Sutherland - The Empty Lands? The Adventure Show

I'm climbing up this hillside

towards what will be the start of a week-long journey through the mountains.

And I tell you, this is the most magnificent viewpoint in the whole of Britain.

If you don't believe me, come with me and see for yourself.

This is the wild and windy summit of Suilven,

a remarkable mountain of Torridonian sandstone

that rears up under the loch-ensplattered moorlands of Inverpolly and Assynt

in northwest Scotland.

Up here, between the heavens and the deep blue sea,

I'm embarking on a 70-mile journey

through the mountains of Sutherland,

an area many have described as the Empty Lands.

But I'm curious about that.

"The Empty Lands?"

Says who?

Nothing empty about it. It's just packed with life and vibrant nature.

But how do you describe it?

The mountains, the moorlands, the smell, the scent, the beaches,

the wild flowers, eagles, buzzards, greenshank. I don't know.

There's something to see and do every minute of every day.

Bruce Sandison is one of many people I've met over the last year

who's chosen to make his home in Sutherland.

He's spent most of his life fishing Scotland's remote mountain lochs,

and wrote the popular trout-fishing guide that has become an angler's bible.

Before starting on this 70-mile walk, I decided to ease myself into the exercise ahead.

I've never actually fished these lochs, but I'm willing to try anything once.

I wrote a little poem, four lines, about fishing.

For salmon, trout and sea trout.

For all fish, great or small.

Let thanks be gi'en afore we cast.

To him that gi' us all.

We're off.

I'm glad you volunteered to row.

The first part!

Now, this is it, Cameron.

Take no prisoners.

You do not need to cast a long line.

Chuck it up into the air, aim for the sky.

Oh, there you are. Got that one.

-Do you need this?

-I'll take it.

Thank you. Come on.

Hey, well done. Excellent!

Right, we'll put him back.

So, what was the defining moment when you said, "I'm now an angler"?

I'm not an angler yet. I keep trying.

Keep trying. I'm sure that the moment I said, "Oh, I'm an angler,"

I'd stop catching fish.

Fishing has given me more pleasure than I can say for most of my life.

I do know that giving a child a love of fishing

is far more important than putting money in the bank for them.

Money comes and goes, but a love of fishing stays with you till your dying day.

-Here's one.

-Oh, look.

-A lovely fish.

-Lovely.

It's a very small fish, but it's a typical example of a highland loch wild brown trout.

He's going back now. There you go.

And that's another thing about fishing.

It's hard to think about anything else.

I've got loads to do which I call "work."

Not just now, I don't think about it.

And that's the treasure, the joy, of being out on the loch.

Well, how many did you get?

The boat caught about a dozen fish.

That was nice of him. I had caught, well, precisely none.

But back to something I'm more familiar with.

My own route, which I hope will eventually become known as the Sutherland Trail.

It started at Lochinver, climbed Suilven,

crossed the shoulder of Canisp to Inchnadamph,

from where I climbed wind-scoured hills and quarries to Kylesku.

From there, I crossed the hills of the Reay Estate to Achfary

and the start of the ascent of Foinaven.

A high bealach took me Gleann Mhor and Altnacaillich,

from where the Moine Path finally led to the Kyle of Tongue

and journey's end on Ben Loyal.

Suilven, the pillar mountain,

doesn't reach the 3,000-foot elevation that would make it a Munro.

It doesn't even make the 2,500-foot height that would give it Corbett status.

Despite the lack of elevation,

it's a remarkable mountain in every other respect.

It's got bulk, it's got character, it's steep-sided and it's very impressive.

It's quite a long walk out from Suilven

but even in conditions like this, the surroundings are stunning.

This whole area is synonymous with land reform.

The story of the Assynt crofters is a remarkable one

and could be described as the beginning of a land-owning revolution in Scotland.

Highland crofters had always been at the mercy of the landowners,

many of whom had removed their tenants from the fertile hinterland

to coastal fringes during the infamous Clearances.

But more recently, highland estates were bought and sold, often without the knowledge of their tenants.

And in 1992, when the estate was once again up for sale,

the Assynt crofters decided enough was enough.

They began a campaign to raise the money to buy the estate themselves,

and their success changed the course of history.

John MacKenzie was involved from the very start,

and the implications of their achievement are still difficult to grasp.

The realisation, the following day,

of going out and just looking around...

The fact that we now owned this was just...

The transformation...

When I look back on my grandfather...

..and the...

..hard life

that these people endured.

-Yes, indeed.

-And now, we were masters of this.

-That's wonderful.

He just would not have believed it.

You really, kind of, overturned history.

Yep.

As I said, my view was that I would like to do something

that would be of value to this community in perpetuity.

But, frankly, the success that we've achieved

is beyond belief.

We now own the land.

We have a democratically-elected board

who seek to bring input from each of the townships.

But we largely see ourselves as facilitators.

In other words, liberating the crofters of Assynt

to do what they feel is appropriate to their own needs and aspirations.

And we will encourage and support them.

Nearly two decades later, and the crofts are flourishing.

And the dream of a sustainable future has been fulfilled

by young people like 16-year-old James Morrison.

Born during the buy-out negotiations, he is, quite literally, a child of land reform.

I'm so used to being so quiet up here.

We keep ourselves to ourselves.

I've friends dotted around the place up here.

I've also travelled around a lot.

But no matter how often I go away or how long I spend away,

I always just want to get back to home.

There's no place like home.

I've been doing it ever since I was old enough to be down here.

I've enjoyed it immensely. If I go off to a city, what would I do?

I certainly couldn't stand working indoors, sitting in an office or that sort of thing.

It's just not me. I like to be outdoors and active all the time.

-I see you use the spray, because it's quite easy to miss one.

-Oh, it is, yes.

There are some people who want crofts to be left alone

and let them go back to the wild, a wilderness out there. I don't want that.

Why let the crofts go to waste? Keep them in action.

Do something useful with them. Try and keep them going.

They've been in our family for years and years, so we try and keep them going.

We'll lift it up on its end and then we'll roll it down.

Lift it up towards you, there.

That's it.

My main aim in life is to stay up here and

carry on working outdoors for as long as I can.

And we'll just spin it round a bit.

Perhaps, James is typical of the next generation of crofters.

And it would be nice to think the achievements of the Assynt Crofters Trust

have secured a good future for people like him.

But right now, I'm, quite literally, in the saddle

heading north to Inchnadamph

on one of the very few road sections of my journey through this spectacular landscape.

And I'm about to have my education enhanced.

I must admit, I've never been that hot on geology.

But when you travel through an area like this,

with all those features around you that have been given the northwest of Scotland geo-park status,

then you can't help but wonder just how it all began.

Where you were on top of Suilven, you would actually see a landscape

formed of raw, hard bedrock.

In fact, we have rocks here that are 2,900 million years old.

And the rocks are so hard that they have dominated completely

the way in which the shape of the land developed.

The weather had driven me indoors, but that didn't matter.

I met up with geologist Donald Fisher.

Now, geologists tend to rabbit on about massive timescales,

like 2,900 billion years, but I can't get my head around those concepts.

I wondered if Donald did.

I'll let you into a secret. I personally don't!

No, it's impossible.

We geologists convince ourselves that we really do have a feel

for 500,000 years or, more likely, a million years or 500 million years.

I have a theory that no geologist really understands what a million years is like.

So, what makes this area so different from anywhere else?

Well, we really have to go back to the geological past, Cameron.

There is a structure which we find runs all the way down through Sutherland

and it's a famous thing called the Moine Thrust.

It simply means a structure where rocks were dislocated

by shearing, by compressionial forces within the Earth's crust.

And older rocks from far away, that is to the southeast of Inverness,

were thrust or pushed horizontally, towards, up and over the rocks in Sutherland.

So, like plates?

Yes, when plates collide, there is huge compression.

For example, if I want to compress my two elbows and get them closer, I can either go like that.

Or I can shear one arm over the other and my elbows are now closer.

And that's what happens.

We now understand that. But, of course, at the time it was discovered,

by two very famous geologists called Ben Peach and John Horne,

they were the first people to actually discover it, shall we say.

And in discovering it, they were very successful in resolving a huge debate,

indeed a fierce argument,

that ran within the geological scientific community in the mid-1800s.

So, in geological terms, I'm in for a bit of a treat heading up towards Ben Loyal.

If we look at this map here, where are we just now?

-We're here.

-I'm heading right across to Ben Stack and Foinaven,

then across beyond Ben Hope and eventually up to Ben Loyal.

You're going to walk over and along the zone of the Moine Thrust structure itself.

You're going to go over these mountain ridges and, from the tops of these,

-you'll have the most fabulous view of a land surface 2,900 million years old.

-Incredible.

There's one thing about these great geological time spans.

My wife says I'm too old to be doing a long walk like this.

These time spans make me feel like a youngster.

But Sutherland geology isn't just about antiquity.

There are other odd things here.

At Inchnadamph, limestone rocks predominate.

Their porous nature has resulted in an extensive cave network, something very unusual in Scotland.

This network not only offers exploratory opportunities to sports cavers,

but also hints at Scotland's past.

For the last dozen years, members of the Grampian Speleological Group

have been, quite literally, unearthing the secrets of our past.

This is the famous crag of the Inchnadamph Bone Caves.

It shows remnant passages

that were probably part of a much larger cave system

that ran down the axis of the valley, draining water from both sides of the valley.

Something like 70-80% of all the animal remains that we have to research

in our museums in Scotland have come from this area, and most of them from these caves.

We've just talked about the Bone Caves.

If we talk about Claonaite, the big cave, the longest in Scotland, which

-is behind and underneath the cliffs behind there...

-That's not really a tourist cave.

No, that's definitely a sporting cave. That was discovered in '66.

And in '95,

we finally made a breakthrough, through some of the sumps.

Cave divers got through into some really large passages.

In those passages, we discovered bones.

Almost a complete skeleton of what's been identified as a brown bear,

just lying in one of the passages.

We haven't a clue how it got there, because there's no easy way in.

We've no real idea how old it is, either.

This is like a mass industrialisation. What are you doing here?

In these nice, quiet hills, you've got... I don't know what it is.

-What's going on?

-We started digging down here 12-and-a-half years ago.

Just after Christmas last year, we broke through into the main cave system.

Since then, we've discovered about 600 metres of passages, just from this dig.

The girls are on their bikes there. They're working very, very hard.

I think we should explain what they're doing.

This is a fantastic machine made by one of our members coming up from Sheffield, Norman Flux.

This is Fluxcavater Mk 5.

The three cycle frames are powering the single winch drum,

and it's pulling buckets from 100 feet below,

30 metres down, up to the surface.

Perhaps 40 kilograms at a time.

I suppose the moment has come when I should think about going down there.

I've spent the past 35 years wandering over Scotland's mountain tops and enjoying that.

I'm not too sure I want to spend any time wandering below the ground, but let's look and see what it's like.

I shouldn't have had that extra sausage this morning!

-Makes me feel like a hobbit.

-It's not everybody's cup of tea, to be fair.

You can become claustrophobic.

But once you've done it once or twice, you know the way and you're with the right guys

who will help you through, it will give you a buzz.

Wow!

Well, to be perfectly honest, I've come down all these big, long ladders...

I'm now in here, just a small chamber.

But this is where I'll probably cop out, because the next bit involves

crawling along a very, very low tunnel, crawling on your knees.

And as a hill walker of 35 years' standing, my knees are pretty well shot, and I won't cope with that.

So, I'll do is shoot back up and leave this to the real experts.

Donald Fisher warned me that on no account should I leave Inchnadamph

before coming up here to pay respects to his great geological heroes, Ben Peach and John Horne.

It says they played the foremost part in the unravelling

of the geological structure of the northwest Highlands.

So, there we are, respects duly paid.

I'm now off to this area here,

one of the wildest and roughest sections of the northwest Highlands.

One of the real delights of coming to this corner of Sutherland

is the network of stalkers' paths that criss-cross the hills.

Unlike hill-walkers' paths that tend to go right up the front of the mountain, getting to the summit

in the quickest possible time, these traditional paths were made by guys who lived on the land

all their life and knew the intricacies of the landscape.

All the falls and slopes.

And they built paths that took devious lines across the hills.

They smoothed out the contours that followed the lines of least resistance.

They're absolutely wonderful.

And all the guys, through the years, who have actually maintained these paths have done a fantastic job.

Hill walkers, like myself, are really indebted to these guys.

What I'd like to know is how these guys in bygone years coped with the midges.

You may be wondering why I didn't just jump in a car and drive from Lochinver to Tongue.

It's a fantastic car journey, no doubt about that. Probably one of the best in the country.

But when you're sitting in a car, you're cocooned from the landscapes that you're passing through.

It's really only by walking that you can tune into the land, connect with the land.

Just get used to its rhythms and subtleties.

And you follow tracks that our ancestors have followed

for hundreds and hundreds of years,

so we can sometimes hear those whispers and taints of times gone by.

Another thing about walking the land is you can stop whenever you want and simply gaze at the beauty of it.

Just stop and wonder at the majesty of it all.

From here, I took a detour,

because I certainly couldn't miss out on a visit to the bird reserve of Handa Island,

somewhere I'd always been meaning to get to.

I also wanted to travel there under my own steam.

But I'm not a canoeist, so I needed some help.

Brian Wilson was the first man to crag all the way around the coast of Scotland.

Having achieved that, he then circumnavigated Ireland.

But he's passionate about paddling in this area.

I think it's the combination of islands and mountains.

The mountains are so close to the sea here.

And the sea lochs come right in past the mountains,

so you have sea and mountains meshed together.

Like a kind of handshake.

And you have the groups of islands,

the Summer Isles and the Hebrides, not far offshore here.

It really makes it a pattern that's almost unique in Britain.

-Shall we launch and head out for Handa Island?

-Let's do that.

What will it be like out there?

On the way out to Handa, dead easy.

-With the current and wind in our favour?

-Yeah.

-Let's go for it.

I talk quite a lot about, when walking in the hills, connecting with the land

and the opportunity to connect with the landscape.

When you're kayaking, do you connect with the water?

Not just with the water, but with the smells and the sounds and the sights of it.

But you also tune into the tides and the weather, because that's what you use to get from A to B.

It becomes second nature to know whether the tide is rising or falling,

or going round a headland in a certain direction.

You take that into account compared to what the wind's doing.

Right a little bit.

-OK.

-You look at the landscape and the seascape in a way

that the early Celtic travellers or Christian monks would have looked at it.

An island isn't something that's inaccessible because it has water all around it.

It's accessible because it has the water to it, and the tides flowing past it.

You can choose where you're going according to where the day's tide is taking you.

What are the most difficulties you've been in, Brian?

How dangerous has it become?

A kayak can handle strong winds up to about force eight,

at which time it starts to do things to the sea that you don't really to be out in.

It will also start to catch your paddle blades and make you feel pretty tippy.

But a lot depends on what the tide's doing.

A wind against the tide will cause serious conditions.

The roughest conditions I've been out in have been force eight with an opposing tide,

which makes it a very hilly seascape and it's quite hard to survive for long in.

Hey, brilliant. Thank you, Brian.

Good, made it.

Every summer, the Scottish Wildlife Trust sets up a temporary base here on Handa Island

to monitor and protect the vast bird population.

Nobody lives here now all year round.

But until the 19th century, it was home to over 60 people.

Looking after the island today is ranger Amy Corton.

Apparently, there is a Queen of Handa, the oldest widow on the island, in charge of everything.

Have you ever regarded yourself in that position?

We did try to form a Parliament once.

I had a volunteer who was the Treasurer, and it was quite funny.

We made up some little rules for ourselves.

If you visited, you weren't allowed to take any chocolate away.

-You had to leave it for the ranger.

-Who was you.

-Yes!

So, people lived here, married here, raised children here,

died here and presumably were buried here as well?

Yes, there is a graveyard on the island as well.

It has quite a few people from the mainland.

They used to bring people over and bury them

because they were frightened wolves would dig up the bodies and eat them.

-There are no wolves today?

-No, no.

The only thing we have to look out for are the bonxies. Tell me about them.

They're quite big birds.

They'll chase other birds to make them regurgitate their fish,

then they'll eat the fish the other birds have caught.

But they'll also kill birds to eat them, too. They'll kill puffins and sometimes kittiwakes as well.

-They're quite the aggressor of the bird world?

-Yeah, predators.

That's a nice word.

This year, one of Handa's summer residents is research student Becky Green,

who is studying the 70-odd pairs of great skuas, or bonxies, who come here every summer.

-And she has quite an unusual view of these birds.

-There are birds that you love.

It's hard not to love the bonxies

when they've got their little chicks running around.

They're lovely and territorial.

They're good parents, and you want to see them do well.

-So, you see the nice side of them.

-Yeah, I do. And the horrible side, when they try to dive-bomb you!

How do you keep track of 70 pairs of birds?

We have a GPS.

At the beginning of the season, we do what's called an all-island census.

We walk up and down the island and find all the nests we possibly can.

So, the majority of them are mapped.

Then, when I want to find them again, I go out with the GPS.

I spend a couple of days a week wandering around their territories,

checking on their chicks or their eggs, taking measurements and recording them.

Then, I spend a couple more days collecting the pellets,

which are the regurgitated remains of their diets,

so we can analyse them and find out what they are eating most.

But the highlight of any trip to this island is the 400-foot-tall Great Stack of Handa.

I must confess, I feel quite overwhelmed being here. I think it's the whole sensory thing.

I can see probably more sea birds than I've ever seen before in one place.

I can smell more sea birds than I've ever smelt before.

The sound of it all, between the sea and the birds, it's incredible.

I suppose, for most people who come here, this is the piece de resistance of the island.

This is what people come to see?

Yes, this is the most spectacular part, definitely.

What are we seeing here? What are all the birds we can see?

I can see the easy ones, like puffins.

Yes, the puffins are all on the top of the stack.

We've also got a lot of guillemots and razorbills at the top.

And further down again, we have kittiwakes and fulmars, as well.

The kittiwakes, are they the ones who nest on the horizontal ledges?

The guillemots are the ones that really pack themselves in tight.

They sit there, facing the cliff with their backs outwards.

I noticed that. They look as though they're in a huff!

It's like a defence against predators.

The skuas and gulls will try to steal their eggs to eat.

So, if they pack in tightly and put their eggs under their feet, like penguins,

it's difficult for the birds to get in and steal their eggs.

What's your favourite?

Fulmars, they always look like they're enjoying themselves.

They are floating on the air at the top of the cliffs.

If you sit still, they'll come and look at you.

You can see them looking at you through their eye.

Back on the mainland from Handa, I've gone up the coast to Kylesku.

Hiya.

-True Vine?

-Aye.

Good man.

Is this safe, aye?

And this is another first for me.

I've joined prawn fisherman Andy MacLeod as he set out on his daily trip, heading out to sea.

It's early August, still only 7am.

And what a morning I've chosen,

as we steam out past another of Sutherland's great mountains, Coigach.

I've been at the creel fishing for seven years.

I was trawling before that.

-I've always been fishing.

-What took you to fishing in the first place?

-I don't know. I don't know.

We're out here on a lovely day in the middle of summer and it's beautiful to be here.

But what's it like on a dour November day or a January day?

Pretty miserable.

Och, it's all right sometimes, but it can be miserable.

Cold, wet.

The boat rolling about.

-Hard going.

-How dangerous is it?

Och, I wouldn't say it's dangerous.

-Not really.

-In relative terms?

No, I wouldn't say it's dangerous. It can be dangerous, but you just need a bit of common sense.

As Andy pulls out the creels to see what they've caught, his mate, Darren, chops bait.

The weather might be delightful, but the catch isn't.

One!

-That's not a great start to your day, is it?

-No, I think there's room for improvement yet.

How many would you expect to find in there?

Och, I've been getting a few. Half a dozen.

A bit more, maybe.

How many of these do you have? Oh, that looks better.

That's a good haul, yes.

-Oh, wow!

-There's a large one there.

Two large ones. In the last two, a couple of large prawns in.

That was good. That was just on the edge of the ground.

-This creel is probably under...

-OK.

You see, there's no prawns at all now.

-How would you rate this haul, Andy? Reasonable?

-No, it's poor.

The fishing is poor just now. It has been for the last couple of weeks.

-Is that just a seasonal thing?

-Yes, it is.

But the poorer times seem to be getting longer.

I'd been promised a good feed of langoustine by mine host, Struan Lothian of the Kylesku Hotel.

-Wow! Look at that.

-Here we are, Cameron.

Langoustine fresh from the loch this afternoon.

Fantastic! Before we eat these, I want to tell you a little story.

A number of years ago, when I was young, newly married, my wife and I went to Brittany.

We went to a seafood restaurant and we had a thing called fruits de la mer, fruit of the sea.

It came in a three-tier cake stand.

All the shellfish. We looked at it and thought, "How do we eat this?"

We had no idea. It's given me a phobia about shellfish to this day.

So, could you show me how you actually tackle this?

I'm not sure whether you actually eat it or fight it.

Sure. It's fairly straightforward. You might need a bath afterwards.

You just twist the tail off.

It's the tail you eat. This is the section we're going to eat.

Gently crack the shell down the back.

Peel off the top.

Squeeze the tail and it should just...

-Wonderful.

-There we go.

-Thank you.

I'm not even going to have a dip in this, because this is so fresh.

-Enjoy.

-I think I saw this particular one come out of the water.

Look at that, isn't that beautiful? Mmm.

It's just so full of flavour.

And I've eaten so many prawns in my time that have been simply tasteless.

But this is, oh, full of flavour.

And all washed down with a nice glass of white.

This is the life!

Enough eating, enough drinking.

It's time to get back to the walk.

But first, there's a man-made structure to say goodbye to.

What do you think of the bridge? The Kylesku Bridge.

Some people see it as a real blot on the landscape,

a modern contrivance in such a natural setting.

But I have to confess, I quite like it.

I like the simple lines of it and how it blends into the landscape.

And, on a more pragmatic note, I'm old enough to remember having to queue up at Kylesku for hours on end

to get the little ferry across to Kylestrome.

And I remember lines of cars on a single-track road,

so I think it's a bit of a blessing.

The alternative is a four-hour round trip if you just want to get to the other side.

A round trip through Lairg, round the top of the country and back.

I don't think that bears thinking about.

It's a wonderful spot here just at the junction of Loch Glencoul and Loch Glendhu.

These waters hold a dark secret.

During the war, the 12th Submarine Flotilla trained here.

They trained young submariners to, basically, sit astride torpedoes,

and they would go down below enemy convoys

and attach the warheads to the hull of the enemy craft.

They would then swim away and detonate these warheads.

The amazing thing was, the whole community here knew that this training was going on,

but nobody gave the game away or told the secrets.

And it's been said that this was a community that knew much, but talked very little.

On any long-distance walk, you anticipate the high passes,

or the bealachs as we call them here in Scotland.

That's those areas of high ground that separate one region of landscape with another.

Or, quite often, one region of cultural identity with another.

And on this occasion, I'm leaving,

I'm saying goodbye to the hills and landscapes of the western seaboard,

with the great sea lochs that intrude into the land.

I'm heading over into an area north of the road that runs between Laxford Bridge and Lairg,

an area of land-locked mountains and very, very different mountains.

Something I've noticed over the past few days is the complete absence of sheep from these hills.

A few years ago, sheep would have been everywhere. They would have been grazing at every corner,

almost eating everything in sight.

But the truth of the matter is that many of these estates now are given over almost exclusively

to sporting purposes, to fly fishing or to deer stalking.

People pay a lot of money to come and take part in these activities.

But I don't think there's any doubt that sheep farming is still vital to the Sutherland economy.

And, despite the hard times and low prices of recent years,

the sheep mart at Lairg is one of the largest in Europe.

But it's also the moment of reckoning for the year's income.

Just a wee bit anxious as to what might happen later on in the day.

Because it's a whole year's work and it's all boiled down into today.

So, you get into the ring and you just have to see what they say and think of your lambs.

Jan Mackenzie works on her own croft, and she's also the shepherd for the North Loch Naver estate.

The Lairg sheep sale is culmination of a year's hard graft.

These are the tups. Stock tups. They're what we'll be using this year. It's a selection of tups.

It's the ones from my croft

and the ones from North Loch Naver Farm, where I work.

I feed them before they go out.

What makes a good tup?

His power to reproduce?

Certainly, if he has the reputation to reproduce, yes.

But they've got to have good confirmation, good bone about them.

See that fella? He's got good, heavy bone. Nice hair and clean.

No black spots.

In your lifetime here, have you seen a reduction in the number

-of people shepherding in the hills in Sutherland?

-Oh, yes, definitely.

There used to be four or five shepherds on each estate.

Now, there will be one, if any at all.

So, how important are sheep to this particular landscape?

I'd say very important.

There's a lot of sheep going off here anyway.

If you lose the sheep out of the grounds, it's going to change the whole environment.

Because your ground is going to get rank and grow long if it's not been grazed hard enough.

It's changing everything if the sheep are not here.

You do need them.

We tend to think of these lands as wilderness areas or empty lands.

But for hundreds and hundreds of years, people have been living off the land.

And these are the first peat cuttings I've seen since leaving Lochinver.

And, with the whole uncertainty of rising fuel prices worldwide,

I just wonder if we could eventually see the creation

of a whole new peat-cutting industry in places like Sutherland.

I've just come down from the high ground that runs across from Kylestrome to Achfary.

And I have to say, after all the chat with geologists,

cavers, crofters, I've kind of relished this time on my own,

just enjoying the solitude.

So, it's quite appropriate to come to this old bothy here, which goes by the name of Lone.

I think that's quite suitable.

And behind me stands a triumvirate of Corbetts.

Those are the Scottish mountains between 2,500 feet and 2,999 feet.

They are the wee brothers of the bigger Munros, if you like.

And behind me is Arkle.

Over to my left here, Meall Horn.

And in the distance, you can't see it from here, is Foinaven, the biggest of them all.

I'm just about to make may way up to a high camp.

It's just a nice cusp between the three hills.

All going well, tomorrow morning,

I'll get onto the summit of Foinaven,

a mountain I've always regarded as the Queen of Sutherland.

I love this big, split boulder here.

They're like twin portals, the gateway to Foinaven.

I'm almost at a loss for words at the incredible landscape up here.

Wandering up here this morning, the cloud was down.

As I've climbed up, it's gradually lifted,

revealing one of the most incredible landscapes you'll find in Scotland.

Indeed, one of the most incredible landscapes you'll find anywhere in Britain.

It really is just stunning.

I stand here and look right back to Suilven, where I started this walk.

And I look right down over this fold over fold of hills,

ridge line against ridge line,

and all the way up, it is absolutely stunning.

People talk about your Ben Nevises, Trossachs, Cairngorms,

National Parks, Torridons, Isle of Skye...

This landscape in the northwest of Scotland compares with anything in the country!

It really is absolutely fantastic!

I'm looking for a nice, flat bit of ground to lie on.

Reasonably sheltered, but with enough breeze to keep the midges down.

And some water fairly close by.

And I think I see my point just down here.

Yes, this will do, about here.

Perfect.

People sometimes think you have to rough and tough it, to wild camp in a place like this.

But it's ironic that the technology we try and escape from, coming to these places,

is the very technology that helps make it comfortable for us when we come.

This whole pack, including the tent, the sleeping bag, stove and food,

probably weighs no more than 12 to 15lbs.

That's about six or seven kilograms.

I've got everything I need in here.

Waterproof jacket that weighs about 400 grams.

Waterproof trousers, maybe 200 grams.

All my food for a night's camping.

My sleeping bag probably weighs about 900 grams.

It's pure duckdown, and I've got it extra-wrapped up in a polythene bag,

because this is the one item that you don't want to get wet.

You want to keep it nice and dry.

And it really is beautiful, soft duckdown.

That will all inflate up there and be very nice and cosy.

I always maintain that

any fool can be uncomfortable out in the hills.

So, it helps to bring one or two nice little things, just to remind you of home

and make things that little bit more comfortable.

Like a little bottle of wine to go with the freeze-dried food!

I've always been very intrigued by the name of this mountain.

Foinaven comes from the Gaelic Fionn Bheinn.

And I've always understood that to mean the Fair Mountain or the White Mountain.

You can understand that translation

when you see these lovely silvery-white quartzite screes

that give the impression the hill is covered in snow almost any time of the year.

But more recent thinking suggests that word "Fionn" is spelt differently

and it actually means the Mountain of Warts, which isn't quite as pleasant as the Fair Mountain.

But you can understand that interpretation as well, because the hill has five separate summits

and I suppose, from a distance, they could look like warts on the flanks of the mountain.

From this point, the character of the mountain changes quite dramatically.

Until now, I've been walking up broad, fairly featureless, grassy ridges.

But from here, the mountain tightens up into a narrow,

eerie, very dramatic ridge

with steep slopes falling away on either side.

But the greatest feature of this mountain that you'll notice here

is the fact that it's eroding below your feet.

It's really a peeling carcass of a mountain.

It's kind of falling apart.

That has led to very, very unstable underfoot conditions.

So, you have to be very, very careful treading this particular tight ridge.

For more years than I care to remember, mountaineers have debated the height of Foinaven.

The reason for that debate is, about 20 years ago, the Ordnance Survey

surveyed all the mountains and they gave this one the height of 914 metres.

Now, that could be anything between 2,999 feet and 3,002 feet.

It might have been a Munro, it might have been over the 3,000-foot contour, or it might not have been.

Because of this debate, and it went on for a long, long time,

the Munro Society decided they would resolve this problem once and for all.

They brought a team of surveyors up here and, using the latest GPS equipment,

they re-measured the mountain.

They found, in fact, it was 12 feet short of Munro status.

The final figure that they reckoned on was 2,988 feet.

Not only did they discover the fact that the mountain is less than Munro height,

there was also a wee sting in the tail.

They realised that this summit here, that everybody thought was the summit, in fact, wasn't.

There's a wee contour ring missing from the Ordnance Survey 1:50,000 series map.

And, in actual fact, that cairn across there is the real summit.

So, I'm afraid I'm not finished yet!

We've made it at last. There was a point when I thought I was never going to get here.

But does it really matter if Foinaven is a Munro or not?

I don't think it matters a jot, to be honest.

But the point is, Foinaven is one of the most underrated mountains in the country.

It's certainly in my top ten favourite mountains.

It really is a fantastic hill and I would recommend every hill walker in the country

to get themselves up here, get this on the list of mountains to climb.

You certainly won't regret it.

Before I head down the mountain, let me leave you with one thought.

Munro bagging, and indeed Corbett bagging, are amongst the most delectable of addictions.

I commend both of them to you with a passion.

I've just wandered through the hills from Foinaven and Loch Stack.

And, in the course of a few miles,

I've come into a completely different landscape both scenically and culturally.

This is Doon Dornagel, of the Fort of Dornagel.

And there's about 500 of these brochs scattered throughout the Highlands and islands of Scotland.

Nobody seems terribly sure what the purpose was,

but it's generally believed that they were circular, defensive buildings.

If that is the case, who was the enemy?

The finger of history points towards the Vikings.

But there's some difficulty here, because these were built during the Iron Age,

and at that time there was no organised civilisation in Norway.

But more recently, scientists have discovered rock carvings dated at 1,000 BC.

And these are carvings of Norsemen in their longboats.

That suggests there were groups of unorganised, undisciplined Norsemen coming down from Norway

to these southern lands, or what we call Sutherland.

On my walk through Sutherland,

I've discovered a wilderness of extraordinary beauty.

But these glens weren't always empty.

Until the 19th century, there were around 50 townships in Strathnaver alone.

And the events in this glen achieved notoriety when the Gaelic-speaking population was thrown out

to make way for commercial sheep farming.

Bettyhill head teacher Jim Johnston has spent years studying the Clearances here.

We're just stepping into the remnants of one of the houses here.

But if we were here at the time of the Clearances,

or prior to the Clearances, this would be a substantial house.

Most of the space would be taken up by cattle.

For that reason, these houses were often built on a slope

with cattle at the low end,

so the effluent they produced during winter

would flow away from you, rather than up into your kitchen area.

It was a time when opportunity was available for anyone

who had an entrepreneurial spirit.

The Countess of Sutherland had that entrepreneurial spirit, as did Patrick Sellar, her factor.

In the course of history, Patrick Sellar hasn't done too well.

He's come across as a real villain, hasn't he?

He certainly has. He's come across as a villain, and that continues.

It would be a very dangerous thing to do, to go into a bar in Bettyhill and praise Patrick Sellar!

He had absolutely no compunction about evicting people from ground

that he possessed or anything like that.

He knew what he wanted

and he was prepared to pursue that with little regard for other people.

He was one of the largest farmers in the whole of Scotland.

In that area, that area of his farm,

there had been 2,000 people living prior to the Clearances.

And those 2,000 people were replaced by 18 shepherds from the Borders.

But from the point of view of Victorian society, he was a big success.

And he was an expert farmer.

But then, Mussolini made the trains run in Italy on time!

History repeats itself.

And one of the most telling things about all this is that things like this still go on.

You still have parts of the world where traditional lifestyles are being disrupted and destroyed.

Many of the relatives of those who were cleared found themselves living on the Sutherland coast.

Just before my final mountain, I wanted to meet one of them.

Angela MacKay not only lives on the coastline but earns a living from the coastline, farming oysters.

She came to that job almost by accident.

I was a hairdresser. I'd just sold my business

and I was a wee bit unsure what I was going to do next.

So, from giving people blue rinses and perms and all the rest of it...

I'm giving haircuts to oysters now!

-That's quite a difference!

-Yes.

But they don't talk back!

Can you run me through the process of farming an oyster?

They come in about the size of my little fingernail and we put them into these bags.

As they get bigger, we take them further in.

We take the bigger ones out, put them in bigger bags.

And the process goes on like that until they become fully grown.

And then, we take them out of the water and further up the shore a bit to harden the shells.

So that, when they're out of the water for a while, the muscle starts getting stronger.

-They're just like pets to you, I suppose.

-Are they really?

-Yes.

-You don't give them names?

No. Too many!

Can I go and choose some for my tea tonight?

-Yes, no problem.

-Lovely, thank you.

-I think we'll take some of these ones.

-OK.

Ah, let's have a look.

Feel that one.

They're nice and full.

Never, ever have an oyster if it's open, like that, in any way at all.

In fact, what you can do is...

Always tap them.

And make sure you have no hollow sound.

There we are. I'll see if I can get one or two more in there.

Brilliant. Whoa, whoa!

-They'll all want a wee taste. There you are.

-Marvellous.

Kyle of Tongue oysters.

-The best in the world.

-But, of course!

This is Grant. Grant, last year, was Scotland's Young Chef of the Year.

So, for getting advice on how to eat oysters, I'm in very capable hands.

-I think the best thing is for you to demonstrate to me.

-No problem.

You have a go and tell me what to do.

What we do once we've opened them is serve them with a bit of lemon on a bed of ice.

And you just want to make sure it's nice and loose in the shell...

-Down the hatch. Beautiful!

-OK.

Just make sure it's fairly loose, and here we go.

I almost missed part of it.

Yes, it is very... The combination of lemon...

-The lemon brings out the taste of the seafood.

-Indeed.

-Fantastic.

-Simply done. Don't mess about with it too much.

Get them out simply, and let the customer do the work.

That's what I like to see, people using their hands.

I'm going to try and chew this one, just to see what the difference is.

Mmm.

Oh, that's good too!

It's always a bittersweet moment when you come close to the end of a great journey like this one.

In this case, I'm a little sad because I know that, very shortly,

I'll be finishing what has been a fantastic walk across the county of Sutherland.

But at the same time, I'm actually quite pleased,

because I'm going to finish this journey on top of an amazing mountain called Ben Loyal.

Now, I know I've already said that Foinaven is the Queen of Sutherland.

But according to a statistical account of 1840,

Ben Loyal is, in fact, the Queen of the Highlands.

This will be the second time I've completed this walk between Lochinver and Tongue.

The first time was with my wife, over six or seven days during the summer.

But for this journey, I was very keen to break it down into several parts.

Into the seasons of spring, summer and autumn.

And I was keen to fine-tune

the end of the walk this time with the fading out of the season,

so I could sit up here on these slopes of burnished bronze

and listen to this incredible sound of the roaring of the red deer stags.

At this time of year, each of the stags will gather its own herd of hinds, its own harem, if you like.

And other marauding stags will come along and try and take over the herd.

Quite often, the two stags will stand on the hillside and roar defiantly at each other.

And quite often, the stags will come together in head-to-head combat, their antlers interlocking.

It's one of the great sights of the Highlands.

For me to sit up here at this time of year and listen to the roaring

is something I don't think I'll ever get tired of.

One thing I've realised on this walk

is that the geological complexities aren't confined to one area,

but actually follow you all the way north to this most northern of mountains, Ben Loyal.

This hill is the only igneous mountain in the north.

It's made up of quite a peculiar form of granite called cyanite.

That's a granite that doesn't have any quartz, or very little quartz, in it.

And it's because of the granite that this mountain has got its shape.

It's weathered down into four distinct summits,

four distinct granite tors.

The highest of which, An Caisteal, I'm heading for right now.

The one thing that really stands out in my mind of this walk is...

Well, other than the three mountains I've climbed, Suilven, Foinaven and Ben Loyal, of course...

But the thing I'll always remember are the people.

Both those who were born and bred here and those who came to Sutherland to make it their home.

Those who earn their living by traditional means, by crofting, fishing and farming.

And those who service the needs of the tourists,

the climbers, the mountaineers, the sea kayakers, the fly fishermen,

the cavers, all these people.

Hey!

Well, that's it. That's the end of the climb.

And it's also a very breezy end to my walk through Sutherland.

I hope you'll agree that we should never really refer to Sutherland as the Empty Lands.

I think this is a land overflowing with promise and potential.

And, for me, it will always be a very, very special place.

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