0:00:06 > 0:00:11I set out to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain,
0:00:11 > 0:00:18to piece together the history that shaped them. And this seems one of the most untamed. The Cairngorms.
0:00:18 > 0:00:24It's the biggest area of really high ground in Britain,
0:00:24 > 0:00:31a landscape of heather moors, high glens, of streams and bare mountainsides, of red deer and pine.
0:00:31 > 0:00:37The question is whether this landscape is truly untouched -
0:00:37 > 0:00:41a prehistoric survivor still living in our time?
0:01:02 > 0:01:05I've come to the Cairngorms.
0:01:05 > 0:01:09It's the heart of the Scottish highlands.
0:01:09 > 0:01:16The tops of those mountains are sub-arctic tundra. Very little can survive there.
0:01:16 > 0:01:24But if you look at the hillsides and the valley bottoms, it's very wild, probably more deer than people.
0:01:24 > 0:01:30We know that almost all the landscape of Britain is man-made,
0:01:30 > 0:01:38but the question is, is this really a wild landscape - a survivor of wild Britain?
0:01:38 > 0:01:43We know that this was once the heart of the Caledonian Forest,
0:01:43 > 0:01:48a massive prehistoric woodland stretching across the glens
0:01:48 > 0:01:50and up on to the lower slopes.
0:01:50 > 0:01:58There are still thousands of acres of conifer - forestry plantations, mostly imported species.
0:01:58 > 0:02:04But do they stand where pine forest has stood for thousands of years?
0:02:04 > 0:02:10I asked Christopher Smout, an expert in the history of woodland.
0:02:10 > 0:02:16He took to me Rothiemurchus estate, to a pine forest quite unlike the dense forestry plantations.
0:02:16 > 0:02:22And this, he said, was what the original woodland was like.
0:02:22 > 0:02:25Lovely open clearing here.
0:02:25 > 0:02:31How far do you think this would have been typical of the original Caledonian Forest?
0:02:31 > 0:02:38I think this is probably VERY typical. They do seem to have been open places, full of sunlight...
0:02:38 > 0:02:45They really "turn up" in Scotland, if you like, about 7,000 years ago when the Caledonian pine invade.
0:02:45 > 0:02:50There's a wonderful clump of pines with birch beyond. Typical...
0:02:50 > 0:02:57- It's the mixture of pine and birch which is...- Typical of that habitat. - Absolutely.- Old habitat.
0:02:57 > 0:03:05And you see they're big open pines which indicates that they grew up in an open bit of wood, you see?
0:03:05 > 0:03:11And they're what people think about when you talk about the old Caledonian Forest.
0:03:11 > 0:03:17- What age are we talking about?- When you talk about an original wood,
0:03:17 > 0:03:24you don't mean the trees themselves, but that there have BEEN trees on this site for thousands of years.
0:03:24 > 0:03:30And they form glades of various tree species and this wonderful ground flora.
0:03:30 > 0:03:34What is typical about the ground flora here?
0:03:34 > 0:03:40I don't think there's any single plant that you can call Caledonian pine wood.
0:03:40 > 0:03:44It's the combination of all these things.
0:03:44 > 0:03:48Here we've got bilberry, wood sedge and heather...
0:03:48 > 0:03:54And this kind of tussocky ground in which it all grows is very characteristic.
0:03:54 > 0:04:00- A moss of some sort here.- Lots of different sorts of mosses. Best of all, we've got a wood ants nest.
0:04:00 > 0:04:04They create them out of these pine needles.
0:04:04 > 0:04:08There's been a lot of human interference here,
0:04:08 > 0:04:15but the ecosystem has basically remained, and the natural process has remained.
0:04:15 > 0:04:17And that's what's original about it.
0:04:17 > 0:04:25According to Chris, this open and diverse woodland originally covered most of the Cairngorms.
0:04:25 > 0:04:30But modern conifer plantations have been dark, dense timber factories,
0:04:30 > 0:04:34and 90% of the land has no trees at all.
0:04:34 > 0:04:38The wild original Caledonian Forest has utterly vanished.
0:04:38 > 0:04:45It's obvious to me now that in no way is this a survivor of an ancient landscape.
0:04:45 > 0:04:51What trees there are don't form the majestic open forest that would have once covered this area.
0:04:51 > 0:04:56What we have is a few remnants and miles of open moorland.
0:04:56 > 0:05:05This is a landscape that's been transformed, and the question is, when? And by whom?
0:05:11 > 0:05:16I asked Richard Tipping, who's an expert in analysing ancient soil.
0:05:16 > 0:05:20He took me to Carn Dubh, near the edge of the Cairngorms.
0:05:20 > 0:05:23What can you see on the land here?
0:05:23 > 0:05:30What we're walking on here is a hut circle - one of hundreds that you can pick up in upland Scotland -
0:05:30 > 0:05:34which may go back... 3,000 years, really.
0:05:34 > 0:05:38And it's a really very substantial structure indeed.
0:05:38 > 0:05:42A very busy man-made cultural landscape.
0:05:42 > 0:05:49'A man-made landscape 3,000 years ago? Is it possible that changes to this land began in the Bronze Age?
0:05:49 > 0:05:53'Was this when the original woodland came down?
0:05:53 > 0:05:58'Richard reckoned that the answer lay deep under our feet.
0:05:58 > 0:06:05'Hidden in the layers of peat are clues that reveal what was growing here thousands of years ago.'
0:06:05 > 0:06:08You know there's good peat under here?
0:06:08 > 0:06:14Yeah, there's about five metres of peat here that we established from probing when we were here last.
0:06:16 > 0:06:18OK... Going up... And up again.
0:06:18 > 0:06:21One, two, three...
0:06:23 > 0:06:26That's fine. That's excellent.
0:06:26 > 0:06:35So in theory, this sample should be taking us back to cover the period of hut circles.
0:06:35 > 0:06:40- GURGLING - Wonderful noise. - It's a lovely noise.
0:06:40 > 0:06:44Peat which has been undisturbed for 3,000 years.
0:06:44 > 0:06:51- What goes down must come up. - Can I lend a hand? - You may! One, two, three...
0:06:51 > 0:06:54There we go. Just drop it down.
0:06:56 > 0:07:00And up she comes. Lovely.
0:07:02 > 0:07:04Oh, hey! That's...!
0:07:04 > 0:07:11Signs of wood and plant material. The peat has lost much of the structure of the plants that formed it.
0:07:11 > 0:07:18They are breaking down slowly over time and turning into this rather amorphous-looking peat here.
0:07:18 > 0:07:26- But you'll still find pollen grains in here?- Oh, yes. Well preserved and in perfect stratographic order.
0:07:26 > 0:07:33Preserved in the peat are grains of pollen from plants that flowered thousands of years ago.
0:07:33 > 0:07:38You can count them and discover what was growing.
0:07:38 > 0:07:44I wanted to know what was there 3,000 years ago, when those huts were built.
0:07:47 > 0:07:51There aren't that many tree pollen types here
0:07:51 > 0:07:56because effectively, by this time you've lost a lot of tree species.
0:07:56 > 0:08:03- So, they were clearing the trees? - They were, yes. We have evidence from the pollen sequence
0:08:03 > 0:08:06that there was a perfectly good woodland -
0:08:06 > 0:08:11birch, hazel, with some elm, some alder and some willow.
0:08:11 > 0:08:15So really quite a nice mixed upland woodland.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19And it was that that started to decline
0:08:19 > 0:08:26initially, maybe 5,000 years ago - but really with gathering speed maybe about 3,500 years ago.
0:08:26 > 0:08:32So it seems certain that these Bronze Age people were affecting the landscape
0:08:32 > 0:08:37- and shaping it to... for their own cultivation.- Yes.
0:08:37 > 0:08:43I think we can see two different ways in which they were trying to get rid of the woodland -
0:08:43 > 0:08:46first, with just grazing pressure,
0:08:46 > 0:08:50and then they also started to use fire.
0:08:50 > 0:08:52- I've got some charcoal there...- Yes.
0:08:52 > 0:08:57So they had at least two techniques to get rid of woodland
0:08:57 > 0:09:01- which they don't necessarily need. - Yes.
0:09:01 > 0:09:07Their place is coming. Pasture, which we can recognise from particular pollen types,
0:09:07 > 0:09:09and cereal cultivation.
0:09:09 > 0:09:12So they started growing cereals?
0:09:12 > 0:09:16- If you...- Yeah.- Have a look in there. - OK...
0:09:16 > 0:09:23Now, just in the middle there is a pollen type which is of the grass family,
0:09:23 > 0:09:28but it's a much bigger grass grain than we normally see.
0:09:28 > 0:09:36- It's really a member of the cereal type, maybe something like barley. - So...this is a CROP, really.
0:09:36 > 0:09:42Yes. And it's coming from a time period which is related to the hut circle.
0:09:42 > 0:09:49Here we really are starting to find evidence that, yes, they were cultivating.
0:09:49 > 0:09:52From the pollen evidence,
0:09:52 > 0:09:58we can sketch in the landscape created here in the Bronze Age.
0:09:58 > 0:10:02There were settlements with clearings for fields,
0:10:02 > 0:10:06perhaps of barley, and pasture for cattle and goats.
0:10:06 > 0:10:09And the trees were being felled.
0:10:15 > 0:10:22It's an amazing thought that it was the Bronze Age people, 3,000 years ago, who first cleared the forests.
0:10:22 > 0:10:29They began cultivating here and they effectively created an agricultural landscape.
0:10:29 > 0:10:34There's little here now. Where have the communities gone?
0:10:34 > 0:10:39Where have the fields gone? What's happened to that farming landscape?
0:10:39 > 0:10:46I discovered that the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments in Scotland
0:10:46 > 0:10:52was doing a survey of the Cairngorms. I tracked down Rob Shaw in Glenbanchor.
0:10:52 > 0:10:57He had a satellite tracking system to pinpoint every find they made.
0:10:57 > 0:11:01- This is your mapping instrument? - Yes, this is a GPS receiver
0:11:01 > 0:11:06which we're setting up ready to start mapping this morning.
0:11:06 > 0:11:13- So...it'll lock on to...?- Yes. It picks up whatever satellites are available.
0:11:13 > 0:11:20There are about 31 orbiting the Earth, and at the moment I think we're picking up seven.
0:11:20 > 0:11:25And using the roving station with the reference station behind us,
0:11:25 > 0:11:32we can get a positional fix to an accuracy of about 2 to 3cm, which is fantastic for our purposes.
0:11:32 > 0:11:38Steve Boyle was charting a whole field of humps and bumps at the head of the glen.
0:11:38 > 0:11:46Were there any clues here to the fate of the farming that had started 3,000 years ago in the Bronze Age?
0:11:49 > 0:11:55- Steve, what have you found here on this site?- What we have here are the remains of cultivation
0:11:55 > 0:11:58of two completely different periods.
0:11:58 > 0:12:05First, remains of prehistoric, probably Bronze Age cultivation, which we see in these heaps of stone.
0:12:05 > 0:12:12- These little mounds, yes. That's Bronze Age stuff? - These are probably Bronze Age.
0:12:12 > 0:12:17These are heaps of stones cast aside to clear the ground for agriculture.
0:12:17 > 0:12:25- Overlying that are the remains of a landscape dating from the 18th century.- The 18th century?
0:12:25 > 0:12:32A group of buildings are perched above the river, and down beside the water is the remains of a mill.
0:12:32 > 0:12:37- There's just the stone foundations. That's all that's there now?- Right.
0:12:37 > 0:12:42Grassed-over foundations. You can see something of the wheel pit...
0:12:42 > 0:12:46but very little left of the mill itself.
0:12:46 > 0:12:51One's got this Bronze Age stuff and the 18th-century township...
0:12:51 > 0:12:57and there's nothing more...? There's nothing visible on the ground between those two periods?
0:12:57 > 0:13:03There isn't very much. This is a very typical picture in a highland glen.
0:13:03 > 0:13:08We find hut circles and small cairns of prehistoric Bronze Age agriculture, and then...
0:13:08 > 0:13:16we usually have a long gap, particularly for the thousand or so years before the 18th century.
0:13:16 > 0:13:22There is a gap which field survey has not been terribly successful at filling so far.
0:13:24 > 0:13:31Astonishingly, we seem to have nothing in this landscape for thousands of years
0:13:31 > 0:13:36except a few piles of rubble almost impossible to interpret.
0:13:36 > 0:13:42Was the land abandoned, or was it occupied in some way that left little trace?
0:13:42 > 0:13:46We have remarkably little evidence about the landscape
0:13:46 > 0:13:53between the time of the Bronze Age farmers and the flourishing townships of the 18th century.
0:13:53 > 0:13:55But there's a way to get more clues.
0:13:55 > 0:14:02Here at the Highland Folk Museum at Newtonmore, they've taken these scattered fragments
0:14:02 > 0:14:09and they're trying to reconstruct the buildings they might have come from - indeed, the whole community.
0:14:09 > 0:14:17You can compare even a few foundation stones with primitive buildings around the world,
0:14:17 > 0:14:24and then you can experiment with rebuilding, as the museum director, Ross Noble, has done.
0:14:24 > 0:14:32This is all the archaeologists see but they don't always know why the foundations are different.
0:14:32 > 0:14:37So our experiment is actually looking at what would be above there
0:14:37 > 0:14:43and what effect it would have when it does decay. Archaeologists learn from us what to look for.
0:14:43 > 0:14:49So you've got practical experience of what it must have taken to build the house
0:14:49 > 0:14:53- and that feeds back to the archaeology.- And not only that.
0:14:53 > 0:14:58The skills which our team are developing in working the wood
0:14:58 > 0:15:04often raises new questions which the archaeologists hadn't thought of.
0:15:04 > 0:15:13Ross discovered that, for centuries, buildings left little trace because they were mostly made of turf.
0:15:13 > 0:15:20But once you know how to read the signs, you can reconstruct a whole lost way of life.
0:15:22 > 0:15:27- What sort of building was this? - This is a fail house.
0:15:27 > 0:15:35Fail is this very thick turf which you can see here. The layers are actually very thick.
0:15:35 > 0:15:37Divots, on the roof, are thin.
0:15:37 > 0:15:43- And "divots" survives in our language as part of golfing lore.- Yes, indeed!
0:15:43 > 0:15:51- So this was the general highland house?- An architecture for humans and animals in the one house.
0:15:51 > 0:15:58So the Iron Age round house had its place for the cows, as did the 18th-century long house.
0:15:58 > 0:16:03It's extraordinary that so little changed over 3,000 years.
0:16:03 > 0:16:09Perhaps it was because this was a self-sufficient way of agricultural life.
0:16:09 > 0:16:14Ross has reconstructed a weaver's house and a pigman's house,
0:16:14 > 0:16:18and has evidence that they were growing corn.
0:16:18 > 0:16:26So this is the grain storage area. The whole structure is designed to keep it as fresh as possible.
0:16:26 > 0:16:31But the drying process begins in the fire-box down here.
0:16:31 > 0:16:35That's a tidy way down, that fire, isn't it?
0:16:35 > 0:16:42Well, this is a corn-drying kiln. It functions to dry wet grain and also to prepare barley for whisky-making.
0:16:42 > 0:16:50- And the flue's going horizontally. - Yes, horizontally into the bowl, which you can climb up and visit.
0:16:51 > 0:16:53- Don't fall in.- Right.
0:16:53 > 0:17:00- I see the framework... Would they have dried this grain before threshing it?- Right.
0:17:00 > 0:17:04What sort of period were they using kilns like this?
0:17:04 > 0:17:11This would have been in use from about the 6th or 7th century, through until the 18th century,
0:17:11 > 0:17:17- and virtually didn't change in the technology in that time. - A thousand years...- Yes.
0:17:17 > 0:17:22I thought that grain drying was a modern thing, but you're saying...
0:17:22 > 0:17:26- From the earliest times... - Man has had to dry his grain. Yes.
0:17:26 > 0:17:33Everybody needed drying facilities because the weather here is so unpredictable in the autumn.
0:17:33 > 0:17:40- And at harvest time, everybody would need them at once.- Indeed. They were great social places as well.
0:17:40 > 0:17:46It was a warm place for the men to get away from their wives and sit and drink whisky and tell stories.
0:17:49 > 0:17:55For many centuries, these hillsides were dotted with little townships,
0:17:55 > 0:18:01their houses built of turf and heather, their fields stretched around them.
0:18:01 > 0:18:06Their animals grazed the valley in spring and the hilltops in summer.
0:18:06 > 0:18:11I found myself looking at the deserted moorlands with new eyes.
0:18:11 > 0:18:13Once there'd been open woodland,
0:18:13 > 0:18:20but then they were home to bustling communities, their turf houses gathered on the river banks.
0:18:20 > 0:18:25All that's left, if you can find them, is a scatter of stones.
0:18:29 > 0:18:36I imagine this village at evening, people around a fire, talking, drinking, cattle asleep up here...
0:18:38 > 0:18:40And outside, their fields.
0:18:40 > 0:18:47This was a self-sufficient community, a way of life that had existed for centuries.
0:18:49 > 0:18:56I began by asking the question whether the Cairngorms had always been a wild landscape.
0:18:56 > 0:19:04I now realise here that the question is, what catastrophe overtook this way of life
0:19:04 > 0:19:09and replaced it with the empty landscape we have today?
0:19:09 > 0:19:12SHEPHERD WHISTLES
0:19:13 > 0:19:20Donald MacKenzie farms sheep. He comes from a long line of Cairngorms crofters -
0:19:20 > 0:19:25the small tenant farmers who once lived in those villages.
0:19:25 > 0:19:29He and his wife researched what happened to that way of life.
0:19:29 > 0:19:34They took me to Westerton, high on Glenbanchor,
0:19:34 > 0:19:38to the ruins of their own family's house.
0:19:38 > 0:19:43The landlord tried to put it over as an improvement to the farms,
0:19:43 > 0:19:51but the tenants felt they were losing the land they had worked for most of their lives,
0:19:51 > 0:19:53and they had no choice in the matter.
0:19:53 > 0:19:58And five families were moved out - or had to move out from this area.
0:19:58 > 0:20:05And you can clearly see the fields marked out down near Easterton township,
0:20:05 > 0:20:10- and these fields here for Westerton township.- Yes.
0:20:10 > 0:20:15So, Donald, the land of your great-great-great grandfather,
0:20:15 > 0:20:22- would have been out the back here, you think?- Yeah. On this area here. - How would they have cultivated it?
0:20:22 > 0:20:28- What sort of cultivation would they have been practising here? - Some barley, some oats...
0:20:28 > 0:20:34tatties and some turnips, all in wee strips, right down through.
0:20:34 > 0:20:40- They'd be ploughing in strips. - Ploughing in strips.- Is it good land?- Yes. I think it was.
0:20:40 > 0:20:46It was fairly deep soil here. But they were kicked out, pushed down, because of the sheep.
0:20:46 > 0:20:50Ironically, it was sheep, like Donald keeps,
0:20:50 > 0:20:54that caused the eviction of his family and thousands of others.
0:20:54 > 0:20:59From the 16th century, agricultural revolutions swept Britain.
0:20:59 > 0:21:05They were about profit. And medieval subsistence farming died out.
0:21:05 > 0:21:09Eventually, during the 18th and 19th centuries,
0:21:09 > 0:21:15even the remote Cairngorms tenants, with their ancient and uneconomic way of life, were herded away.
0:21:15 > 0:21:22Sheep are still the backbone of Cairngorms farming, and they have created this stark landscape -
0:21:22 > 0:21:28few people, and few trees because the young saplings are grazed to nothing.
0:21:28 > 0:21:32But not all the land was given over to sheep.
0:21:32 > 0:21:36Something else was happening, to do with ideas.
0:21:36 > 0:21:40There's a clue in the castles around the Cairngorms.
0:21:40 > 0:21:47- I had an invitation to one. Blair Castle. - SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCE MUSIC
0:21:47 > 0:21:50I'm going to a dance.
0:21:50 > 0:21:57Highland dancing, a bit like wearing tartan kilts, is very much a national stereotype now,
0:21:57 > 0:22:04but it's an early 19th-century invention which was picked up enthusiastically by the Victorians.
0:22:04 > 0:22:06It's a bit like their castles.
0:22:06 > 0:22:14Blair Castle is a really old building, but it's the Victorians who put on the medieval battlements.
0:22:14 > 0:22:20They loved this idea of Scotland as a wild, romantic, medieval place.
0:22:20 > 0:22:26And the interesting question is whether this extended to the landscape.
0:22:26 > 0:22:30Did the Victorians change the Scottish landscape
0:22:30 > 0:22:35to fit in with this picture of a wild, medieval land?
0:22:35 > 0:22:38MUSIC CONTINUES
0:22:38 > 0:22:44The dance was in the baronial ballroom, a fine old Victorian addition
0:22:44 > 0:22:49for well-to-do visitors who started coming to Scotland in numbers.
0:22:51 > 0:22:55I met an expert in 19th-century Scotland,
0:22:55 > 0:22:57Chris Watley.
0:22:57 > 0:23:03Was there an element of this romantic image of Scotland that really involved the landscape itself
0:23:03 > 0:23:08- and affected the landscape? - Oh, indeed. That's hugely important.
0:23:08 > 0:23:12In one sense, the image of the land which developed -
0:23:12 > 0:23:17the middle- and upper-class visitor was looking for a wild landscape -
0:23:17 > 0:23:23in order to be satisfied, has to have a landscape cleared of people.
0:23:23 > 0:23:29The IMAGE of the landscape, in effect, becomes the REALITY of the landscape.
0:23:29 > 0:23:33One cruel paradox, I think, of the early 19th century
0:23:33 > 0:23:39is the sense in which there is an image of the highlands as bare and bleak and so forth,
0:23:39 > 0:23:46and at the same time people are cleared off that land and, of course, ultimately are forced to emigrate.
0:23:46 > 0:23:51Did they also hark back to the time of, you know, great hunting?
0:23:51 > 0:23:54From the early to mid-19th century,
0:23:54 > 0:24:00these estates become places of sport and leisure rather than work and living.
0:24:00 > 0:24:06So the land usage changes quite dramatically over a period of 50 years or so.
0:24:06 > 0:24:11Many of the people had already gone, driven off by the sheep.
0:24:11 > 0:24:17But the wealthy Victorians' love affair with hunting meant the rest had to go too.
0:24:17 > 0:24:21Popular romantic images now became a reality.
0:24:22 > 0:24:29So is the landscape we have today a landscape fabricated by the Victorians?
0:24:29 > 0:24:36I asked Jimmy Gordon, who's a ghillie, a stalker, like his father and grandfather before him,
0:24:36 > 0:24:39on the Rothiemurchus Estate.
0:24:39 > 0:24:45There's hinds and calves. A young stag amongst them. A stag at the top.
0:24:45 > 0:24:53- A big old black switch.- What did you call him?- Rolling in the peat makes him look like a...- I see.
0:24:53 > 0:24:57By a switch, I mean he doesn't have many points.
0:24:57 > 0:25:04What sort of a landscape were these Victorians trying to make? What did they want for deer stalking?
0:25:04 > 0:25:08The ideal landscape had no people about, little or no trees,
0:25:08 > 0:25:13and plenty cover to stalk behind - not for the deer, for the stalkers.
0:25:13 > 0:25:16No trees, then. Deer don't want trees.
0:25:16 > 0:25:24Oh, yes, the deer want trees, but WE don't. It's much easier to stalk. You can spy them from a distance...
0:25:24 > 0:25:29and you can plan your approach much easier without trees involved.
0:25:29 > 0:25:36Would this part of the estate look much the same now as it did in your father or grandfather's day?
0:25:36 > 0:25:44I imagine it's virtually unchanged. In Victorian times, there wasn't the paying guests that we have now.
0:25:44 > 0:25:52- Someone would take a forest for a year, 10 years, 20 years... - They'd rent it?- And build lodges.
0:25:52 > 0:25:58And bring their friends up. Nowadays, we rely more on foreign visitors.
0:25:58 > 0:26:03But the pattern of... It's... The landscape is unchanged.
0:26:03 > 0:26:11As the railway ran into the Highlands, the Cairngorms were finally within reach of London,
0:26:11 > 0:26:17a wild theme park for wealthy Victorian huntspeople.
0:26:17 > 0:26:23What looks like an ancient landscape turns out to be amongst the most modern in Britain.
0:26:23 > 0:26:28Before I left, I went back to the pine woods where I'd first gone
0:26:28 > 0:26:33in search of that ancient, open, rich Caledonian Forest.
0:26:33 > 0:26:38The Victorian visitors have been replaced by tourists and walkers.
0:26:38 > 0:26:40And here in the woods,
0:26:40 > 0:26:46there are signs that the landscape of the Cairngorms is therefore changing once more.
0:26:49 > 0:26:55It looks like a wild and ancient landscape, and indeed it IS, on the mountaintops,
0:26:55 > 0:26:59but for the most part it's a Victorian creation.
0:26:59 > 0:27:06This used to be a farming landscape. There's a Bronze Age hut circle up there, and there were fields here.
0:27:06 > 0:27:12And now it's becoming a leisure landscape. Foreign trees are being stripped out.
0:27:12 > 0:27:19Sheep and deer are being reduced and the natives are coming back - birch and juniper and Scots pine.
0:27:19 > 0:27:24It's amazing to think that although it will remain a man-made landscape,
0:27:24 > 0:27:31it will reflect something of its real history. The Caledonian Forest will come back.
0:27:49 > 0:27:53Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 2000
0:27:53 > 0:27:56E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk