Crinan and Caledonian Canals Coast

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WHISTLE SOUNDS

This is the Vic 32,

the last surviving coal-fired steam-powered Clyde puffer.

Few of the men who sailed these boats westward remain.

Stewart Pearson is one of them. He was a deck hand on the puffers.

What was the life like for you? How were the crew with you?

We were a cheery lot. The skipper had a great sense of humour,

the mate was a bit of a character.

But all these guys were sort of rough diamonds.

You kind of get the impression that the skippers were a law unto themselves, and risk-takers.

Yes, they were, they did their own thing. When they were sailing on these, between these islands,

they did it by sort of pilotage, they didn't have charts, as such.

They had their sturdy boats, but the puffer crews relied on a short cut

to the isles, a seaway carved through the land - the Crinan Canal.

For traders heading out from Glasgow,

the construction of the Crinan Canal

meant they could cut through a fearsome obstacle

to the western seaboard.

Before the canal's coast-to-coast route,

boats had to navigate round the Mull of Kintyre,

a 240-mile trek through some treacherous waters.

So coming through here by contrast is just a walk in the park, I suppose?

Och, absolutely.

This is great, that's what the famous song says,

"The Crinan Canal for me, don't want the wild rolling sea."

# The Crinan Canal for me

# I don't like the wild raging sea

# The big falling breakers Would give me the shakers

# The Crinan Canal for me It's the Crinan Canal... #

The Crinan Canal starts life running parallel to the coast before cutting inland.

It sliced journey times to the west coast from one-and-a-half days to just a few hours.

It might have started as an industrial trade way,

but it's now become known as Britain's most beautiful short cut.

# There's no shark or whale That would make you turn pale

# Or shiver and shake At the knee... #

Even so, it's not exactly plain sailing.

Furthest away one, please, yeah.

There are 15 locks to get through.

It's all hands on deck,

and off deck,

and back on deck, again and again.

WHISTLE TOOTS

But it's a magical journey.

All too soon you reach the last lock on the Crinan Canal.

Once you're through that,

there's nothing between you and the open sea of Scotland's west coast.

Navigating these waters by boat can be fraught with dangers.

To sail from the west coast to the east coast

means braving the storm-battered northern coastline of Scotland,

a treacherous stretch of water barring the passage to the North Sea.

So what if there were a short cut for ships

right through the centre of Scotland?

Well, here is that short cut -

the Caledonian Canal.

Started in 1803, it was one of Britain's biggest, boldest building projects.

A mighty waterway running for 62 miles from the Atlantic

to the North Sea through the mountainous heart of the Highlands.

And we're embarking on a journey along it.

It starts with a tight squeeze,

which looks a little too small for today's ocean-going cruise ships.

How was this waterway built, and why was it built?

Nick is on the trail of an epic tale.

Travelling along this canal you start to get a sense of the scale -

it was an extraordinary undertaking.

The plans were drawn up just over 200 years ago by Thomas Telford.

Telford's design for this waterway cleverly combined bold engineering

with Scotland's spectacular landscape.

Just look at this incredible view -

probably the most stupendous valley in the British Isles...

the Great Glen.

Right, here's a map of northern Scotland.

Glasgow is down here, and here is the Great Glen slashing across Scotland

from one side to the other, from the Atlantic here to the North Sea here.

In the bed of the Great Glen are three freshwater lochs, Loch Lochy,

Loch Oich and the largest of them, Loch Ness.

What Telford wanted to do - and here is his master plan - is link them all up by canals.

Here's Loch Lochy, here's Loch Oich and here's Loch Ness,

so he had to create canals

here, here, here

and here - four of them.

If he could do that he could create a waterway, which linked the North Sea with the Atlantic.

This short cut was planned to slash journey times and protect shipping

from storms at sea, but there was another even greater prize at stake.

Some 200 years ago the Highlands were in crisis.

For years landowners had been throwing tenants off their land to

make way for sheep farming, a period known as the Highland Clearances.

People were leaving in their droves, their abandoned homes swallowed by the heather.

There was a village here once, now it's gone back to nature.

So many people were emigrating that the Government became anxious that the Highlands would soon be empty -

people needed jobs as an incentive to stay.

Bright idea - how about getting them digging?

The Government put dispossessed Highlanders to work digging the Caledonian Canal.

In the days before heavy machinery, carving this monster waterway

would keep thousands busy with backbreaking work.

The state poured vast sums of money into the enterprise.

Here was a job creation scheme on a massive scale.

I'm meeting historian Anthony Burton, who knows what was expected of the novice navvies.

-Hello.

-Hello.

This is a beautiful spot. I've seen some of the canal now, this is like

the Panama Canal, this is something that changed British geography.

Absolutely, this was THE civil engineering triumph

of the age and it's all down to this, the spade.

This was done by blokes, and it was blokes from the Highlands.

The Highland Clearances, the Highlands were desperately poor -

in one day, 200 Highlanders appeared en masse having walked all the way

-from Skye to come and work on this canal.

-They were desperate for work.

They were desperate for work but they had to reach the standard of the professional navvy

and the professional navvy, they reckoned, could shift 12 cubic yards a day.

Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,

ten, 11, 12.

Right, OK, so come on back. Now if you're an experienced navvy,

you're going to be digging a trench roughly waist-deep from here to there.

-Every day.

-Every single day, do you want to have a go to see how much hard work's involved?

-All right, all right.

-Be my guest, carry on.

I suppose this is probably what they did, just take the turf off first.

Yes, that's right.

So this soft Londoner

-is getting a bit knackered already.

-I'm not surprised.

You're getting into the rough stuff now, getting some stones down there.

-One more clod and...

-It's going to get harder and harder as you go down.

I'm just trying to imagine, given that I'm soaked in sweat and my back's aching,

what it meant to the people who were obliged to dig it by hand.

What would you say, if you met one of them now, if you could flip back through time?

Is this better than starving? Because that was the other option.

Or would you rather get on a ship and go to Canada?

I'd keep digging, I think.

-I think I would too.

-Even though it's absolutely back-breaking.

-But I've done enough...

-I'm sure you have!

..to know how incredibly tough they must have been to pull it off.

They dug and they dug for 19 years along a total of 22 miles,

they dug this channel, 15-feet deep.

Little by little, the canal breathed life back into the Highland economy,

but the navvies couldn't have achieved this gigantic task without some help from nature -

a series of freshwater lochs along the length of the Great Glen.

Connecting these natural waterways was the key to completing the Caledonian Canal.

On their route was the mightiest loch of them all, Scotland's most famous...

Loch Ness.

Deep enough to hold the fresh water from every lake in England and Wales put together.

So enormous, it's said, that every human on planet Earth could fit beneath its surface...

three times over!

Adrian Shine originally came to these waters to hunt the Loch Ness monster.

What he did find was a fascinating insight into the boats

that once used this waterway as part of the Caledonian Canal's coast-to-coast short cut.

-This is rather exciting.

-It is, isn't it?

Does it matter which way into the water it goes?

No, no, just...just pop it in.

This is the remote camera technology Adrian used to explore the deep.

-Now, lower away, lower away.

-Watching the screen,

that's it, watching the screen.

Skimming across the floor of the loch with his underwater camera in 2002,

Adrian stumbled across something that, for me, is an intriguing clue

to the fate of the Caledonian Canal.

You know, suddenly this wall of wood came up in front of us,

there was the name - Pansy, and the Banff registration number.

Fascinating, because often with wrecks

you have trouble identifying them.

Well, we didn't have any trouble with this.

The registration tells us that Pansy wasn't a grand trading ship,

she was a sail-powered fishing boat much like this one.

The Pansy foundered in Loch Ness whilst using the Caledonian Canal

to reach new fishing grounds.

Fishing boats found the canal useful but finding the wreck of a large

merchant ship in Loch Ness is about as likely as spotting the monster.

Within a few years of the Caledonian Canal's completion in 1822

many merchant vessels had grown too big to use this coast-to-coast short cut.

It never became the mighty trade route that was planned.

If that wasn't bad enough the project had gone three times over budget.

Many thought it was a white elephant, a colossal waste of public money,

but approaching the end of the canal here at Inverness,

I can't help feeling that its success shouldn't be measured in pounds and pence.

Yes! This is the very last lock on the Caledonian Canal,

so that's salt water, that's the Moray Firth, and out there is the North Sea.

You know, this isn't just a great waterway, it's a great survivor.

Over the years, many people have come up with many reasons to close it down,

but here's one to keep it open - it's an awesome achievement.