John o'Groats to Firth of Forth Coast

This programme contains some scenes that some viewers may find upsetting.

We've now travelled the length and breadth of the UK

on our voyage of discovery.

We've visited our southern, western and northern shores

looking at how the coast has shaped us as a nation.

Now, for the first time, we're heading down the east coast.

We're beginning at the north-eastern corner of the British mainland,

the famous Scottish landmark of John O'Groats.

Many years ago, I cycled here all the way from Land's End.

If you're thinking of doing the same thing yourself,

the last stretch along the north-east coast of Scotland has a sting in the tail.

It's a killer, yet my bike ride was nothing compared to the extraordinary lengths

that the people who live on this coast have gone to

just to make a living.

It's that industry and ingenuity that I'll be exploring

in the company of our team of experts.

Neil Oliver gets a taste of life at sea

during one of the most troubled times in the fishing industry's history.

Alice Roberts meets Britain's last whalers.

Miranda Krestovnikoff has a front-row seat

as our most northerly dolphins do a spot of salmon fishing.

Mark Horton uncovers the origins of an invention

that helped turn the tide of the Second World War.

And I'll be investigating the future of North Sea oil.

This is the story of Coast.

On this leg of the journey,

we'll be travelling over 500 miles,

right down to North Queensferry in the Firth of Forth.

Fishing has been the mainstay of communities on the east coast

for centuries.

In the 1800s, there were over 100 fishing ports along here.

Today, there are still 50 working harbours.

But because there's little protection from the wilds of the North Sea,

it's very difficult to land boats.

But up here in the north-east,

they've always been an enterprising lot.

The Whaligoe Steps zigzag their way up the sheer cliff face.

This gigantic staircase

was built for carrying fish from the harbour below.

They're a monumental testament to the people who lived here.

There were fish out there

and they were going to land them, whatever it took.

There were steps here as early as the 1600s,

but the 365-step sweep that we see today was completed in 1792.

Whaligoe was mainly used to land herring.

At its peak in 1855,

there were 35 boats operating out of this tiny port.

We look at this place today and it's dramatic, it's scenic,

but in those days it would have been horribly intimidating.

It's a very narrow, rocky entrance.

You're in a boat loaded with fish and you misjudge your approach... You'll be smashed to smithereens.

Despite the dangers,

in the 1860s, Whaligoe harbour was thriving.

The North Sea teemed with the affectionately-known "silver darlings".

They landed over 2,000 barrels of herring a year at Whaligoe

and the whole catch had to be laboriously carried, basket-by-basket, up the cliff.

It wasn't the fishermen who did the carrying, it was the women.

The women were the backbone of the industry,

mending the nets and gutting up to 60 fish a minute.

To stop the men getting wet and catching hypothermia, they'd carry them out to the boats.

You only have to climb these steps to get a feel

for how hard life must have been for those women carrying baskets of fish up the cliff...

..often in the winter, when the steps would have been slippery with rain and the air freezing cold.

Looked at from the comfort of the 21st century, their lives look unimaginably tough.

Today's east-coasters aren't scared of hard work either.

There are salmon fishermen along here who still embrace traditional methods,

hauling in nets by hand.

But they've got competition -

the UK's most northerly population of dolphins, who are also partial to this prized fish.

Miranda Krestovnikoff is at the Moray Firth with the salmon hunters.

This great expanse of water is a truly extraordinary place

that really comes alive during the summer months.

Bottlenose dolphins and fishermen

await the salmon returning to breed.

Seven generations of Sandy Patience's family have fished this area.

-Come this way a wee bit.

-OK.

-There you go.

-All right.

Is it hanging at the back? No, clear! >

Right-o!

Watching you guys work like this,

-is like watching fishing from a bygone era.

-It is indeed.

This is what they did in Biblical times.

The net goes around in a semicircle

and the rope is fed out and comes back to the beach.

The net is pulled at all times. The whole operation maybe takes about 20 minutes.

It's really full-on work.

-It looks very tiring.

-It's very hard work.

You can start off, like myself, weighing 13 stone

and by the end of the season you're down to 11 stone.

You don't need any exercise bike!

Sandy catches an average of only 50 fish a week,

but a single dolphin can eat up to 10 salmon per day.

I've caught the odd glimpse or two of dolphins this morning while I've been fishing here with Sandy.

But this isn't the best place to see them. Just over there is a little spit of land.

That's the best place to watch dolphins from the shore in the whole of Britain.

The dolphins congregate here at Channonry Point because it's the perfect place to catch dinner.

It's one of the most dangerous parts of the salmon's journey back to their spawning rivers.

As they swim past, the tide pushes them against the shore.

It offers rich pickings for the dolphins and means we get to see them in action.

I've met up with dolphin expert Helen Bailey.

-Look! There's a dolphin!

-Fantastic.

-They're a long way away but you can really see what they're doing.

-Yes.

That's terrific, though.

All that energy and excitement... Even from this distance you can gauge just how big they are.

I never get over how huge these bottlenose dolphins are.

They are really big.

The dolphins here can be up to four metres long. It makes sense in this area -

we've got cold water. They need a big body,

small fins, thick blubber layer...

-They're designed to generate heat, minimise loss...

-Changed direction!

They're coming towards us!

That's fantastic.

I've heard that dolphins can eat 10% of their bodyweight a day.

-If you've got a 300-kilo dolphin, that's 30 kilos of fish!

-Yes.

-They'll be spending a lot of their time trying to feed.

-Superb!

-I've never seen that before.

-The salmon are very large, fast fish.

It could be that during the pursuit, the dolphins just break the surface.

-We see the fish being thrown.

-Oh!

-Those two there...

-Fantastic!

Once they've had a good feed, the dolphins just seem to have fun,

playing with each other and reinforcing their social bonds.

This really is the ultimate hotspot in the UK

to see one of nature's great floor shows.

From Channonry Point, we wind our way along the Moray coast.

This is the mouth of the Spey,

one of Scotland's great rivers. It's best known for salmon fishing

and is the magic ingredient in some fine whiskies.

But this peaceful river was once a hive of industry.

The Spey was a logging river, similar to the ones in the Canadian Rockies.

The trees were felled in forests and mountains way inland

and then the logs were floated downstream to be used in the shipbuilding industry.

That bank of the river was once lined with shipyards.

Between 1785 and 1890, over 500 beautifully-crafted ships were built on the Spey's banks.

The best known were the tea clippers,

built along this stretch of coast in ports like Kingston and Aberdeen.

The pride of the east coast

was the Thermopylae, once the fastest ship in the world.

In 1872, she took on the Cutty Sark, raced her from Shanghai to London

and beat her by an impressive margin of seven days.

Steam and steel killed off the wooden ship.

It's a story we've seen all the way round the UK coast -

historic industries succumbing to modern technology. But there are a couple of pockets of resistance.

The port of MacDuff is home to the last boatyard in the UK

that can build commercial wooden ships.

90% of their work is for the fishing industry.

Although there's been a big shift over to steel, wooden boats remain popular.

You've got quite a few wooden boats standing around being worked on.

-Yes.

-That's a wooden one?

-That's right.

-And that one there?

Everything on the slip is wooden.

-That's interesting, not a single steel boat here at all?

-No.

John Watt is managing director of the shipyard.

Why would somebody choose a wooden boat over a steel one?

It's tradition. Some skippers have always had wooden boats...

Their family's always had wooden boats. It's a nice material...

It doesn't rust.

The wooden boats we build are very strong. They last a long time.

Can you still get shipbuilders who can work in wood?

That's a bit difficult,

getting experienced people.

There's a serious skill shortage throughout the country. We take on six to eight apprentices each year.

We've currently got 20 apprentices going through the company. Six are being trained on timber boats.

-You train young Scots to build boats?

-They don't have to be Scots!

We've now reached the heart of Scotland's biggest fishing region.

Scotland is still one of the largest fishing nations in Europe.

The fleet lands two thirds of the total UK volume of fish.

But quotas imposed by Europe cutting the amount of fish they're allowed to catch

have made recent years some of the most turbulent the industry has ever faced.

Neil Oliver has gone to see how one particular community is coping.

Fishing's been the main way of life in Fraserburgh for over 200 years.

Today, out of a population of 13,000,

over half work in fishing-related jobs.

In recent years,

the Fraserburgh fleet's been cut in half and the white-fish fleet

has borne the brunt of it. It's all been done in the name of conserving fish stocks,

and decommissioning boats has been the Government's solution.

Sandy West and his two sons used to own a fishing trawler.

-But the boat was decommissioned - scrapped - 18 months ago. ..Show me what's gone on.

-OK.

In October 2003, the family made their last trip with the boat...

to a scrap yard in Denmark.

It's not so much the end of a dream,

it's the end of a part of my life.

The end of a big part of my life.

I'll just have to get over it.

It was so final at the time, to see the ship go.

More than so, because that ship was actually built for the future of my two sons.

49 white-fish boats have been destroyed in Fraserburgh over the last four years.

Today, there are only 10 left.

Decommissioning started because cod and haddock stocks were at dangerously low levels.

The European Union imposed quotas, but they were driving fishermen to the verge of bankruptcy.

Many skippers felt they had no choice but to take up the Government's offer of compensation

to scrap their boats.

What do you think now, nearly two years down the line, about the decommissioning?

It's been bad for the town.

The white-fish fleet is gone from this town.

On the other hand, the sea is starting to replenish itself.

What's going to happen when they need a fleet to catch these fish?

The biggest fear here is if foreign fleets come into our waters and catch these fish.

-There'll be an abundance of stocks.

-How does that make you feel?

It makes you feel gutted, doesn't it? Really.

Sandy had little compensation money left after he paid off the costs of the boat.

He now works as a hired skipper in Ireland.

After the boat was decommissioned, Sandy's son Zander spent a year in the oil industry,

but now he's back - working as a deck hand on a prawn boat.

-Is this you back on the boats?

-Unfortunately, aye.

I just wanted to turn my back to fishing, get into something else.

But the pull was too strong. I think it's in the blood.

I've got it in my blood, unfortunately.

I just had to come back.

I'm joining Zander to try and understand what lured him back.

HE WHISTLES

LOUD ENGINE NOISE

-TANNOY:

-'How are you doing, boys?

'OK, now!'

Wakey-wakey, Neil. Time to go!

That was dreadful! I don't mind telling you!

This constant noise - it's like being in a tumble dryer!

And it smells real bad!

The working routine involves shooting and hauling the nets,

sorting out the catch and grabbing a couple of hours' sleep before it's time to start again.

These guys can be working 20 out of every 24 hours.

So is this just a typical morning, then?

This is how it starts, this is how it ends...

I know you've seen all this a thousand times before but it's exciting for somebody like me.

There are now 70 prawn boats working out of Fraserburgh.

Quotas on prawns are more generous

so white-fish boats that could convert moved over.

It's become the biggest shellfish port in Europe.

But for Zander, who'd been training to be a skipper on his dad's boat the Steadfast,

it's not the future he had planned.

-What are you doing there, exactly?

-Just sorting 'em out, really.

Keeping the bigger ones in one basket

and the slightly smaller size in another basket.

Can you imagine standing here, three, four hours a day doing this?

You couldnae exactly turn round and get a job in here, could you?!

When I was on the Steadfast I swore I'd never go aboard a prawn boat.

I left the Steadfast, and the wife said, "What you gonna dae?"

I said, "I'm nae caring as long as it's nae on a prawn boat.

"There's no way you'll ever get me on a prawn boat."

A year later - on a prawn boat.

What was it about the Steadfast that made the difference?

I think the simple bit of it is

there's a big difference between chasing a cod and chasing a prawn.

Chasing cod and fish,

er, I think it's just mair exciting.

Was it more like hunting?

Yeah, yeah.

The EU accept they should have tackled over-fishing earlier.

When they eventually did, the measures they took were extreme.

But many Scottish fishermen feel they've been hit harder than others.

While their boats were decommissioned,

Irish and Spanish fishermen got grants to build new ones.

For Zander, the loss of the family boat has been devastating.

It's really hard to explain how you feel when your life's taken off you,

cos that's what it is.

The Steadfast was a boat, but it was also something that had been in my family for years,

put food on the table for years,

so it wasnae just a job.

And all of a sudden that's taken off you.

Where do you go from here? How do I support my family?

Why take somebody with ambition and knock it oot of them?

It's clear that both the fishing industry

and the fish stocks are fragile.

There's a delicate balance to be struck

to ensure we don't lose either one.

As the scientists and politicians fight it out,

the fishing families of Fraserburgh pay the price.

From here it's south all the way

as we turn the corner at Fraserburgh.

Luckily for all of us, the North Sea has provided more than just fish.

Beneath the waves lurks another bonanza,

one that has transformed not just the economic fortunes of this area,

but the whole UK.

This beautiful beach at Cruden Bay is concealing a surprise.

Rushing beneath my feet

at a rate of 2½ million gallons a day is oil.

The oil from nearly 50 platforms, sited up to 200 miles offshore,

is passing through a single umbilical cord right here

known as the Forties Pipeline.

The oil industry has had a profound effect on this stretch of coastline,

and on the UK as a whole.

But what does the future hold for North Sea oil?

The Forties Pipeline system took 20,000 people three years to construct.

Built in the early 1970s,

it was a massive undertaking

in the same era and on the same scale as the space race.

Today, it carries nearly half our entire oil supply

direct from beneath one of the harshest sea environments in the world.

But incredibly, the discovery of North Sea oil nearly didn't happen.

It was a find of natural gas off the coast of The Netherlands

that triggered a gigantic gamble.

Companies staked tens of millions of pounds on a hunch

that the Scottish waters might be hiding the far bigger prize of oil.

One of those early oil prospectors was Rob Lingard.

From the late 1960s, he worked as a drilling deck hand

on board BP's Sea Quest exploration rig.

Great pleasure to meet you. I like the hat!

-Shall we go aboard?

-Yep.

-Is that an authentic oilman's hat from your travels?

-It is.

I've had this 30-odd years. A long, long while.

-Did you see yourselves as explorers?

-Very much so,

because we used to try all this new equipment, and smash no end of gear.

But it was pioneering days, you know,

and the things we used to do then you'd never get away with nowadays.

Was it all just a big adventure or did you think, "We're really making history here!"?

Well, to me it was a big adventure at the time.

BP had been searching beneath the sea bed for five years,

but had found nothing.

Their exploration licence was about to run out,

and the company's future was in jeopardy.

By the 11th October, 1970,

it was reaching make-or-break time.

I was working on a rig floor, and lo and behold,

there was oil floating about on top of the wood.

First thought - rotary table leaking cos we'd had trouble with it earlier.

-You thought the oil had come from faulty machinery?

-We did, yes.

We stopped, and thought, "Oh, go down and get a sample."

Get the geologist out of bed, drill a little bit more, geologist going mental.

-Everybody's on the telex machine, coded messages.

-Why coded messages?

We don't want the world to know what's happening out there, there's a big investment.

We knew we'd got oil, but we didn't realise at the time how big it was.

In actual fact, you were sitting on top of the Forties field

-and had changed economic history for Britain.

-Certainly Aberdeen.

If I'd known then what I know now, I'd have gone home, remortgaged my house and bought a few shares!

It didn't just change the economy,

it changed the whole way the coast behaved.

-Jobs, the local economy...

-You've just got to look at Invergordon

where we are today. There was nothing here except bird-spotting at one time.

Forties was the first giant oil field to be discovered in UK waters.

Soon, other big fields came on stream.

Piper, Brent, Ninian -

North Sea oil had truly taken off.

The provincial fishing port of Aberdeen became the Dallas of the north -

Europe's oil capital.

The oil and the revenues - £200 billion to date -

have flowed ever since.

But for the first time since the discovery of the big oil fields,

UK oil production has begun to decline.

Britain will soon be a net importer of oil.

The problem is not that there isn't any left,

but that what remains is becoming increasingly difficult to extract.

I'm on my way to one of the New Age oil platforms.

With the end of North Sea gas and oil in sight

companies are having to find cleverer ways of exploiting what's left.

The Elgin/Franklin platform, 150 miles out to sea,

is at the cutting edge of extracting oil

that would have been inaccessible 30 years ago.

They're tapping the deepest reserves anywhere in the North Sea.

'David Atkins is manager of the Elgin/Franklin platform.'

How does Elgin differ from the fields found in the early days?

The main difference right now for Elgin

is that we're drilling a lot deeper than we did, and a lot further.

Here we've got a rig which has come up against the platform

to drill a new well for us,

-and this well is over 5,000 metres deep.

-That's about three miles!

It's over three miles deep. We're drilling down, and then we fan out.

Techniques have moved on in 30 years.

It's called directional drilling, and we can drill in practically any direction we want to go.

We can do loops or spirals. It's amazing what the drillers can do.

Originally, 20 years ago, we only expected to produce

20%, 30%, maximum 40% of the oil in the reservoir.

That means 60% of the oil is still left there in the ground.

What we're trying to do is work out techniques

to get that extra oil out.

Getting 1 or 2% oil from one of the large fields today

is the equivalent of a new find, a new discovery in the North Sea.

We're just going to go across to the wellhead platform.

This is where the wells are drilled from.

It feels rather as if we're walking through an underground tunnel

on the London Underground network

rather than balanced 100 feet above the open sea.

New techniques mean that they can carry on pumping oil

out of the North Sea for at least another 30 years.

But the boom time has passed, and ultimately the reserves will run out.

Are there elements of this huge oil industry

out here in the North Sea that can somehow be recycled

as other forms of energy generation?

Aberdeen is a centre of excellence in the oil industry worldwide.

So what we hope at the end of the day is maybe the oil platforms will go, maybe the rigs will go,

but the technique, the industry, the skills that we've set up

will actually last for a long time.

It's not all big business and heavy engineering around here.

But the same sense of enterprise

that led to the success of the oil industry,

the impulse to make the most of whatever nature has to offer

has seen a more modest harvest of the sea.

My name is Margaret Horn and I have a restaurant in Auchmithie village.

And I'm down on the shore picking up seaweed

like generations of Auchmithie fisherwomen before me.

I come down here as much as I can to get stuff for the restaurant.

This is dulse. This is one of my favourites.

You eat it like this,

or you can roast it with a red-hot poker from the fire.

It splutters and sizzles and turns bright green.

Sprinkle it with vinegar - delicious!

This is what I've been looking for to show you. This is tangles.

This end is what my mum would snap off and give me to eat, and say,

"Enjoy that - it's just like a stick of rock but much better for you."

OK - this is the pool I've been looking for.

The tide is going to come in and overwhelm us

but we'll be able to see this wavy one that we called sloke.

It's like the Japanese nori

and people pay a fortune for Japanese seaweeds

and it's growing just on our own shores.

Whoo!

We're going to be swept away!

Now I'll take this up, give it a good wash,

and then it'll be on the menu tonight, if I leave any!

For centuries, intrepid traders from the east coast

have exported their wares around the world

from grain to Scandinavia through to granite to New Zealand.

But just 12 miles offshore,

there's a treacherous barrier to sea trade -

Bell Rock - a deadly reef notorious for shipwrecks.

By the late 1700s,

Bell Rock was claiming an average of six ships a year.

When HMS York sank in 1804

with the loss of 491 men,

the tragedy finally triggered action.

This is the result.

Bell Rock lighthouse defiantly sticking out of the ocean.

It took over 100 men four years to build it in appalling conditions.

The challenge of building a lighthouse in the middle of the sea

fell to the brilliant engineer, Robert Stevenson,

who went on to construct over 20 Scottish lighthouses.

I'm going to take a closer look at Bell Rock.

The 100-foot high lighthouse is precariously perched,

ingeniously designed so its weight alone holds it on to the rock.

Now we're up close

I can see why Stevenson was commissioned to build a lighthouse on top of this ferocious reef.

It's actually a ridge of serrated sandstone

that forms the top of a gigantic submerged mountain

which disappears just below the surface of the water every high tide so you can't see it.

It's absolutely lethal.

The lighthouse has been doing its bit

to keep sailors safe since 1811.

So precise is its construction

that the stonework hasn't required any maintenance in nearly 200 years.

But for one east coast community, overcoming the obstacle of Bell Rock

was just the start of their epic voyages to some of the most inhospitable parts of the globe.

Alice Roberts is in Dundee - a place that likes to bill itself as "The City Of Discovery".

The "Discovery" in the slogan is this ship.

Built in 1900, she took two of the world's most celebrated explorers,

Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton,

on their very first expedition to the Antarctic.

In Scott and Shackleton's time,

Dundee led the world in building ships

that could withstand extreme polar conditions.

The famous explorers' expeditions relied on the strength of the Dundee-built vessel.

The Discovery was trapped in the Antarctic ice for nearly two years and survived.

But Dundee's shipbuilding expertise didn't come from exploration

but from a less glamorous enterprise.

The city was once one of the world's major whaling ports.

Dundee whaling crews had been sailing to the polar regions for over 150 years

before the Discovery's expedition.

The hunt for the great beasts of the sea took them further north

than anyone had been before.

They ventured through the ice and uncharted waters of the Arctic,

searching for Greenland right whales.

Historian David Henderson is an expert on Dundee's whaling past.

-Hi, Alice.

-Hello, David.

-Welcome to Discovery.

-She's beautiful.

Lovely ship, magnificent ship.

Mind your ankles on the portholes.

-The portholes are on the deck on Discovery, not on the side.

-Why?

To keep the strength of the hull.

She was built to barge through ice

and they didn't want any points of weakness.

It seems really strange to think of Britain as a whaling nation, cos obviously we're not any more.

It seems odd to think about it being such a key thing here.

Yes, Dundee was like many of the east coast ports -

the government offered a subsidy and everybody jumped in

-and goes whaling. This happened in Dundee in about 1750.

-Right.

It was fraught with difficulty -

on occasions, Dundee ships were trapped in the ice for months.

One year, 19 ships were lost, 21 came back without a catch,

things were that bad.

What were they actually bringing back? What were the main products?

The main one, of course, was blubber,

which contained the oil.

The other product was a material called whalebone

which are the baleen plates

that hang down inside the whale's mouth instead of teeth.

These plates are very flexible, and they're what made your granny's corsets,

and that was a very valuable commodity.

-So it was big business, then?

-Very big business in Dundee.

Simply, it was the best job around.

It was better than sailing to the Indies and getting standard pay,

because at the end of a whaling voyage, providing they got a catch,

they were in the money when they came off the ship.

It was in the 1860s that Dundee's whaling industry really took off.

Other whaling ports were struggling as paraffin began to replace whale oil for lighting.

But the Dundee whalers had a new market right on their doorstep.

The city's vast jute industry

needed whale oil for processing the cloth.

It was an industrial match made in heaven.

Dundee's whalers were the first to invest in steam ships,

and became a major force in the whaling industry.

But they were victims of their own success.

By the time Dundee was a key whaling port,

the whales they were hunting were becoming very scarce

and they were having to sail further and further north

into uncharted waters to find their prey.

It became a very, very risky business indeed.

By 1900, the Arctic whales had been hunted almost to extinction.

In an effort to save their industry,

the whalers had to look even further afield.

Their search took them south to the oceans of the Antarctic.

Whaling from Scotland continued right up till the 1960s.

Don Lennie and George Cummings were Antarctic whalers.

-Hello!

-This is George.

-Nice to meet you.

What are we looking at? They look fairly nasty.

-Very nasty tools, yes, as far as a whale's concerned.

-Yeah.

This looks like a pretty old instrument here.

Is that a harpoon that would have been used in the 19th century?

Certainly, yes,

but this would be a hand-held one with a pole.

-Right.

-And you come up, throw it into the whale,

withdraw the handle, and of course the line is attached.

This thing on the end - is that still a harpoon?

-That is one large harpoon!

-It's enormous!

-That's a more modern harpoon.

-Right. Just like a warhead.

Once it was inside the whale, it exploded,

and hopefully that killed the whale. In lots of cases it did,

but in other cases it didn't.

George, you were there on the factory ship taking in the whales...

It sounds like a horrendous job.

It was. Really, it was like a large, open-air abattoir

in freezing conditions.

That's basically what modern whaling's about, actually.

If you were below decks on the factory ship, the temperature could be up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

It was almost Dante's Inferno.

It was a hot, hostile environment to work in,

but it was a job you'd take knowing you just had to get on with it.

Don and George were on the very last whaling mission

launched from Britain in 1962.

Over 40 years on, they now have mixed feelings about the industry.

At that time, even in the early '60s, there was no conservation lobby as such.

We didn't think an awful lot about it.

We were sorry that you had to kill the whales, it was not a thing you took pleasure out of,

but most of the men were there to earn a good living.

My opinion's changed now. I'm sorry I harpooned, obviously,

but like anything else, you're clever in hindsight.

Britain was a major whaling nation,

and it's something we can't hide, it's part of the history.

It was a job of work. It was an industry, but it was a job of work like any other job,

and you tried not to think about the sad part of it

which was the killing of the whales, and let's face it, it was sad.

They're such magnificent creatures, they really are, and it's sad

to see them suffering like that, because they did suffer.

If whales could've made a noise we wouldn't have been there.

If a whale could've screamed or shrieked,

you wouldn't have been able to bear it. You wouldn't.

International commercial whaling was suspended in 1986,

but Norway continues to hunt them commercially,

and Iceland and Japan award themselves whaling quotas

for scientific research.

Over a thousand whales are killed each year

and many species are still endangered.

The thought of Britain ever being a whaling nation makes me uncomfortable

but it was the pioneering spirit of the whaling expeditions that set out from ports like Dundee

that helped drive the exploration of the Antarctic.

We can still admire the resilience and resourcefulness of those men,

who made their living in one of the planet's most inhospitable environments.

We're off to the windswept shores of Fife.

DOG BARKS

This is a popular spot for sports of all kinds,

and it was the grassy dunes of St Andrews that inspired a game

that's become one of Scotland's most famous exports.

In 1457, James II of Scotland banned his subjects

from playing the newly-invented game of golf.

Obsession with the sport was distracting the Scots

from their war with the English.

Now that distraction has become a global industry.

St Andrews is proud of its title as the "home of golf".

It has six courses, and despite the Scottish weather,

golfers from around the world come to play here.

At £115 a round on the Old Course,

St Andrews is a big contributor to the £300 million a year that Scotland earns from golf.

The superintendent of the Old Course is Gordon Moir.

Do you know how it started?

Originally, Dutch and Flemish fishermen

arrived at the port here,

and played their way along the beach into town as they were coming in,

then the local shepherds sort of picked up and developed that game.

Where did they get the idea of hitting little white balls with long, thin sticks?

Probably pebbles with crooks.

The shepherds were using the crooks and hitting pebbles along the links.

And what does links mean?

Links is really the land between the sea and the arable inland land.

It's too infertile for farming, possibly a bit of sheep-grazing.

So golf couldn't have evolved on any other part of the landscape

other than this link area between the seashore and the farmland?

It's a coastal sport.

Initially, it started off as a coastal sport, then it developed

and everybody wanted to play, so courses were built inland.

I'm amazed we're allowed to walk around so casually on such hallowed turf, Gordon.

Well, all the golf courses in St Andrews technically belong to the people of the town

-so it's common land.

-So anybody can come and have a picnic here...

You can, and the townspeople actually have the right to hang their washing out to dry here,

which probably started from fishermen having the right

to lie out their nets and mend them.

-Do you come across many strings of laundry on the course?

-Fortunately not.

It's strange to think that a coastal wasteland

became the bunkers and roughs that golfers know all too well.

This corner of the Scots coast is now replicated the world over.

The landscape may be ideal for golf,

but during World War II it was also identified by Hitler

as a potential spot for attack.

The huge beaches meant it was perfect for landing troops,

armoured vehicles and planes.

An invasion here could have cut the country in half

and opened up a new Northern Front.

Winston Churchill's response inadvertently led to one of the greatest unsung inventions

of the Second World War.

With British forces fully occupied abroad, this stretch of coast

was put under the protection of exiled Polish forces.

The anti-tank blocks strung along these beaches are a visible reminder of the Polish efforts.

The invasion never materialised,

but as Mark Horton is investigating, the Poles put their time here to good use.

One of the Polish officers sent to defend the Fife coast

designed a machine that was to save countless lives

in war zones around the world.

It is one of the most important inventions of the Second World War -

the mine detector.

Lech Muszynski was part of the exiled Polish Army based in Fife.

He trained with the Polish mine-clearing sappers

using the original mine detector

developed on this very beach. It must be the famous mine detector!

-It is, yes.

-What a wonderful piece of kit!

Does this date from the Second World War?

Yes, that was one of the first units

produced by the British Army

for the Allied Armies.

Before these things were invented

-how did people look for mines?

-Well, they had steel spikes

and they had to walk along the beach or field

and spike the ground. And if you felt a hard object,

you had to feel with your fingers to see if it was a mine or something else.

Then you had to gently remove it, which was an extremely dangerous job.

It was in the Second World War that mines became a major weapon.

Huge numbers were buried around our coasts to prevent enemy landings.

But they were laid in haste and the poor records of their locations

made them dangerous to our own troops.

Polish officer Lieutenant Josef Stanislaw Kosacki

had already been toying with an idea for detecting mines back in Poland.

The British War Office asked him to develop his designs

during his posting in Fife.

Do you think after all these years it still actually works?

-Can we have a go?!

-Well, I've got a bunch of keys here. I'll go and hide them!

I shall look away!

-Have you hidden them, then?!

-Yes, I have.

-So what do I do?

-Just walk with it...

That's right.

Two or three inches above the sand.

Slightly slower sweeps.

Short steps forward. That's it.

-I can hear this continuous tone the whole time.

-Yes, yes.

If you come across a metal object, it'll change.

-TONE CHANGES

-It's sort of fluctuating like mad!

-It must be...

-That's right.

-It IS!

-Look, keys!

-Yes!

The mine detector came into its own during the North African campaign.

German troops had protected themselves with extensive minefields.

500 of Kosacki's mine detectors

were urgently deployed.

The Allied Forces punched through the enemy minefields

and their victory at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942

was one of the pivotal moments of the Second World War.

Far more than is generally realised,

the mine detector has played a great part in bringing the Axis out of Africa.

Rommel brilliantly employed the landmine and it was necessary to find a quick and safe detector.

What the anti-mine device achieved

can be judged by the fact that this is a typical day's haul.

Now hear what Sgt Miller has to say.

I've been fighting in the desert with General Wavell and with General Montgomery.

My job out there was to clear mines

and make gaps for our tanks to get through.

And every 40 men I used to take out of my section

I knew it was certain that I'd lose ten - either blown up or killed.

Now we have these new detectors,

we are pretty certain that we won't get many casualties.

So how do you rank the importance of this as an invention?

Well, as an invention, I rank it very, very highly.

This is the detector

that was used very extensively, everywhere, all over the world

to...to the last conflict in Iraq.

But nobody's ever HEARD of Lieutenant Kosacki!

He has been forgotten about completely.

He has,

partly due to the fact that this invention was top-secret

during the war

and after the war, people wanted peace.

They didn't want to talk about war inventions and things like that.

It was a great invention of the last century,

not appreciated enough.

It saved countless thousands and thousands and thousands of lives.

Josef Kosacki's invention was never patented

and he received no money for it.

His only reward for the ingenious mine detector

that helped clear our beaches and battlefields around the world was a letter

from King George VI and a Polish Silver Cross medal.

We're nearing the end of our journey down the industrious

east coast of Scotland.

It's fitting that our route south takes us across

one of the most enduring symbols of engineering achievement

in the UK.

No landmark sums up the pioneering spirit of the east coast of Scotland better than this -

the Forth rail bridge.

One of the greatest wonders of the industrial world,

the bridge endures as a symbol of what man can achieve when pushed beyond the normal limits.

The world's first major steel bridge is 360ft high

and 1½ miles long.

It took 5,000 men 7 years to build.

As many as 80 lives were lost during its construction.

Workers on the bridge could be as young as ten years old.

The youngest recorded death was a 13-year-old

who fell from a great height and died at his father's feet.

There are calls now for a memorial to be erected

to those who died, but for the time being, this bridge itself

is a testament to the engineers and to the workers who risked their lives to build it.

The bridge opened for business in March 1890.

115 years on,

it still carries up to 200 trains a day

and remains an integral part of the east coast mainline.

I love this bridge for the elegance of its engineering,

for the raw strength with which it strides across this enormous gulf.

It's a stunning memorial for the endeavour that we've seen along the whole of this coast.

What a way to end our tour of the enterprising east coast of Scotland!

We're heading for the English border and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

On the Northumbrian coast, we rebuild Britain's first house

5,000 years older than the Pyramids.

We explore the spiritual isle of Lindisfarne and meet one of the coast's great survivors.

Further south,

where coal was king, I investigate how ship-building has given way to ship-breaking.

Industry and isolation, a coast of two halves...

the North-East of England.

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