Aberfeldy to Cape Wrath The Adventure Show

For years, I've been saying that Scotland has some of the best landscape anywhere, and to prove it

I've spent the past two and a half years putting together a 470-mile route

from the border with England to the far north.

Welcome to the Scottish National Trail one of the great long-distance walks of the world.

Hi, I'm glad you could join me on this second half

of my end-to-end walk through Scotland.

I started in Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders

and followed the ancient trails as far as Edinburgh, our capital city.

I then made my way through the heart of Scotland

and through our first National Park into Highland Perthshire.

Now, I'm on the edge of our second National Park, the Cairngorms,

with the rest of the glorious Highlands lying before me.

After 200 miles I'm nearly halfway through the walk, but you could argue the best is yet to come.

High mountains, deep lonely glens, beautiful woodlands and much more besides,

as I make my way north and west.

Ahead are the wild lands of Kintail,

Torridon and the magic that is Sutherland.

And what an experience it's going to be,

walking through a constantly changing landscape that inspires everyone who sees it.

You can't convey in words the scale of this and the extent to which it is so impressive,

especially like today with the wind in the grass and the rain coming and going.

-And the sun, sometimes!

-And I'll say "Aye!" to that.

Ahead of me is Glen Tilt, part of the 145,000 acre Atholl Estate.

Their head ranger is Polly Freeman.

Accompanied by her working collie, Midge, we set off up the Glen.

This is Polly's office.

I come up the Glen a lot and it always looks different and it gives you a kind of peace.

Glen Tilt is quite unusual in the sense that it's a long straight line, linear glen.

-What makes it like that?

-It's got a fault that runs pretty much

the whole way down the Glen, so as you get further up the Glen

you can see the Glen is very narrow and it's very straight

and it's exactly following that fault line,

which also means the Glen doesn't actually rise very much.

so it was a really popular drove road in times gone by

because you could bring the cattle through and you weren't having to gain much altitude,

so it's much easier for both the herders and the cattle.

Polly, this is a fantastic spot in the river, there's pools and the fall here but

it does have a special significance, doesn't it?

It does if you're a geologist. If you're a geologist, this is a Mecca.

James Hutton came here looking for certain geological clues to prove some theories that he had.

Now, James Hutton is one of the founders of modern geology and he

wanted to show that not all rocks were always laid down

so that the oldest rock is on the bottom and the youngest rock is on the top.

And he came to this area specifically looking to find granite in amongst the schist,

and his theory being that the granite, which is an igneous rock,

would be injected into the schist and therefore it's a younger rock

travelling through various layers of older rock.

And apparently he came up here and saw it and went "Oh, eureka, I've found it!"

And he got very excited. And it is very obvious to see if you know anything about geology,

the pink rock here is the pink granite of the Cairngorms,

and the grey rock is the schist which is actually a metamorphic rock.

That's not just been laid down layer on layer,

there's something else going on there and that's exactly what he was looking for.

This Glen may have been shaped by enormous geological forces,

but it's the river that runs the whole length of it that defines its character.

Most of the big rivers here have been harnessed for hydropower.

Back in the 1950s, Highland Perthshire and I think the top of the Spey as well a lot of

that was connected up to make this huge big hydro scheme

and most of the rivers up here are in that scheme except for the River Tilt.

The River Tilt is still, if you like, a wild river,

it still reacts to the weather, which I really like.

Polly, can you give me a breakdown of your career progress

from leaving London to ending up here in Blair Atholl?

Well, I've moved around the country a lot, but all northwards.

My main aim was to get out of London, which I did and...

Why was that?

Because it's very big and it's a city and there's just no access to the countryside where we lived,

-it was just really difficult.

-Where do you think this passion came from?

Were your folks interested in the outdoors?

No, I don't know, I really don't know, I don't think my family knows.

We used to go on holiday in North Wales to the coast and we'd drive through Snowdonia to get there

and I just wanted to get out of the car and go up these hills that I could see from the car,

and... But we couldn't because nobody else wanted to do that

and my uncle would come and visit us sometimes when we were on holiday

and I'd nag him to take me up a hill all the time. And he did, very occasionally.

You very kindly rangered me right up the length of Glen Tilt today.

What are your feelings when you stand at the top of the Glen like this

-and just kind of look around you?

-It's a strange mixture of

excitement and calmness at the same time,

it's somewhere that's so remote...

it just makes you feel good somehow, but that's not a very good

word to describe something that's a much more intense feeling than that.

The Glen feels remote all the way up but you get up and you realise this

really is what remote is and if we were to reverse our journey now and walk back down,

then all those places that had seemed quite remote,

you'd think, "Oh, my goodness, no, this is the centre of civilisation, there's a house here."

This really is remote round us now.

-You love it, don't you?

-I do yeah, yeah.

I'm following a series of Glens through the Cairngorms National Park, Glen Tilt,

Geldie and Feshie, and that will eventually take us down towards Kingussie.

I'll tell you something, when you come out of Glen Tilt and into Glen Geldie it feels strangely unsettling.

I think Glen Tilt is so lush, it's so green,

particularly in this low stretch where it's heavily wooded in deciduous trees.

And even as you come higher up the Glen the sides,

the little channels and glens are choked with birch and rowan.

But when you go into Geldie, it's bare.

It's starkly beautiful and it feels very, very remote.

But, you know, I like it. I must be a bit weird, but I really like it.

I love walking under the infinity of this dome sky,

where you get the feeling that the only other things that are moving are the odd cloud shadow

or spot of sunlight on the far hillside.

In the 18th century, the indefectible road builder-cum-soldier, General George Wade,

thought it would be a good idea to link Deeside with Speyside.

He wanted to build a road through Glen Geldie and Feshie.

It didn't really come to anything, he was too busy trying to subdue the restless Highlanders.

But the thorny issue has been raised several times since,

most notably back in the 1990s when some councils thought it would be quite a good way

to spend some public money. Thank goodness it hasn't happened

and I don't think it will happen now for two reasons -

one, the huge amount of cash it would cost to build such a road, and, of course,

this is slap bang in the middle of a National Park.

I'm just over half way through this walk through Scotland now and already

I've reached the conclusion that we tend to consider land and landscape purely in economical terms.

I'm reminded of the words of the great American ecologist Aldo Leopold,

who once said, "If we think of land as a commodity, then we will misuse it.

"If we think of it as a community to which we also belong

"then we will learn to treat it with love and respect."

When I was planning the route of the Scottish National Trail

I thought of linking the villages of Kingussie and Newtonmore

by the three-mile long Sustrans bike track that parallels the road between the two villages.

But it's tarmac, it's not great for walking, although it's terrific for cycling.

Then I discovered some people had made a new path,

a new path that follows the line of old townships high above the villages,

all the way past Newtonmore right through to Laggan.

This is Loch Gynack. And I think it's a lovely stretch of water,

nestled the way it does between Creag Bheag and Creag Mhor.

It's stocked with brown trout and an archaeological report from 1925

says that there's the remains of a Crannog that's an artificial island dwelling - in the Loch here.

I kind of suspect that the Loch has enlarged quite a bit since 1925 because I've certainly never seen

anything resembling a Crannog here and I don't know anybody who has.

But that doesn't matter, it's the notion that people once lived on the Loch that I find attractive.

This is the site of the former township of Auchtouchal. What a great name, eh?

And it's said that there were up to a dozen houses here,

a dozen houses, associated barns,

a lime kiln, some fields with rigs and lazy beds.

And the only thing you can see today is a few piles of stones here and there and the heather outline

of what may well have been a building.

But all these little townships were elevated from

the strath of the River Spey and I have a theory

that people lived up here rather than down in the depths of the valley because,

well, cold sinks and these houses wouldn't have been very well insulated.

So it's probably actually warmer living up here and it's quite interesting that,

Newtonmore, for example, the new town on the moor, didn't really come into existence

until the end of the 19th century when the railway came through here.

The Scottish National Trail follows byways

as opposed to highways, the quieter, less frequented routes through the Highlands,

and this is a good example this morning. I could have walked

between Newtonmore and Laggan along the road but instead I've chosen this much older,

much more traditional route through Glen Banachor through to Dalvalloch down to Cluny and then on to Laggan.

And on a morning like this, it's truly sensational with the big hills of the Monadhliath on one side,

the birch clad slopes of the Creag Dubh on the other side.

Creag Dubh the battle cry of the Clan Macpherson.

Creag Dubh! Just fantastic.

I'm having to travel quite a long way west before I continue my journey

north because of the Monadhliath Mountains,

stretching from Spean Bridge right across the country to the other side of the A9 at the Slochd.

They create a formidable barrier to any sort of northern progress.

The only real point of weakness is the old General Wade Military Road across the Corrieyairack Pass.

I've had the most beautiful walk this morning from the village of Laggan

and I'm just about to meet up with one of my oldest pals

who also happens to be Britain's most prolific lightweight backpacker.

I'm proud of the new Scottish National Trail,

but it's just a walk in the park compared to distances tackled by Chris Townsend.

He leaves his home outside Grantham for months at a time.

His longest walk along the watershed of America from Canada to Mexico was a staggering 3,000 miles,

and it took him five and a half months to complete it.

Why, you might think, would anyone want to do something like that?

People often talk about it being escapism

to go out into the hills, I think it's the opposite.

We've created an artificial world to live in which can be

very comfortable, but it cuts you off from reality.

You set up your tent in the evening,

you can lie in the tent looking at the views

and you wake up in the morning and you're still there,

in this wonderful place, just ready to walk through

the hills on another day.

I noticed, probably in an effort to save weight,

you're using what looks to me like a tarp rather than a full tent.

It's not actually a tarp, it's between a tarp and a tent,

if you like, because as you can see, it's not a flat sheet,

it's shaped, and this shape and the tension on these panels

actually makes it very stable, very wind resistant

and because it pitches with trekking poles, you can adjust the pitch.

At the moment I've got a high pitch, lots of ventilation,

you've got a good view out the big door.

You've certainly got lots of ventilation!

But if there's a big storm, you can lower the poles

and peg it down to the ground.

But the question, particularly with relevance to Scotland is,

does it have a midgey net?

There's an optional mesh inner which I do have

and I use over the summer, yes.

Cos most people would regard this walk that I'm doing 470 miles -

as a long-distance walk, but I guess that's just a sprint to you.

Yeah, I'd call it a moderately long walk.

But it's not really a long walk, no.

I tend to think of a really long-distance walk

as starting at around 1,000 miles and then going upwards.

The big difference is the time, it's not the distance,

which is what people tend to think it is.

The distance in a sense doesn't really matter, it's how long you're

out there because the difference is it becomes a way of life.

If you're out for a week or two it's a break from what you normally do.

But when you're out for four, five, six months, that is what you do.

And when you're spending that sort of time in wild places, does that

change your relationship with the landscapes you're walking through?

Yes, I think it deepens it, because you're there all the time,

especially with the camping, when you're sleeping in it as well,

so it's there when you go to sleep, it's there when you wake up.

But also with a really long walk, you're moving through

the landscape and experiencing how it changes and develops

and how different landscapes run into each other,

so you get this overall picture of a whole mountain range or a whole

country and that's something that I get very much from a very long walk.

What's the sort of time scale between you thinking,

"I'm a visitor to this landscape"

and, "I'm actually now part of this landscape"?

It varies a bit but usually takes me

ten days to two weeks before I feel this is what I do,

I'm now inside the walk, so to speak,

and the outside world has gone away.

So obviously that's about the time that a lot of people spend

on a walk and then they stop.

For someone like yourself who is passionate about wildness,

what are the special characteristics of Scotland?

It's got a Northern feel, you get the same feel in Scandinavia,

especially about the light, it's the long dawns and the long dusks.

You go south, somewhere like deserts in South West USA

and you don't get that at all. The light there is wonderful,

but it's totally different.

And it's the spaces, the wide openness you get,

particularly in areas like the Cairngorms.

But there's also the huge variety, the variety is incredible.

We're nearing the top of the Corrieyairack Pass.

A classic example of the kind of landscape that inspires Chris.

Rising to 2,526 feet, it's the height of many of Scotland's mountains

and less than 500 feet lower than a Munro.

Dropping down the other side to the Great Glen

reveals a very different landscape.

I've left a very sleepy Fort Augustus behind me

and I'm on the Caledonian Canal now, heading west towards Glengarry.

Earlier on the walk, I followed the Union Canal

and the Forth and Clyde Canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow

and I remember thinking at the time

that these canals were national treasures, they're beautiful.

And this canal is very similar - it's peaceful, it's quiet,

it's a lovely landscape, and on a morning like this when it's still

and there's a nice, flat canal towpath to follow,

I can't help but contrast it with the starkness and the wildness

of the Corrieyairack Pass.

Really, that's the story of the Scottish National Trail

it's about diversity, it's about contrasts

and that's what is going to make this trail stand out from any other.

The Caledonian Canal was built 189 years ago

by that master engineer, Thomas Telford.

And it links Fort William and Inverness

through a series of four natural lochs and 22 man-made locks.

It was seen as the work creation scheme of the time,

because many Highlanders were on the point of starvation

because of successive potato blights

and it was felt that this project could offer them some work.

But that had a downside - every so often,

the majority of the workforce would simply vanish,

usually at harvest time, because they felt it was more important

to bring in the kale and turnip for the year

than building a canal right across Scotland.

What could be nicer than meandering along the shores of a Highland loch?

This is Loch Oich and I've been following the track bed

of a former railway that used to go as far as Fort William,

and I'm making the most of it this morning, I'm enjoying

the relaxed feel to the walk, because once I get past Glengarry,

the character of this route is going to change quite dramatically.

The last 100 miles or so of the Scottish National Trail

heads through the wild and beautiful landscapes of Glengarry

and Glenaffric to Achnashellach.

Then it's onwards past the iconic mountains of Beinn Eighe and

An Teallach to one of my favourite parts of Scotland - Sutherland.

The final stretch is along the coast north to Cape Wrath.

I've been walking through

the Glengarry Forest for a couple of hours

and it's been really, really strange.

This thick mist has enveloped the whole area

and it's got really, really still and silent.

Everywhere there are these sort of moisture webs on the ground

and hanging from the trees like little fragments of lace.

I half expect them to keep falling in my beard!

It makes me feel as if I could be almost anywhere in the world,

it's beautiful.

Sometimes it pays to be an optimist

when it comes to the Scottish mountain weather,

and I've had this funny feeling that we are going to come above the mist

and that's exactly what's happened. We've got this temperature inversion

when the cold air sinks down into the glen.

It's the sort of condition that every hillwalker dreams of, when

the mountains appear like islands on this great ocean of white cloud.

And this only happens maybe once a year or twice a year if you're lucky

and because it doesn't happen very often, it becomes really memorable.

I've been following a route that's traditionally been known

as the Road to the Isles,

and it eventually goes all the way to the Isle of Skye.

But it's also an old drovers' road and it's just at this point here

that the droving road leaves the modern hillwalkers' path.

Originally the drovers would have taken their beasts

across the brow of the hill there, down into the glen where

they'd go across a couple of rivers

and then make their way up to Cluanie.

But in 1957, the rivers were flooded for hydroelectric purposes

and the drovers' road - a couple of bridges and some small islands -

were all submerged under the waters of the new reservoirs.

Today the hillwalking route takes a slightly higher route,

goes through the Mam na Seilg and then drops down into Glen Loyne,

just a little bit west of the Loch Loyne Reservoir.

This is the high pass of the Mam na Seilg, which is a natural

divide between the fairly gentle slopes of the East Glenquoich

Deer Forest and these rugged landscapes of Cluanie and Affric.

The big hill ahead of me is Creag a'Mhaim,

and that's the most southerly Munro

on the Munro-rich South Glen Shiel Ridge.

And beyond that lies A'Chralaig,

whose slopes drop down into Glenaffric,

and that's where I'm going.

This is one of the most spectacular corners of Scotland,

dominated by the mountains of Kintail.

My route takes me down Glen Licht and I'm joined by someone who

has spent a lifetime arguing for access to these unspoilt areas.

Marion Shoard's campaigning works, The Theft Of The Countryside

and This Land Is Our Land, reminded me

that our access legislation was the result of a long, long fight.

This particular area was leased by an Anglo-American

who had got a lot of money, called WL Winans, Walter Louis Winans,

and he had a fortune and he paid, I think,

it was about £20,000 a year to rent vast acres and he employed

an army of 35 ghillies to keep people out, so people who wanted to

walk freely and enjoy this landscape as we can today, couldn't.

Was he trying to create a sort of private fiefdom for himself?

I think so, I think he was quite an odd sort of man.

He was very obsessed with actually shooting the deer,

and his particular way of shooting them was that he would get

the ghillies to drive deer into the line of guns and then

shoot them in the way that pheasants and grouse are still shot today.

Sounds to me like wholesale slaughter.

Yeah, it does a bit. It doesn't sound very appealing, does it?

But he was very keen on keeping ordinary people out

and he even went to the extent of seeking an interdict against

a crofter's pet lamb which he said was trespassing on this land.

What sort of time period was this?

Well, this would have been the 1870s, early 1880s and of course

it was at that time that you saw the first attempts to have

legislation to give people a right to walk in these hills in Scotland.

James Bryce MP had come from Scotland, was an MP actually

for a part of London, had got very exercised by the problems down there

and he came back here and he saw the same kind of thing was happening.

He tabled an Access to Mountains Bill in 1884

and he cited the Winans case, for instance,

so this is a really important area in terms of the history of access.

Do you see that sort of access as a human right?

Yes, but I see it as a bit more than a right to be present

in places like this, important as that is, because I do think

as citizens we should have a right of free movement around our country.

I live in England and feel that about the whole of

the United Kingdom, and so the sort of right

of access that you have in Scotland

now seems to me the sort of thing that we should have elsewhere.

-That's vivid, isn't it?

-Yeah, fantastic.

It's carving the mountain. It's quite a spectacular corner.

It is amazing.

There's something about a mountain, a lake,

the environment generally, that somehow shouldn't be owned.

It should be free - the land, the air, the water.

-It's like saying, I own a chunk of the sky.

-That's right. You can't.

-Or I own that cloud.

-Yeah.

You can own a television set, you can own

an item of furniture, but you can't really own this.

You'll get more of a wilderness experience here than you would, say,

if this were south of the border in England or Wales because you're

in no sense here on sufferance, you're not shackled in any way

by somebody who owns the land

saying, "I've got a right to exclude you."

Have you ever thought, Marion, just how you'd react

if someone said to you, "You're not to come to a place like this"?

I just couldn't live if I couldn't touch nature, there's no way.

And if I were really ill, I would want to be out here.

If I got dementia, for instance, I have said to my daughter,

"Just buy me a ticket for the Settle-Carlisle Railway Line

"and sit me on there and I'll go up and down

"and I won't remember what it was like last time,

"so I'll have all this wonderful scenery to see all the time."

But, no, I can't imagine not being able to be close to nature.

On the way from the Scottish Borders, I passed through

a huge variety of landscapes and some of them

have been truly wild and I felt truly wild and at times

I felt quite isolated but in reality I've never been more than

a few miles from a road or a few hours from a centre of population.

But that's all about to change.

I've come down from Kintail into lovely Glen Elchaig in

the Inverinate Forest and I've come into a tract of land which is

truly wild, truly remote and isolated.

If you can imagine starting a walk from Dornie on

the Kyle of Lochalsh road on the West Coast of Scotland,

and traversing Scotland right across to Beauly on the East Coast,

you wouldn't cross a single road on that journey.

And that's the tract of land that I'm about to traverse

for the next couple of days.

It's a tract of land where you have to be truly self-sufficient,

truly self-reliant, it is wild, it is remote and it's probably

as close as we've got in Scotland to genuine wilderness backpacking.

I'm kinda looking forward to it.

I recently read the recollections of a man

who put his family into this area in the 1950s to work as a shepherd.

And he paints a very evocative picture of community life.

When he and other shepherds in the area would spend time herding

the sheep together or driving the cattle over high passes,

cutting the peat or fishing in the loch,

and he makes it sound very, very attractive.

But he eventually had to move away

when the house he was living in was submerged under

the waters of Loch Monar, which was enlarged for hydroelectric purposes.

It just shows that community life in an area like this can be very brief,

things change very, very quickly in the great scale of things.

Well, I've reached the high point of today, this high pass.

One of the attractions of a long walk like this is going over

these high passes, these bealachs, or divides if you like,

the divides between one form of landscape and another.

It's always a nice surprise, wondering what

sort of landscape we are going to be dropping into.

I have this feeling that I'm walking down into what is a great vacuum.

It's like a great bowl that collects the waters

of a thousand hill streams and gathers them

all into what will eventually become the River Ling, which flows down

to Loch Long and the sea.

But I can't shake this feeling that I'm walking down into this vacuum

and it's just going to gobble me up.

From the remote hills,

the trail enters another wild landscape,

the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve.

Founded in 1951, it's the very first such area in Britain.

'One name is intricately linked to this part of Scotland,

'is that of Dick Balharry.

'Dick spent his lifetime as a conservationist

'and his work as warden of Beinn Eighe in the 1960s

'was ground breaking.'

The reserve at that time was seen as an outdoor laboratory for scientists

to come and look at this whole 10,000 acres and at that time there

were something like, oh, perhaps

20 bylaws that were imposed on this land

that were an impediment to people going out there and enjoying it.

And I so much wanted to change that so took down all of those signs

so that people can then begin to enjoy it because, for me, until

such times as people really knew what this was all about,

we would not get the political climate at street level

to do the things we are doing today.

I can remember the first time I visited Torridon myself,

it just overwhelmed me, I almost lost the power of speech,

I'd never seen anything like it.

What was it like when you first visited Torridon?

My first visit to Torridon was on a bicycle when I was 13 years old

and I biked all the way from Dundee

and I was just completely bowled over by it.

Because I'd never seen mountains like that before.

That was the time when I thought, "This is going to be my life,"

as it were and that was embedded in me from that time on.

Every time I come here, you know you're going to learn something new.

Under every stone. What's the beetle that just crossed

the road in front of you? What's that butterfly? What's that moth?

It just goes on and on and that's the wonder of the natural world

because regardless of how long you've been doing this or where

you've been doing it, there is so, so much more that we can learn

in the short time that we are on this earth.

Cameron, we've got to look at this. Very, very beautiful lichens.

Oh, look at that! All this colouration, that's lichen?

Every one of them - the brown, that bluey, the grey,

there's a different one there, and the yellow and to think that we

can learn so much from aging those, going right back to the Ice Age.

-Really?

-And you know we had about a half a mile of ice above us here.

Living like a gem, just is beautiful.

That's one of the things about Torridon, they're the oldest rocks

in the world. Can you guess an age of that bit of rock?

Simply say millions because once you start stating the years...

That's right.

When we were attached to the American coastline

and we split off then it would cool down

and that's when all this would have originated.

Isn't this absolutely superb?

I remember, Cameron, coming in here in 1963

and I came in this direction,

I'd seen it on a map before and I was hunting all this area looking

for, particularly golden eagles, but when I came over here and saw these

mountains and the big tor up here.

Always seen this one as the sleeping giant

cos when you see it coming from Kyle of Lochalsh you see this

sort of profile of the sleeping giant.

It's just absolutely magnificent.

And, of course, we did see eagles

and they were doing quite well at that time here, too.

'From the high pass of Corrie Lair it's downhill

'now into the heart of the Beinn Eighe Nature Reserve.

'We've made a short detour to look at some of the natural woodland

'regeneration which is central to Dick's philosophy.'

There are two ways we can get this sort of regeneration.

One is by reduction of grazing pressure

or we can string a fence round.

And this tree has had a really tough life in the heather.

But then the fence was put in and gradually the tree has grown

and not been browsed.

In scientific terms, how important is it for us to have more trees?

This is a remnant that is a one-off there is a few others

but they're small, they're not big enough in order to give

the ecological value that we really know.

The concept of this is in fact to link up

the pinewoods across the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve and round

the corner in Loch Maree to give connectiveness so that the species

that live and enhance this wood also grow all the way around there.

Looking across Glen Torridon here at Beinn Eighe itself,

what are your memories of that particular mountain, Dick?

Oh, just... The second day I was in charge of

Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve,

I went up there and I never felt such humility, going along the

ridge there, this beautiful ridge and looking down,

looking at it all and think,

"Hey, Dick, you've got something to do with this place now

"and you're responsible."

'I'm now in that remote country between Loch Maree

'and Little Loch Broom the eastern edge of the Letterewe wilderness.

'Dominating the horizon is my favourite mountain - An Teallach.'

I'm hoping to catch up with a couple of friends close to here and

they've given me directions to where they'll be. They said,

"Follow the track and turn down the hill at the big marker stone."

I think this is it. "Downhill and across the river," they said.

'One half of this partnership is well known

'but the other is equally vital for its success.'

Well, it's Hugh Prior and Son! Colin, how are you?

-Mr McNeish, lovely to see you.

-Good to see you. How are you?

-Very well.

Good. Tell me,

we are in this huge landscape one of the best landscapes of Scotland, wide

open views and you're tucked away in a wee hollow here.

-What are you doing?

-Well, Cameron, I came across this tree.

It's like a national treasure.

Have a look at it, it's an old alder tree

that's obviously been struck by lightning or a storm,

and there's this rowan that's taken root in the crown of the tree.

Colin Prior is one of the world's leading landscape photographers.

His panoramic images feature fleeting moments of light

that few have managed to capture.

They're the result of meticulous planning and preparation

and long days and nights in the hills in every conceivable sort of weather.

Now his photography is taking a new direction.

I've spent most of my life photographing these big panoramas,

and often it's taken me one, two or three years

to get the right conditions to get that specific shot.

But once I've done that, that rat that lives inside your stomach

and gnaws away at it from inside

'and forces you up the mountain at these unsociable hours,

'it quietens off a bit.'

So what you're saying is you're just getting too old to climb to the top?

Exactly, exactly. This is a softer option.

But I am fascinated by the relationships

between the elements of the natural world,

and that's really what I'm trying to capture here.

Well, you showed me your tree, which I think is very special.

I want to show you something that's very special to me,

so I think we'd better move on now.

It strikes me what we have here

is something that's quite a unique relationship in photography -

a father-son team taking photographs.

And Hugh, you... Seems to me, you do the hard work.

You carry all the gear. What's some of the highlights

that you remember taking photographs together?

I do recall, on the Horns of Aragon,

we sat for three hours at minus 16, waiting on the sun setting.

And I was shouting, "Take it now, take it now!",

and he was saying, "No, there's no light on the peak."

"Take it now, take it now!" "There's no light in the foreground..."

Until we got it right.

And within half an hour of that, it was pitch black,

we had head torches on, we had crampons on, and we had to descend.

We had dropped a pack of film, which slid down the path.

-We found it on the way down in the headlight torch, unharmed.

-Lucky.

But there was another instance when we went on to Beinn Anicka.

We had two tripods, we had a camera called a Seitz Roundshot,

plus my usual panoramic gear, plus the camping equipment,

and we got to the top, set up our tent,

set up the cameras and waited for the light to drop,

and just at the end of the day,

I pulled out a bottle of whisky from the rucksack,

and my father said to me, "You didn't carry that up here?"

And I said, "No, you did!"

THEY LAUGH

There you go, lads, that's what I wanted to show you.

As far as I'm concerned,

this is the finest view in the Scottish National Trail.

I just think it's an unusual aspect

of what is certainly my favourite mountain.

-What do you think of it?

-Oh, it's just breathtaking.

It's these profiles which the west coast here are so renowned for.

It adds drama.

I'm going to shoot with this panoramic camera,

which was one of the first panoramic cameras that I bought,

and it's still using roll film.

It gets four shots.

Four shots to one film?

Yeah, one film. It's a bit like driving a Bentley, I'm told.

But the reason I continue to use this camera

is because of the aesthetic that it creates,

it can't quite be replicated in a digital environment.

Yes, you can use stitching to create panoramas,

but for me, photography is about capturing that single moment.

Take me through the process

of taking one of your prize-winning photographs.

Well, the whole key is about composition,

and it's about trying to get the graphics of the image to work.

The big mistake that many photographers make

is they try and get it all in.

But the converse is true, you need to be thinking,

"What can I take away from this viewpoint to make it stronger?"

So what I'm going to try and do here

is make sure that I've got no extraneous trees

or bits of foliage coming into the shot,

and there's just a lovely, simple shape up there,

which is going to give me an image that's really powerful.

SHUTTER CLICKS

There we go, point scored.

HE LAUGHS I wish I could just shoot so easily.

LAUGHTER

I'm happy to admit it, my snaps -

point and squirt - just aren't in the same league as Colin's.

'I'm wandering up Glen Oykel.

'In Viking times, this was the boundary

'between the Pictish lands of Cat -

'what we now know as Sutherland and Caithness -

'and the old province of Ross.

'There's a real sense of northness here.

'Indeed, there's less than 60 miles to my destination at Cape Wrath.'

It's starting to feel like the final leg

of my long walk through Scotland.

I'd like to think there'll be a lot of people

who will want to walk the 470 miles of the Scottish National Trail

in one long, adventurous journey, but you don't have to.

You can break it down into bite-size chunks, into bite-size sections,

'and the logical sections are from the Borders to Edinburgh,

'from Edinburgh to Glasgow, from Glasgow to Kingussie,

'and from Kingussie, north to Cape Wrath.'

And even within those sections, you can break it down into subsections,

if you like, into the sort of bite size that you particularly want.

And I quite like the notion

of thinking of the Scottish National Trail as an artery or a river,

an artery with blood veins going off to either side,

where you can just leave the trail for a day or so,

and climb a couple of Monros or calduits,

or leave the tributaries of that river,

and let them take you up into the little hollows

that are unexplored around the linear route of the trail.

No matter how you choose to walk the Scottish National Trail,

I can always guarantee it will be a tremendous experience.

But if you do decide to walk it in the one, all 470 miles,

you'll find that the accumulation,

the total sum of all the experiences that you've enjoyed on the way

'will become something very, very special.'

There's something lovely

about following a river right to its source.

And I'm following the River Oykel up to its headwaters,

its lonely Sutherland Corrie,

and it's great to be back in Sutherland again.

It's a county I think has its own ambience, its own atmosphere,

its own character. It's just good to be back here.

The great natural showpiece of Sutherland

is indisputably Sandwood Bay,

and that's where I'm heading on this kind of grey and wet morning.

I'm in the company of Cathel Morrison,

who's the conservation officer for the John Muir Trust.

But more importantly, Cathel was actually born and bred here.

Now, Cathel, Sandwood Bay to me has always been a very special place,

but I just can't put my finger on why.

It's that sort of indefinable thing,

what makes it so special. Is it a special place for you as well?

Oh, indeed, yes.

It's always had a touch of magic,

and each time I go there it's never really the same.

It's always changing and always different, but...

Always that feeling of continuity, too,

that people have lived there in the past,

and you can't put your finger on it.

I'm delighted to hear you say that as a local man,

because I've sometimes felt, I've maybe been a wee bit fanciful,

but there's that undefinable thing that I just can't put my finger on.

Without a doubt.

Even the old shepherds spoke of this,

'this feeling they had as they walked through Sandwood Bay,

'and it lifted when they came up onto the track.'

Well, I think the weather gods have been kind to us.

After what looked like a horrible morning.

I've noticed, Cathel, there's something about this beach -

when the moorlands are looking quite sombre and grey,

there's a light here,

it always looks as if there's a big sunbeam on it.

Indeed. I think it's the really nice light-coloured sand

that reflects any light that's available,

but also maybe it's another little magic bit Sandwood possesses.

You look at an area like this, and you think,

"This is so unchanging, it's here, it's static,"

'but I suppose an environment like this is constantly evolving.'

That's right. It's quite deceiving.

Thousands of tonnes of sand move almost on a daily basis

when the weather is quite severe. It can...

One time, the river came running halfway across the beach here

into the sea, and come down a week later,

and it might be going down at the far end.

And the sand dunes, of course, are always changing.

Of course, and that's what basically keeps it all together.

If we didn't have the marram grass which stabilises the sand dunes,

who knows what kind of beach it would be?

What we have had is odd, extreme storms like thunderstorms,

which we'll see at the far end of the beach.

We've had some major washouts and also severe gales

where you can get the leading edge of the marram grass

being completely washed away.

For somebody who has never been here before,

how would you describe Sandwood Bay to them?

I remember having three postcards in my kitchen, up on the wall,

and one was of Table Mountain,

the other was one of part of the Great Barrier Reef,

and the third one was of Sandwood Bay,

and Sandwood Bay really stood out, looked as good as any of them.

It may be on a smaller scale, but it's still really, really special.

Cathel and I have talked about the size and scale of Sandwood Bay.

We've talked about the quality of the light

and the contrast of the light.

I could go on for hours about the sound of the pounding surf,

or the raucous call of the seabirds.

But none of that gets close to that special quality

that is Sandwood Bay.

For that, you've really got to come here yourself.

You know, after walking so far on good tracks and trails,

this final dozen miles between Sandwood Bay and Cape Wrath

is a real sting in the tail,

because anybody who knows what coastal walking is like,

it's up and down and up and down, but it's actually not bad, is it?

And if you look very carefully,

you can see across there to the skyscrapers of New York.

It's pretty good.

And theoretically, I should be almost there.

All the way from the Scottish Borders,

I've had this beacon shining in my mind,

guiding me north and north-west,

and I've been dreaming at night of coming over a final rise

and seeing that 120-foot obelisk of the Cape Wrath Lighthouse.

But now that I'm within a mile of where it should be,

I can't see it.

It's strange, you know?

In the whole distance from Kirk Yetholm, I haven't been lost once.

It would be quite ironic if I finally get lost in the last mile.

Hey! There it is. Journey's end. Fantastic.

And since the last time I was here,

I believe there's been an addition of a cafe.

Let's hope it's open.

Ohh! Wonderful. Good man.

You know, John, I have this morbid fear

that I'd get to the end of a long-distance walk

where there's supposed to be a cafe, and it will be shut. THEY LAUGH

We're open 24 hours a day. There you go.

-Oh, is that for me?

-Yes.

-Oh, fantastic.

The Cape Wrath Trail.

Oh, brilliant. Well, listen, I tell you what...

-I've been wearing this for six weeks, so...

-Try that one on.

Getting a wee bit niffy, so a nice fresh hat.

I'll just put that one on right now, that's brilliant.

So you're open 24 hours a day?

Yeah, we're open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

My wife does all the baking in the cafe.

Mmm.

That's nice. At the end of a long walk, that's what you want.

So, tell me, give me an idea of what it's like here in winter.

We get some severe storms come through in February.

120mph sort of stuff, so quite dramatic.

-Do you never think, "Oh, this is...", you know?

-A bit insane?

A bit insane. You said it, I didn't want to say that,

-but you've said it.

-Yeah. You get used to it.

We've been up here five years.

It gets easier every year, sort of thing.

Now, you and your wife became almost of celebrity status

a couple of years ago during that hard spell of snow.

She went off to London to get the Christmas shopping,

and couldn't get back for five weeks.

-Five weeks?!

-Yeah. Snowed in.

Once the snow gets down on this road,

it's not a good venture to try and get down there.

And tell me, did the turkey stay frozen?

Yeah. We had it on the 22nd of January,

it was anti-climatic, to say the least.

There's only a few steps left, and then I'll have finished.

I'll have walked from one end of Scotland to the other.

My own personal trek will be over,

but the Scottish National Trail is just beginning.

On October 30th, 2012, my dream of a national walk was realised

when it was officially opened by the First Minister, Alex Salmond.

APPLAUSE

I'm not the world's greatest rambler,

but my late mother certainly was,

or one of the greatest ramblers in Scotland.

She was somebody who could perhaps even out-ramble Cameron McNeish,

and she would be absolutely delighted

looking down on today's events.

Many congratulations for bringing this to reality,

and many thanks for inviting me to perform the honours

of declaring the Scottish National Trail from the Borders to Cape Wrath

well and truly inaugurated!

APPLAUSE

That's an auspicious start for our new National Trail,

a launch that's ensured many thousands of folk

in Scotland and far beyond are aware of what we have to offer.

The overwhelming sensation

at the end of a long-distance walk like this

is normally one of delight tinged with sadness.

Sadness that you've finished what has been a great experience,

and the sense of exhilaration and euphoria tends to come later on,

when you get a chance to think of the whole thing,

when all the jumble of thoughts in your mind are all gelled together.

But even at this point, at the end of this walk,

there are certain instances that stand out in my memory.

Waking up in Kirk Yetholm to snow on the ground,

and then walking over wide-open hill in wintry conditions

was terrific.

And for a mountain man like me, it perhaps sounds odd to say

that I had a huge sense of pleasure in walking the canal tow paths

between Glasgow and Edinburgh,

a green channel going through central Scotland.

Following the lines of drovers and marauding armies and vagabonds

up through the central Highlands was incredible.

The gloriously beautiful empty miles of the northern Highlands

is something you just won't see anywhere else.

And what about this as an end point to any long-distance walk?

Someone once said to me that the great difficulty in a long walk

is knowing where to stop.

There's no doubt here - you just can't go any further.

But I think above all that what stands out...

The Scottish National Trail for me is the new sense of identity I have

for being Scottish,

and to walk through a country like Scotland from end to end

is an immense privilege.

And the only way to really experience that

is for you to come and do it yourself.

So let's finish this walk

by saying what I say at the end of all these walks -

the Scottish National Trail

is a trail that I'd recommend to you with more than a passion!

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