Episode 4 Landward

and it's home to Scotland's newest and largest solar-energy farm.

I'm in one of the remotest places in mainland Scotland.

There's barely a road here and you need a boat to get to the pub.

Welcome to Knoydart.

Hello and a very warm welcome to Landward.

This week, I'm on the Knoydart Peninsula and, in a moment,

I'll be investigating a controversy that's been raging for months.

First, here's what else is coming up on the programme.

We head to the hills for one of nature's most amazing spectacles...

I can never tire of watching black grouse at the lek.

..Euan is on the hunt for the sun...

There must be sunnier places to build a solar station.

It's not all about direct sun, it's about sunlight.

..and Sarah discovers the pleasures to be had in a hut.

All that picture-book stuff that everybody looks

back on, their idyllic childhood, it happens here.

But, first, I'm on the Knoydart Peninsula,

one of Scotland's great wildernesses, to investigate

the controversy raging over one of our most majestic animals.

Knoydart is such a beautiful, peaceful and tranquil place

but there is an argument rumbling between conservationists and

shooting estates, which is causing deep divisions within the community.

And it's posing wider questions about the best way to manage

deer numbers across Scotland.

At the centre of the controversy is

the Li and Coire Dhorrcail Woodland.

Only accessible by boat, I'm being taken there by Lester Standen,

who manages the land for the owner, the John Muir Trust.

It's the trust's intention to bring the woodland back to life

after decades of deforestation and overgrazing.

Not that you can see much today in this spring snowfall.

The John Muir Trust want to turn this land into a thriving

piece of the Caledonian Forest.

The problem is, deer eat young trees

and their numbers have to be controlled.

Last year, the trust shot 86 stags and left them

on the hill to rot where they fell

and this infuriated neighbouring sporting estates.

The estates saw the cull as a waste

and would rather the deer were used for stalking or other

forms of tourism that would bring money into the area.

It's an argument that has run and run

since emotive headlines began appearing in the press.

Regardless, Lester still has to deal with the damage

to the woodland he has to protect.

This young tree has been thrashed about and they've pulled it

and broken it off.

A lot of the trees are actually doing quite well here

because we're actually controlling the deer numbers,

so we can live with that level of damage but we've only been

doing the culling here since 2008.

If you went back to 2008, none of these seedlings would be here

because every time a seedling comes up...

you get two or three inches of growth

and then the tops being nipped off.

The trust maintain that leaving the carcasses on the hill

encourages a variety of other animals, such as golden eagles

and badgers, as well as providing essential nutrients for the soil.

But there are also practical reasons for leaving the deer on the hill.

We always leave some carcasses

and it depends on how hard they are to extract.

Some of them you just can't get them out because of where they're shot.

They're away up on the hills

and it takes a hell of a long time to get up there, get the deer culled

and then it is impossible to get them out from that area.

SNH did a helicopter survey of this area

and found 14 stags yet you culled 86 last summer. Isn't that excessive?

It's not excessive in the whole area.

I mean, it might sound excessive in terms of the 14

they counted but then it depends what day they count.

They can come and count 14 on this area one day

and the next day they might come in

and find there's 300 here or something.

Come on, come on.

One of those who objected to the trust's control methods is

fellow Knoydart landowner

and chair of the Knoydart Deer Management group, Sir Patrick Grant.

I'm joining him as he feeds wild deer.

We feed the stags in the winter time

because they are the main product.

This is a farming exercise.

So we don't want them dying unnecessarily in winter

and we don't want them wandering onto crofts or into neighbouring

forestry or other areas where they shouldn't be.

The John Muir Trust killed 86 stags and left them on the hill.

What's your opinion about the way they went about that?

First of all, it was a shocking waste of a community resource.

The herd is a community resource.

I estimate that an individual stag, if you look at the downstream

tourist-value chain, it's between ?1,000 and ?2,000 to the local area.

The main driver of the local economy here is the deer-stalking industry.

What do you want the John Muir Trust to do, then?

I would like them to stop fighting with local communities

and work with us.

They can achieve their objectives by doing that.

It's perfectly possible to achieve their laudable objectives.

Nobody is objecting to conservation, we just need to work together.

The John Muir Trust say they do consult with the community and other

groups but there are some landowners who refuse to speak to them.

Scotland's wild deer belong to no-one.

Landowners - be they individuals, public bodies or charities -

work together to look after them and control numbers.

This is largely a voluntary arrangement

and when there are disagreements, they can be difficult to resolve.

What's happened here on Knoydart, where the two sides are poles apart,

have led some to question whether the voluntary set-up is

actually working and whether new legal powers need to be introduced.

You can give us your thoughts by heading to our Facebook page

or e-mail...

And, later in the programme, we'll be on

the Mar Lodge Estate in Aberdeenshire with their year-round

ecologist to see what happens at the black grouse lek.

Meanwhile, Sarah is heading into the hills herself.

With the help of some schoolchildren, she's about

to uncover what remains of a piece of farming life from a bygone age.

Today, with the spring sunshine on my back, I'm visiting

the Shieling Project near Beauly where ancient farming practices

are being brought back to life for the first time in generations.

I've come to meet the man behind the project and find out why

these lost traditions are still so relevant today.

Sam? Hello.

Hi, good morning. Sarah. How are you doing? Good, thanks.

Sam Harrison is the director of the Shieling Project.

The shieling is a really beautiful cultural system that was

based in the Highlands,

where people would.... This time of year, they would gather

everything up. Summer? Summertime, yeah, start of summer

and they would take all their livestock and walk up to

the hill and live up there in little bothies for the summer.

So why are we here?

Well, this is the kind of winter town, so this is where everybody

would have been living and

the cereal crops would have been growing.

Can I have a look around the site? Absolutely. Come with me.

Now, as a kid, I always remember a shieling as somewhere

in the Cairngorms I was taken for, like, a hot chocolate and a biscuit.

I mean, how old are they? Well, they're really old.

We haven't got a good date about how far they go back

but they're at least medieval.

This is a reconstruction of what they think shieling huts

would have looked like from the Highland Folk Museum.

Pretty basic. Very basic.

It's basically just a shelter for you to sleep in.

No windows, pretty much no doors. And everything else you're doing

outside. Despite the Scottish weather. Absolutely.

Right, OK, it's part of my job remit to get my hands dirty,

so can I do something? Absolutely. It's a really practical project,

so come over here and we'll get you started. Right, OK.

Right, what are we going to do?

So we're going to make a new peat-spade handle today.

Fantastic. So this is a piece of local ash. Any tips?

Yup, so we just want to be careful.

We've got a sharp knife there but just shave gently.

Keep it nice and smooth.

Keep it nice and smooth, just shaving off little bits.

You can't put it back on again once you've taken it off.

Yeah, so just explain a little bit about your Shieling Project.

So the Shieling Project is about traditional skills,

about children coming to learn the history of what

they would have been doing 300 years ago.

But it's also about what that means now.

So where they get their food from, going and living in the hills

and things like traditional building and sustainability as well.

How they relate to and understand their landscape around them.

In today's society and our modern world, where we're

so worried about letting kids do anything,

what do they get out of it when they come?

They have a great time, you know.

They might not know what they're getting into at the start

but this is a great example of what we might do.

So they might come and learn about the old peat spades

and they might actually take part in making one

and then they'd go up to the hill to the old peat moss,

cut peats and then another school might bring them down and put them

on the fire and make a cup of tea with them.

Do you think it's still relevant, then? Absolutely, yes.

It's those kinds of experiences that are going to stick with the kids

when they grow up and make their choices about

how they live in the future. So it's really relevant.

OK, so I just want to tell you a bit about the shieling that

we're going to go and find.

'Sam and I are taking these schoolchildren

'from the Black Isle two miles up the hill.

'The same journey their ancestors last made 150 years ago.'

It obviously beats the classroom

because these guys are powering on ahead.

He's setting quite a good pace, isn't he?

They're doing fantastically well.

Whoohoo! Yeah! We're here!

We made it!

I just wanted to say a really big "well done"

and we need to put our archaeology hats on.

Put your archaeology hat on.

We need to start looking around for some evidence of shieling life.

There's not much left of it.

'While Sam and the kids do that, I catch up with teacher Kirst Edgar.'

Kirst, the kids seem completely immersed in what Sam's saying.

How do you think they've enjoyed this experience today?

I think they've had a whale of a time.

They're just really enjoying getting out

and about and finding out things from real people,

not just the teacher telling them about things in the classroom.

Would you subscribe to more of this type of classroom environment?

Yes, please, but maybe a...less steep hill next time.

But what do these budding historians think?

Did you find that tough - the walk? Yeah, but it was well worth it.

Was it? So what did you think when you got to the top?

"Yes, finally! Now I can have lunch."

Does this beat sitting in a classroom all day? Er, yeah.

How much better is it? Erm, quite a lot, yeah.

What better way is there of teaching kids about the history

of the landscape than by bringing them out into this environment

and giving them a hands-on experience?

Have you enjoyed it, kids? Yeah!

OK, last one down the hill is a hairy kipper.

It looks a bit chilly up that hill near Beauly.

Further south, Euan's hoping for some brighter weather as he is

finding out why Tayside is an ideal location for Scotland's

latest renewable-energy project.

The sun, the source of light and energy to grow the food we eat.

You know, it's amazing.

I can feel the heat on my back

from a ball of fire that's 150 million kilometres away.

But when you consider that you can fit the entire earth

1.3 million times into the sun, then it's not quite

so surprising that it's a great source of energy.

Unfortunately, us Scots don't see as much of the sun as we would like.

We get a fraction of the sunshine hours of our Continental neighbours.

For example, through the summer months,

Barcelona has twice the number of hours of sunshine as Edinburgh.

Hence the Scottish speciality tan, now in peely-wally.

But while we like sunshine hours and high temperatures,

we've no shortage of light. Especially in the summer months,

when there can be as much as 18 hours of daylight

in a 24-hour period.

And that's what these gadgets are designed to gather - light!

This is Errol Estate between Perth and Dundee

and it's home to Scotland's newest and largest solar-energy farm.

There are 55,000 panels covering 70 acres of land.

To find out more about this unusual farm,

I'm meeting Thomas McMillan of Savills, who manage the estate.

The landowner, who is renting the land out to Canadian Solar,

this site was developed by Elgin Energy

and they then worked with Canadian Solar to build it out.

This is a really obvious question

but why would a Canadian company want to invest in Scotland?

Look at it, it's not the sunniest day in the world, there must be

sunnier places to build a solar station?

It's not all about direct sun, it's about sunlight.

So in Scotland we have incredibly long summer days.

And it's cool, which actually helps the panels perform better.

In simplistic terms, how do these actually work?

Because people will have seen them on the top of houses

but how do you get the electricity out of the sun?

So the light comes on, hits the panel,

the panel splits the positive

and the negative charge and that goes off to produce the electricity.

So you kind of collect it all together.

It just keeps on collecting, collecting,

goes down these lines here and then goes off

towards the substation. So how much are you going to produce?

The scheme is sized at 40 megawatts.

It will produce that in the best day of the summer, really.

But it's about 3,500 houses worth of electricity on average.

Now, the Scottish Government have really ambitious plans to

have 2,000 megawatts from renewables.

What percentage is this going to supply?

Solar at the moment is a very low proportion.

We've had a lot more wind development in Scotland,

historically, hydro... So, at the moment, solar is about 1%.

But we are expecting that to increase vastly over the next

few years because solar is becoming the cheapest form

of renewable electricity.

What about conventional agriculture?

Because this is prime farmland here in Perthshire.

You're covering the whole field with these panels.

Can traditional farming and this system coexist?

I believe they can.

We do a lot in Scotland on land that is currently not for

food production. So you've got malt and barley for whiskey,

why not put some land to renewables?

Here you are effectively double-cropping,

so you've got the solar panels and then you can bring

the sheep into graze the grass underneath and between the panels.

And the clover will just help keep the nitrogen levels up over

the 20 years that the panels will be here.

So this is going to be quite a sheltered field, then, for sheep.

Yeah, very nice. They'll like it here.

Everyone will have a view on how these panels will look

in the Scottish countryside,

as they do with wind turbines.

But, unlike wind turbines, when these panels reach the end

of their useful life in 25 years' time, there's no concrete involved.

All that has to happen is you pick them up and take them away.

So, when the panels have gone, the energy from that

great ball of fire millions of kilometres away will once again

go back into the land and support a more conventional form of farming.

From the skies of Tayside to the hills and woods of Stirlingshire

and the spiritual home of the hutting movement.

These basic wooden dwellings have provided a rural escape

from the city for Scotland's working classes for decades.

And Sarah's been down to the woods of Carbeth to find out if hutting

can still offer an attractive lifestyle in the 21st century.

When you think of summer holidays, busy airports,

overcrowded beaches and long journeys spring to mind

but there are those who like to escape to Scotland's forests

each year for the peace and quiet of hutting.

And it's a movement they're trying to revive.

With over 140 huts, Carbeth is Scotland's biggest hutting village.

At one time, it was a bustling holiday destination

on the outskirts of Glasgow.

It all began after the First World War

when local landowner Allan Barns-Graham

granted returning soldiers permission to build huts.

It grew in popularity

and Carbeth soon became a haven for those wanting to escape city life.

Carbeth culture peaked in the decades after

the Second World War but has since gone into decline.

Gerry? Good morning.

Good morning, Sarah, how are you doing?

Good. Sorry, wet hands.

These days the land is owned by the Carbeth Hutters Community.

Tenants rent a site but they own the hut built upon it.

Gerry Loose is secretary of the Carbeth Community

and wants to see hutting revitalised.

Not just here at Carbeth but all over Scotland.

Carbeth went into a bit of a decline and so did other huts

because people discovered cheap flights to Spain or wherever.

So for the price of a cheap flight to Spain,

you could have a fortnight's sunshine and why would you

want to put up with an outside toilet and a lot of rain

for a fortnight if that's the only holiday from your work that you get?

Times have changed and Carbeth has become the sort of zeitgeist.

People want to be in a hut in woodland with a small

footprint, you know, not consuming lots of stuff.

All of that is happening now

and has been happening for the last 10, 15, 20 years.

It's a movement. Is it a movement that's growing?

It's definitely a movement that's growing in popularity.

People are realising what they have in their own country

and the ideal for many, many people would be to have a little

hut in some pocket of the country somewhere.

In a community like Carbeth or singly, perhaps,

to enjoy the fun

and the privilege just of being able to walk about in your own country.

There is a big push on now to try

and attract people to the hutting movement. There is.

Are you wanting the younger generation to be

attracted to this style of holiday?

They already are because,

since Carbeth Hunters Community Company bought the land,

we've attracted in a lot of young

families and you'll see young children running around in gangs

and building dens and little huts, in some instances,

and climbing trees.

Things that, you know, all that picture-book stuff that everybody

looks back on, their idyllic childhood, it happens here.

Hutting here isn't for everybody.

There's no running water or electricity

and don't expect any broadband.

Tom, hi, how are you doing?

Sarah, hello, how are you doing?

'Tom McKendrick loves it, though.'

One of the many.

'His family have been coming to Carbeth for generations

'and he's currently rebuilding one of the huts.'

What is it about the place that brings you back, that attracts you?

It's the magic of the place. It's just nature.

It's life, it's trees, it's mud, it's rain. It's uncontrived.

There is something very natural

about belonging to a hutting community.

A real feeling of being somewhere special when you're up here.

And this new movement is trying to get more people into hutting,

into the hutting lifestyle - do you think that will change things?

I think it will. There is a kind of...

I know there's a movement, it's a

global movement for people that are into hutting, and it's this

idea of getting out of the cities and touching nature again, touching

the land, being part of something that you're not in total control of.

You know, there are no roads here, there are no lampposts.

Everything has either got to be solar panels or lamps or

torches or something like that.

Things that you take for natural,

you've got to address in a slightly different way.

Would you mind if Carbeth got busy?

It's actually - very, very strangely - a very busy place

because there's... You know, cyclists come up here, walkers come

up here but they all seem to be attracted by the same thing.

It's the peace, it's the nature, it's the wildlife.

It's very real and you see that when children come up.

They just disappear into the forest.

You hear the screams and the shouts and the giggles of laughter.

They come back with branches and twigs, you know?

There's not an iPad or a piece of software seen anywhere

and that makes it a happy place, even when it rains.

Put me on a waiting list now.

With Carbeth as an example, there seems to be a genuine

momentum to promote hutting across Scotland, and Gerry Loose agrees.

What you need in order to place a hut, to build a hut,

is the land but it's getting that requisite planning permission

to build huts which has proved a bit thorny in the past.

The planning regulations which have just gone through

the Scottish Parliament and been signed off now, for the very

first time, have a paragraph relating

to huts as a separate entity.

They are not caravans, they're not bothies, they're huts.

It's a huge step forward. It's a significant thing.

Is there demand for huts here?

We have a waiting list of 150 people who would like to have

a hut at Carbeth.

Imagine the demand for huts across Scotland.

I hope Gerry is right and that the new planning regulations

recognising huts make it easier to find sites and build on them,

allowing new generations to experience the joys of hutting.

As I travel thousands of miles crisscrossing

Scotland for the series, I like to stop off now and again

and share with you some of my favourite places.

Now, it may be one of the most remote locations but, right here,

this hot tub in Knoydart at The Gathering

is one of my favourite. It's unbelievable.

It may be freezing cold outside -

and it is - but, in here, it's five-star luxury.

Cheers.

A decade on Landward and there's one sight I've never seen in person -

the extraordinary courtship ritual that is the black grouse lek.

HISSING

But, deep in the heart of the Cairngorms, there is

one woman who's keeping an eye on

the battling males and admiring females.

Shaila Rao is the ecologist at the Mar Lodge Estate and,

by tagging along with her, we're hoping to get a ringside seat.

This is us now arrived at the black grouse lek.

I know this is the lek site here

because I can tell from the vegetation.

It's all been trampled down.

There's been lots of birds walking around in this area and also,

if I look at the ground, I can find here lots of really fresh

black-grouse pellets

and this is a sure indication that the birds have been here

and I can also see, in places, feathers scattered around that

have been dropped from birds when they've been fighting and suchlike.

So we can film the grouse lekking here,

Shaila is setting up a hide.

It has to be in place for a couple of days,

so the birds can get used to it.

But the weather isn't helping.

I'm just thinking it's just looking pretty ropey in the wind, isn't it?

Look at it.

If we leave this, we're going to come back to nothing.

This is all in a day's work for Shaila.

Her job is to monitor all of the wildlife on the estate,

come wind or foul weather.

42 hours later and Shaila is back at the hide.

Any noise and the birds won't show up.

HISSING

But, at about half-past six, they start their display.

The males raise their white tail feathers

and face off against each other as they compete to

show their strength and dominance to attract a female.

I would say, on average, the sort of number of birds that we

get at those leks is about...between 10 and 15.

Although we do occasionally record very high numbers

of birds at leks and, a few years ago,

for example, we had 38 birds on one lek site.

Shaila has captured her own footage of the amazing scenes

at black grouse leks.

The results have been used on the National Trust for Scotland's

own nature channel.

In the Deeside, as a whole,

black grouse numbers had declined in the late '90s

but, more recently, in the last three or four years,

we've seen the numbers increase again and, on Mar Lodge Estate,

we're now sitting at around about 120 lekking males.

But it's not just the males Shaila has managed to spot.

She has seen the lek reach its ultimate conclusion.

If you're really lucky, you will see the hen wander

through a male's little patch and she'll kind of crouch down,

almost indicating her willingness to be mated.

At that point in time, you might see the male mount the female

and it literally is over in a flash, just a couple of seconds.

They will mate and then the male will scuttle off

and the female will wander away from that male as well.

I could never tire of watching black grouse at the lek.

They're absolutely stunning birds

and display some really interesting behaviour.

Quite comical at times as well.

Comical it may be but there's no doubt that this is one of nature's

greatest spectacles.

And you can watch leks all year round

but the peak time is from mid-March until the end of May.

And, as Shaila makes her way home, we only have enough time left to

tell you what's coming up on next week's Landward.

We're back in Knoydart to discover how the residents manage life

without mains electricity.

I think sometimes we imagine that the Highlands

and Islands in Scotland are kind of on the edges of Britain's

energy revolution but here, in places like Knoydart, you can

see that the kinds of experiments

with new kinds of technical systems and infrastructures

actually put people at the forefront or the cutting edge.

And food banks - a modern-day reality in the Scottish countryside.

It's absolutely desperate.

You never expect when you have children

that you're going to struggle to feed them.

Not in this day and age, not living somewhere in a country like this.

So join us at the same time next week, Friday night, 7:30

on BBC One Scotland.

In the meantime, from all the Landward team here on Knoydart,

thanks for your company. Bye for now.