrated folklorist and Gaelic scholar.

John Lorne Campbell and his American wife, Margaret Fay Shaw,

devoted their lives to the language and the culture

of the people they lived amongst.

They collected songs and folk stories

and recorded the spoken word of a culture

that was on the cusp of irrevocable change.

'The couple were married for 60 years

'and, throughout that time, lived at Canna House,

'which holds their archives,

'the most important Gaelic cultural collection outside the mainland.'

The lady of the house awaits.

Hm!

Good morning, Paul.

'Magdalena Sagarzazu, from the Basque country of Spain,

'was a close friend of the couple

'and was the archivist here for many years.'

And this is where John worked, is it?

Yes. This is the library of the house.

As you can see, in here we've got is a working library.

Is wonderful that is kept this way because also, you know,

it shows so much of the personality that has lived in here

and worked in here.

And exactly what was John recording?

What was his primary aim, do you think?

Oh, the spoken word.

Songs, the stories,

all kinds of, you know, just of the everyday sort of life

on the Hebrides.

When they started making their recordings in the 1930s,

this extraordinary contraption

represented the cutting edge of available technology.

-It's kind of primitive, isn't it?

-Yes, I know. It's 1930s.

Is that wax recording?

-It's wax recording.

-Good grief!

-Exactly.

And is a wonderful photograph there.

It shows, you know, just how they had been, you know,

just have taking this machine, which weighs a tonne...

-Oh, really?

-..in order to record the people.

And these recordings have survived, have they?

Have survived and now, you know,

just now they are just all digitised.

-Uh-huh.

-So that's really good.

WOMAN SINGS A FOLK SONG

John and Margaret were pioneers

in the field of anthropology,

photographing and recording what was even then

a disappearing way of life.

The quality of their recordings, which were made on wax cylinders,

aren't exactly high fidelity

but, like their photographs, they are wonderfully evocative.

They recorded not only from the Hebrides,

from, you know, Barra, Uist, Canna and the surroundings.

But also they went to Nova Scotia,

following the steps of the immigrants.

-He was tracking down stories and songs.

-Exactly, yes.

-And that's the lifeblood of any culture.

-Exactly.

John and Margaret turned Canna House

into a centre for Gaelic culture and folklore.

When John died in his 90s,

Magda came to the island

to stay with Margaret as her companion and help,

until Margaret's death in 2004 at the age of 101.

-And this is Margaret's room, then?

-Yes. This is Margaret's study.

And, you know, just that's where she used to sort of write

and really...and is surrounded by the things that she really loved.

She was a wonderful musician.

-You know, she was trained in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

-Really?

-Yes.

-A classically-trained musician.

-And what instrument did she play?

-Piano.

Mainly was piano.

And do you think that's what led her to start recording

-the music and the songs of the Hebrides, then?

-Yes. Yes.

She made a tour with bicycling

and came to South Uist.

And so she just, she got in love with the Hebrides.

She came back with her camera

and she took this wonderful collection of photographs.

The work of recording was timely.

Within a generation,

the oral tradition and the way of life that supported it

would largely die out in the Hebrides.

The songs and stories in the archives of Canna House

are not just a testament to the couple that assembled them.

They are a hugely important cultural resource.

Leaving Canna House,

I follow the road around the bay where most islanders live.

It's no accident that the Campbells chose to live and work here.

Canna is geographically and culturally

at the centre of the old Gaelic world.

This is a place steeped in legend and folklore,

romantic song and the deeds of Celtic heroes.

Canna is surrounded by islands

and standing here, with Skye and the Cuillins behind me,

I can understand how the Hebrides

have helped shape the character of the people,

creating legendary figures

and inspiring others to tell their stories.

And what better place to end my grand tour of the Scottish islands

west of Skyfall,

than here in the land of heroes.

Join me on my next grand tour,

when I'll be heading to Scotland's northern frontier,

the Shetland Islands.