Three Billion Years in the Making British Isles: A Natural History

You know, we live in an amazing place.

These lumps of earth we call the British Isles.

If you travel north, south, east or west,

you discover it's a land of extremes.

We've got this ancient and chequered history...

We've got an extraordinary diversity of landscapes and wildlife.

And it's chock full of surprises. Just look at that!

Sights to take your breath away.

Like this one...

I wish I could tell you what it feels like to be here.

That is Ben Nevis.

At just under 4,500 feet,

it's the highest mountain in the British Isles.

And on a day like this, you see it in all its emotional majesty!

This is the very summit of the British Isles

and the coldest and snowiest place in Britain.

But if you head south, you'll discover another world -

more like the tropics!

These are the Isles of Scilly.

With temperatures like these and white sand and turquoise-blue sea,

I could just as easily be in the Bahamas as in good old Blighty!

And that's not all that's Caribbean about this place.

Coconuts are often washed up on these shores.

They float here from Central America

on those warm ocean currents that bathe the British Isles -

the Gulf Stream. That's why the Scillies are frost-free in winter

and scorching hot in summer.

So hot, in fact, that some palm trees will even grow here!

We're only 700 miles from top to toe, yet the British Isles

have natural riches far out of proportion to their size.

Maybe it's to do with a life spent working outside, tending the earth,

that makes me so passionate about the British Isles

and proud to call this place home.

On a fine day, even the most hardened cynic

would have to admit that

Britain is one of the most beautiful and diverse countries in the world.

But how did it come to be like this?

The answer is an amazing story of earth-shattering events

that have shaped the landscape and wildlife -

the countryside we see today.

It's a story that's relevant to us all

because it affects where we live,

where we work, and even what we grow in our gardens,

and it's a story that I'm about to unravel.

The reason our landscape is so wonderfully diverse

is because it's had such a long time to evolve.

And the countryside is littered with clues

that enable us to look into our past.

Just like an onion, you can peel back the layers of cities, fields,

woodlands and even mountains

to reveal the story of the British Isles.

A story that's been three billion years in the making.

There are parts of Britain that I know like the back of my hand.

The Yorkshire Dales, this bit of the Isle of Wight.

There'll be places that are familiar to you.

But they've changed so much over thousands of years,

time and time again,

that if you went back into the past, you simply wouldn't recognise them!

I'm going on a journey to discover those hidden faces of Britain,

and to find out what shaped the land we know and love.

It's every schoolboy's dream.

I'll be travelling the length and breadth of the country

by all manner of means!

Finding out what has created our coastline.

Discovering why we have such special wildlife.

Seeing how we've changed the countryside.

And revealing the Britain of ancient times,

long before people walked this green and pleasant land.

It's a story of amazing change,

a story so incredible that it often defies belief.

But the clues are all over the British Isles, under your feet

or staring you right in the face.

And that's what I'm looking for.

Today, the majority of us live in towns and cities up and down the country.

That's where I'll start peeling back the layers of Britain's history.

If that's far from how our coast was shaped and valleys were carved out,

remember, there are clues to the past everywhere -

including right down there.

Take gardens, for instance -

your garden, my garden, any garden you like.

They hold a clue to Britain's past and the best way to reveal it

is to cultivate the soil a bit and then sit back and watch.

This often happens, when you're digging in your garden.

Down comes a robin, perches on your fork handle.

This is a male and his missus

is in the hedge behind me, and he's on the lookout for food -

anything I might turn up.

Yeah, handsome chap, aren't you?

Now, this is all very charming, but it's actually telling us something

very significant about our past.

What did they do when there were no gardeners to turn over the soil?

Well, before we came along,

robins patiently followed nature's gardener - the wild boar.

These great furry pigs behave just like gardeners.

They're also constantly turning over the soil.

Over thousands of years, robins learnt to lurk close by

and wait for a juicy grub to be rooted out.

So, you see, robins were born to live not in gardens,

but where the wild boar roamed - the forest.

Your neighbourhood robin is actually a throwback to ancient Britain.

It's a living remnant of a time when the land was forested.

And I don't mean a few bits of woodland.

The wildwood was much bigger than that.

No matter where you live in Britain, a few thousand years ago,

there would have been no fields or houses, roads or hedges,

just mile after mile of trees.

They do say that the great forest was so dense

that a squirrel could go all the way from Lands End to John O'Groats without ever touching the ground.

And it wasn't just robins and boar in this forest.

What else was here?

To answer that, all you have to do is look in your A to Z!

Do you know anyone from Eversley?

How about Catmore? Your address could be a clue to what life was like in your neck of the wildwood.

Over the centuries, many villages

were named after animals that roamed with the wild boar in the forest.

Take this place - Wooley, in Yorkshire.

Pretty little village with a green and a handsome church,

but it wasn't always called Wooley. It used to be called Wolverley

and the locals shortened it because it was easier to say. Why Wolverley?

Well, you can work it out really, can't you?

Hundreds of years ago, this was a wolves' lair.

All over the British Isles, wolves were common in this great forest.

Not just in Wooley, but in Woo Dale, Woolpit and Wooferton Croft.

There were European brown bears

across the country too, as names like Barham or Beartown remind us.

Beverley and Beaversbrook are named after beavers

that once gnawed the trees of the wildwood.

There were even moose, although sadly, they seem to have missed out

having a town named after them!

8,000 years ago, the whole of the British Isles

was full of these wild animals.

Back then, we were the rare species.

There were only 4,500 of us

living here in Britain.

Amazing what a robin and a few village names

can reveal about our past!

Today, there are no bears or wolves in our forests,

but Britain's woodland is still some of the most important of its kind in the world -

not least because of these beauties!

Bluebells!

Bluebells are a favourite of mine and they, too, can tell us something about our past.

Although they were present in the wildwood, they were scarce -

kept in check by a dense tree canopy that blocked out the light.

But something changed. Bluebell numbers began to increase for one very simple reason -

we humans began to chop the forest down.

Open glades sprang up all across the country.

And these bright but sheltered spots were perfect for bluebells.

This is our British native bluebell.

Altogether more delicate and refined than its Spanish counterpart,

which always seems to me to have been blown up with a bicycle pump.

We take this beauty so much for granted and yet we have more than 50% of the world's population.

If it didn't thrive here, it'd probably be extinct by now.

What a loss that'd be!

Bluebells are just one of the treasures in our woods today.

If you pause for a few minutes

and sit quite still, you might spot a fallow deer.

They were brought to our shores by the Normans

and seeing them on a magical day like this can transport you back

a thousand years.

The felling of the great wildwood

was one of the most dramatic changes in the British landscape.

It created William Blake's "green and pleasant land",

the land that we think of as our typical countryside -

open fields, hedges and copses.

The first farms of our ancient ancestors

were very much like today's allotments -

small, cramped, and sometimes a bit disorganised!

I wonder what Britain's first farmers would think of

today's corn-filled prairies?

As the forests shrank, it was make or break for much of our wildlife.

Many plants and animals found the new open pastures very much to their liking.

Wild flowers thrived in uncultivated field boundaries

and lurking among them, the entrepreneurial harvest mouse!

This creature has been living in our cornfields

and taking just a small share of our crops ever since farming began.

As harvest mice increased in number,

so too did their archenemy - the barn owl!

It was in these new open fields

that it honed its hunting skills to perfection.

As people power created the countryside we see today,

the ancient forest and its wild animals eventually disappeared.

But what was Britain like before the great wildwood?

Well, there are more layers to peel back, if you know where to look.

And they reveal clues to a much bleaker period of Britain's past.

These clues can be found in the remote Highlands of Scotland.

This strange woodland is home to the capercaillie,

a rare and magnificent bird that likes to live in very cold places.

And it's not alone. The trees also love the chill.

It's February in the Cairngorms and this is the Caledonian pine forest.

There are three dominant species here - the birch, the gnarled and the knotty Scots pine,

and the rugged shrubby juniper - all of them capable of coping with intense cold.

The birch sheds its leaves and shuts down all systems for the winter.

The pine and the juniper adapt their leaves

into these fine needles that lose much less moisture than a big leaf,

and their sap contains the plant equivalent of antifreeze,

so they don't go rock solid in the winter.

This forest is so well adapted to the cold that today,

most of Britain is just too warm for it.

But before the great deciduous wildwood, it was this forest that covered Britain,

and trees like this that were growing where your garden is.

And that means that Britain must have been much colder than it is today.

How do we know for sure?

I can show you one simple but irrefutable piece of evidence.

And to find it, I need to head to one of the tiny islands off our coast.

'Cromarty, Forth, Tyne south-easterly veering southerly four or five,

'occasionally six, then becoming cyclonic, perhaps scale eight later.'

Sounds promising! You normally get to the Isle of May - that small island on the horizon there -

by a little boat.

But in this sort of autumn weather,

I think it'd be a bit bumpy, so I've got an alternative lined up.

Today, I'm going by air,

which will give me a bird's eye view of

why this island is so special.

The Isle of May is five miles out into the Firth of Forth.

It's only a small island - about a mile and a half long - and it's shaped like a wedge of cheese.

One side has got steep cliffs on it, whereas the other slopes gently down to beaches.

And it's these beaches that have one of the best wildlife spectacles in Britain. Can't wait!

It's this spectacle that shows just how cold it used to be.

I'm keeping low so that I don't frighten them all off.

Yes, I know I'm wearing red, but as long as I don't stand up

above the horizon and interrupt the skyline,

they shouldn't see me and start lolloping off into the sea.

There they are!

Grey seals. They're one of the rarest seals,

but Britain has 50% of the world's population.

At this time of year, they come onto the beaches to rear their young.

In hidden bays right across the British Isles,

grey seals have come ashore to give birth.

It's the pups I've come to see,

and the Isle of May is one of the best places to get close.

But have you noticed something odd about these youngsters?

Their colour!

I mean, most animals camouflage their young

so that they blend into the background.

But this little chap is almost snowy white

and he's laying on either green grass or black and grey rocks.

Even the most badly-sighted predator could pick him off.

Why?

Well, this island didn't always look like this!

These pups prove that once, Britain looked just like them -

snowy white.

Then, they were camouflaged to perfection.

They're a legacy of one of the most dramatic times in our history -

the Ice Age!

But what's that really like?

It's bitterly cold

and absolutely silent.

A featureless landscape,

a panorama of ice and snow.

The Ice Age was simply monumental.

Birmingham would have been a mile and a half beneath my feet,

which gives you some idea of the scale of this freeze-up.

It would have continued northwards to Ben Nevis and beyond,

out west across Wales and most of Ireland, and eastwards, right over East Anglia!

This was a vast frozen desert

where perhaps only the odd polar bear would have dared to roam.

Polar bears in Britain?

Oh, yes. There's no doubt about it.

Their skeletons have been found from Oxford to Ullapool.

So before the farms and fields,

before the wildwood and the ancient pine forest,

virtually the whole of Britain was like the North Pole.

But what effect did all this ice have on the countryside we know today?

Well, although ice like this may look pretty static, it's actually on the move.

And it's not always just creeping.

Sometimes, it slides along at over 30 metres a day!

It's through this unstoppable power

that ice has left its marks all over the British Isles.

Here in Killarney, in south-west Ireland,

just as in my native Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District

or the uplands of Scotland and Wales,

the landscape has been entirely sculpted by ice.

You can just imagine a wall of it, bulldozing its way through here.

This is a classic glacial valley, broad, steep-sided

and the surprising thing is that that ice only receded as recently as 15,000 years ago.

The glacial bulldozers that re-shaped the entire British Isles

wiped the country clean of life.

But on the plus side,

they left behind a dramatic and beautiful landscape.

From craggy and perilous mountain ridges

to the lakes that inspired Wordsworth,

all were carved out by ice and all are evidence of the big freeze.

But the ice didn't last.

Britain lay entombed within it for thousands of years.

But then, quite suddenly, things began to change.

Temperatures rose from being like the Arctic

to more like today's in just 50 years!

And the entire ice sheet slowly turned to slush.

From gentle, drippy beginnings,

it wasn't long before huge torrents of water poured across our landscape.

And all this water eventually reached the sea.

Today, because of global warming,

we're worried that our seas may rise by a foot or two.

But when the ice sheet melted,

the sea rose not by three feet, but by 300 feet.

The great melt put the isles into British Isles

and, in so doing, it defined our national character.

We built an empire because we're a nation of seafarers,

not always in boats like this.

And yet, 8,000 years ago, we weren't an island at all.

I wouldn't have needed a boat. I could've walked to France from here!

And if you find that hard to believe, you can still find signs of that ancient French connection.

This is Bray, in County Wicklow, on the east coast of Ireland.

Just wait for the tide to go out, and something strange appears.

Trees - fossilised trees.

But they've not been washed up here by a storm.

They're lying precisely where they once grew 8,000 years ago.

And there are drowned forests like these off Dorset,

Wales and the Isle of Wight.

That's because back then,

the Irish Sea, the North Sea, the English Channel -

all of them were dry land.

But when the great melt came and the seas rose by 300 feet,

we were cut off from mainland Europe for good.

The British Isles were born.

Even in a boat like this,

it would take months to explore every nook and cranny of coastline.

Mind you, it would be good fun trying!

Our coastline has always inspired us and drawn us to it.

What's remarkable is that we've got so much of it!

If you could stretch it out in a line, it would reach

all the way to Australia.

11,000 miles of cliffs,

coves, bays and beaches.

The rising seas created not just mainland Britain and Ireland,

but thousands of other islands.

All told, the British Isles contain 6,289 of them!

Many of these islands were isolated so suddenly by the rising seas

that no animals reached them,

unless they could fly!

Some became massive bird cities, and this is one of them.

Bass Rock - absolutely crammed full of gannets.

Every year, more and more gannets come to this island to breed.

Today, there are over 100,000 of them,

packed onto one cramped lump of rock!

Watching them dive into the sea at over 60 miles an hour

leaves you as breathless as the birds.

There are dozens of these island sanctuaries around our coast

and one of my favourites is Skomer, off the southwest corner of Wales.

Puffins...

aren't they great? Smaller than most people think...

about the size of a pigeon, but each one standing guard over

its rabbit hole. It might be eight or nine feet long,

but at the end of it - a single chick, known as a puffling.

What a treat. I think I deserve some refreshment now!

Mmm! Oh, just what the doctor ordered - Scotch whisky.

And just the sort of thing to set you musing on old times...

very old times.

Over the last 12,000 years, Britain has seen some amazing changes

due to ice, rising seas and us.

But if you delve back into really ancient times,

then it all boils down to rock...

even the contents of this glass.

It's that important.

Now, this bar has behind it

over 250 different Scotch whiskies...

I bet you wish you were here.

..and they all taste different,

that's the amazing thing. Now, let's just take... Which one?

This one.

Quite dark in colour.

And when you smell it, what do you get?

Honestly, you get... Oh, gosh!

Remember your grandma's Christmas cake, full of that whisky she said she never drank?

Oh, it's really rich and fruity.

It's...deep,

and this comes from sandstone with peat overlying it,

and once you know that, you can almost smell the heather.

And it's very smooth, very smooth and very aromatic.

Sandstone. Now, then...

This one here...

This one comes through granite.

Oh, now, look at that.

Colour - midway between the two.

Nose...

astringent, not heavy...

..and much less organic on the palate.

Phew! And quite fumy.

Sandstone, granite, what else have we got? Limestone...

Oh, clean. We're almost talking chalk stream here.

And this one?

Fiery.

If you lit a match now, I'd probably do a dragon impersonation,

which is very fitting because this water, before it makes the whisky,

percolates through volcanic rock.

It really isn't imagined.

You really can taste it from all of them, proving the point that it's the water that makes the whisky,

which makes it different. If it's percolated through different rock,

picked up different kinds of minerals, different kinds of ions,

they're all there in that bottle.

It's all down to Britain's foundations.

But there must be some more different ones...

Now, many countries are impoverished when it comes to rocks.

Take Holland. Cheeses? Gazillions of 'em!

Rocks? You can fit 'em all in this box.

Poor Holland.

But Britain... Ah-ha-ha! Just you wait!

Remember that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they put the box in the middle of that warehouse

and they pull out wide and it's absolutely massive? This is it!

MUSIC: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK THEME TUNE

If you wanted proof that Britain "rocks", it's right here.

Over ten million samples,

weighing in excess of 4,000 tonnes!

Doesn't it make you proud? These are your roots here!

I wonder where Ilkley is...

"Swindon".

Ilkley - that's my roots.

"Dallow Road...North Grimstead...

"Cornish Hush". Oh, what a lovely name!

"Roselle Wood, Cardigan".

But to find Ilkley,

I'm going to need a bit of help!

Up there.

Yes! Ilkley!

Look at that!

Millstone grit that made the house that I grew up in.

And somewhere here, in one of these boxes, will be the stone that your house is made of.

You see, there's much more to rock than flavouring whisky!

Ultimately, our landscape

is governed by the rocks beneath its surface.

More than the forests that covered Britain, the ice that scoured it and the meltwater that washed over it,

it's rocks that are at Britain's heart.

The Millstone grit of Ilkley defines its character,

not just the buildings, but even what grows here.

It makes the moors drain so poorly

that it's very boggy - a tough place to live.

But there's one plant that absolutely loves it.

This - sphagnum moss.

Its cells are tremendously water absorbent

and they turn this area into one gigantic sponge.

Yet just a few miles away, well-drained limestone dominates,

so there are no bog plants here.

Just like your garden, it's the bedrock

that dictates the fertility, drainage and pH of the soil.

What's more, every rock

has its own tale to tell of how it came to be there.

And with a bit of detective work,

it can take you back not thousands, but millions of years.

This is the River Weaver, in rural Cheshire,

and here, a typical riverbank flora of red clover and hogweed,

nettle and thistle, plantain and hemp agrimony.

But if I wander a little bit further on, it all changes.

Gone are those tall and luscious wild flowers, native of rich soils,

and in their place, scentless mayweed, sea aster,

with those soft pink daisy flowers,

and grasses that you'd normally find at the coast.

But here, we're fully 30 miles from the nearest sand dune. So what's going on?

I'll show you!

You might think I'm driving around Cheshire at night,

but you'd only be partly right.

I am driving around Cheshire, but 700ft underground.

Right underneath those plants!

This is where it's at.

I need a special piece of kit.

This should do.

All I need to remember is what order to press the buttons.

I think that should be enough.

Look at that!

Salt!

Essential on your fish and chips

and vital for keeping our roads free of ice right through the winter.

But what's more, it's sea salt...

30 miles inland.

Those seaside plants up top are here because of the salt in the soil.

And all this salt can mean only one thing -

this place was once an ocean.

300 million years ago, Britain was underwater!

We were flooded by the Zechstein Sea,

which was as rich in salt as the Dead Sea, and it covered Europe.

This is what nearly the whole of Britain would have looked like -

a vast, shallow sea, which only our hilltops would have poked through.

Slowly, but surely, the sea dried up,

leaving millions of tonnes of salt behind.

So just a small, out-of-place, salt-loving sea aster

can tell you what Britain was like 300 million years ago!

Our rocks not only create landscapes,

but they've also affected our history.

And one rock in particular is responsible for altering

the face of modern Britain.

It's the reason we have our canals and our railways.

The Empire we once had was built upon it.

Today, many of our industries still depend on it

and several of our major cities are only where they are because of it!

What is this super rock?

Coal!

At the height of production, 200 million tonnes of coal

were extracted from the earth every year in Britain.

It was because we had so much coal that we became a world leader,

something we're still living off today.

But how come we had so much in the first place?

It's a remnant of a time when Britain looked like this...

..a massive tropical rainforest.

320 million years ago,

virtually the whole of the British Isles - from Aberdeen to Zennor -

was covered in tree ferns and ancient palms.

Most of today's trees hadn't even evolved!

And as the forest died, it decayed...

eventually being compressed into coal.

In every town and every city,

however obliterated the landscape might seem to have become,

there are still clues to the making of the British Isles.

Often, they're hard to spot, but some of the most dramatic

are simply staring us in the face.

Take Edinburgh, for instance.

These are the Princes Street Gardens

and they're a beautiful place for locals to sit on sunny days,

but I'm not here to look at the flowers, beautiful as they are,

I'm here because the gardens offer the best possible view of that...

Edinburgh Castle.

But what is this strange mound that the castle sits on...

..and the entire City of Edinburgh surrounds?

I'll show you.

340 million years ago, where the drains now run,

there would have been not water...

..but molten rock...

lava!

The castle perches on the remains of a mighty volcano!

It was a volcano the size of Mount Etna.

We can only imagine what an eruption would've looked like!

And Edinburgh wasn't alone.

Throughout our history, volcanoes have erupted

all over the British Isles, from Skye to South Wales.

We really were a land of fire.

Every square inch of the British Isles has so many stories to tell

simply because this country of ours has seen so many changes.

From Gravesend to Gateshead, we've been cloaked in tropical rainforest.

From St Austell to St Paul's, we've been flooded by deep oceans.

We've been a vast and arid desert.

As if that were not extreme enough,

we've endured phases when we looked more like the African savannah,

complete with lions and hippos.

And just like a wise, old relative,

the British Isles will recount the stories of its chequered past

to anyone curious enough to ask.

Our landscape has had 3,000 million years to evolve

and change and change again.

Every one of these changes

has left its mark on the countryside we call home,

and created a land so diverse and so rich

that anyone with an eye for beauty

and an ear for a good story will find spellbinding.

Wherever you live, there are clues to the making of the British Isles

right on your doorstep,

all you have to do is get out there and look.