Burghead to Catterline Coast

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This has all the hallmarks of a 200-year-old new town.

Look at this, rows of little cottages all built at the same time.

These streets are the work

of town planners from the Georgian era.

And at the business-end of town, a rather splendid harbour.

Starting in 1805, the town and harbour were built to land herring,

part of improving life for the Highlanders.

But it's not all quite as it appears.

From another point of view, this unique little new town

was an unfortunate piece of Georgian vandalism.

From up here you can see the grid plan of the town.

At the end of the houses there's a grassy area with massive earthworks,

remains of something much older, built by the Picts.

The Picts were a mysterious tribe

living in this part of Scotland some 2,000 years ago.

This is one of their most important sites,

but it's largely been flattened by the fishing port.

To get an idea of the scale of the Pictish fort that was here,

I've joined archaeologist Fraser Hunter.

So where exactly are we in this fort?

Well, this is a mid-18th century map of the site, here's the..

There's two halves to the site, an upper and lower half,

and we're standing there.

On this ridge up the middle.

This is one of the huge stone-built ramparts

that defined the upper part of the site.

These massive banks of earth

are all that remain of the Picts' 1,500-year-old fort.

And then looking across, where are all these?

Well, underneath those houses, sadly.

-So it's all gone.

-That whole part is now covered over by the village.

No wonder the Picts remain such a mystery.

They ruled large parts of Scotland for centuries,

but this seat of Pictish power was destroyed to build a fishing port.

The new town wiped out precious clues to the culture of the Picts,

but there are some tantalising glimpses of what was lost.

-See up here, the two pentangles?

-Oh, yes, look there and there!

Those are things you get, again,

on a number of pieces of Pictish sculpture.

If we go on in, gosh, it's enormous!

-It's fantastic, isn't it?

-Absolutely massive.

'Deeper into the cave, a more grisly discovery in the 1920s -

'piles of human bones.'

The evidence we have indicates a whole range of odd things going on,

back into deep pre-history,

back into the late Bronze Age and Iron Age. so 3,000/2,000 years ago

this cave is being used for special purposes.

Do you want to come back outside and I'll show you some stuff?

'Back in daylight, Fraser reveals the bones that were buried for so long.'

We have some of the bones from the excavations.

This is human neck vertebrae.

Look! It's been chopped.

-And you think that one's been chopped.

-Ooh!

Whoever owned that met a very nasty fate.

It's a beheading, somebody's been decapitated,

and most of the vertebrae surviving from the site show that,

and also a range of people.

Those two are both adult, but this one is a juvenile.

Juvenile. It's a grisly place.

Yeah, a powerful place, a significant place.

Perhaps this cave is where the Burghead Picts

butchered their enemies, and even their enemies' children.

The culture of the Picts remains an enigma.

Their fort at Burghead was flattened,

but the few precious artefacts that survive have a real power.

Wow!

-Oh, fantastic.

-Oh, isn't that amazing?!

-Absolutely fantastic.

-One of the Burghead bulls.

Most of them are found long after

they've been knocked out of their original settings,

and many of them, as you can see here,

have also been damaged and re-used as building stones.

'It's thought that up to 30 of these bull stones

'were set into the walls of the fort, but only six have survived.'

It's almost a totem or a symbol of this site and its inhabitants.

The bull stones are a precious connection

with the once powerful Picts,

but who knows how many more of their treasures are buried

among the houses of Burghead?

We're working out way down Scotland's eastern shoreline.

Endless beaches stretch down the shore,

waiting to be explored.

A long, straight run of sand

is interrupted by the oil city of Aberdeen.

But we're headed a few miles beyond,

to the little fishing port of Stonehaven.

On the eve of every New Year,

the villagers spend the day preparing for the big night ahead.

Susan Leiper's one of them.

Well, tonight in Stonehaven it's Hogmanay,

it's the night where we swing our fire balls in the high street.

This will be my tenth year of being a fire-ball swinger,

and I absolutely love it.

So this is what a fireball looks like when it's been made up

and before it gets lit.

In this there's old pairs of jeans, cardboard.

There's bits of newspaper and briquettes.

This one's about ten pounds in weight, which is heavy enough.

So at 12 o'clock, the piper starts to march down the road,

and the first fire-ball swinger is off.

That's the point of no return, really.

This is where it all starts to kick in.

I'm really, really nervous. Every year I'm like this at this point.

-ALL:

-Five, four, three, two, one...

Yeah! Whoo-hoo!

Yay! Whoo-hoo!

I'm shattered! I've got no energy left!

And you can feel the atmosphere's absolutely electric,

and I just love it, I absolutely love it.

Yeah! Whoo-hoo!

Stonehaven may sparkle with fire briefly at the start of each year,

but this coast is capable of spectacular displays at any time.

The grey North Sea is famous for its black moods,

when ferocious storms batter this shore.

And sometimes they feel the fury in the tiny village of Catterline.

A little line of houses perches high on the hillside

out of the sea's reach,

but Catterline's most celebrated resident

didn't shelter from the storms.

She embraced the raging water.

Alice is following in the footsteps of a famous artist.

I've got a photo here of a lone painter

working intensely on the shore.

You can see her facing the sea, which is boiling around the rocks,

and she's wearing her oilskins with paint pots around her feet

and some brushes over here.

And this is a very big canvas, which she must be having to stabilise

against the wind, and there's her motorbike propped up.

Now, the artist is Joan Eardley,

and the photograph was taken of her just here at Catterline.

Joan Eardley was one of Britain's most important modern artists,

and she had a long love affair with the shore at Catterline.

This little cottage was her studio in the 1950s and '60s.

Locals call it the Watchie.

The Watchie was Joan's vantage point on the sea

that so captured her heart.

To explore the attraction, I'm off to meet a young artist

who's also fallen under Catterline's subtle spell.

Anna King continues the tradition Joan Eardley started -

women artists coming here to paint.

-Hello, Anna.

-Hi.

-How's it going?

-Good, thanks.

-Are you feeling inspired?

-That's lovely, actually.

-Yeah.

I've got this lovely photo here of Joan facing out to sea

and painting this really stormy sea.

I think she painted everything around Catterline.

I think she kind of got to know every inch of the village

and the sea and everything.

In fact, if you want to have a look at some paintings,

you can see that's the south row of cottages there.

That's lovely. That's the row up on the top of the hill, isn't it?

A bit of a different day from today, with snow on the ground!

It seems like quite a wild place,

it seems that Jane really liked that.

These paintings, that one of the sea there...

It's the wildness of it.

The sea there is actually coming over this jetty, isn't it?

So really crashing through.

So was it Joan herself that first drew you to Catterline?

I like her paintings and I'd heard of her,

but it was more the opportunity of getting to stay in the Watchie,

the wee cottage up there.

There's nothing to do except paint and make art,

so it's pretty good for getting work done.

The Watchie works for many artists.

The potential of this special place

was first spotted by Joan Eardley in the 1950s.

There's something about this space

that inspires canvas after canvas,

and it's not hard to see why.

This is a view that Joan Eardley would have been very familiar with,

and I've got a recording of her voice here

that I'm going to listen to.

'When I'm painting in...in the north-east,

'I hardly ever move out of the village.

'I hardly ever move from one spot.

'I do feel that the more you know something,

'the more you can get out of it. That is the north-east.

'There's just vast waste and vast seas, vast areas of cliff.

'Well, you've just got to paint it.'

Joan Eardley painted the violent seascapes of Catterline

time and again - a love affair that became an obsession.

She asked her friends in this little coastal village

to watch for approaching storms, so they could call her in Glasgow,

and she could jump on her motorbike, dashing to the coast,

ready to paint straightaway.

But she was racing against time.

In 1963, Joan put on an exhibition of her work in London,

and it was critically acclaimed,

but tragically, just as her fame was blossoming, she herself was dying.

She'd been diagnosed with breast cancer earlier that year,

and by August she was dead.

She was only 42 years old.

Joan Eardley was cremated

and her ashes were scattered here at Catterline,

but she left us a precious gift.

Not only do her pictures survive,

the Watchie, the studio Joan loved,

is here for artists to discover for themselves

what it was about Catterline that so captivated Joan.

For me, it's the extraordinary emptiness that's so striking.

Maybe that's the inspiration Joan Eardley found here -

the space to be alone with the elements.