Professor Iain Stewart Making Scotland's Landscape accessible
The Scottish landscape comes under the spotlight in the new season of programming by BBC Scotland. Jack McKeown talked to television geologist Professor Iain Stewart, who presents the landmark series Making Scotland's Landscape.
Professor Iain Stewart presenting Making Scotland's Landscapes.
- By Jack McKeown
- Published in the Courier : 19.10.10
- Published online : 23.10.10 @ 08.13pm
Look out of the window at the countryside. Think of your favourite place to walk the dog. Picture trips you've taken to the Highlands and Islands.
How much of that scenery is truly wild? Unless you've pictured a beach, the answer is almost none of it.
"You think of Scotland as this great wilderness," Professor Iain Stewart says.
"Scotland is sold on this premise that it's a pristine, untouched environment but it's a myth. For as long as humans have been around in Scotland they've been changing the landscape.
"For its size, it's now one of the most changed and adapted landscapes in the world."
Born in East Kilbride, Iain (45) is professor of Geoscience Communication at Plymouth University. Over the last few years he's presented numerous television programmes including Journeys from the Centre of the Earth and How the Earth Made Us.
The last six months have seen him put together two series of programmes as part of BBC Scotland's Landscape season.
Making Scotland's Landscape is the first of these, and begins on Sunday.
Rediscovering Scotland
"I got to spend six months doing a road trip around Scotland and rediscovering it. I left Scotland in the mid 1980s and my work has taken me all around the planet, so it was nice to explore home after all this time.
"It was interesting to go back and see that all the big issues I've been investigating in far-flung places apply just as much to Scotland as anywhere else."
Finding a swathe of Scotland that contains a truly natural landscape, one that has never been altered by man's influence, is no easy task, Iain reckons.
"If you drive through the Highlands there's no one living there really. Yet you still have all these great plantations. There are dams and reservoirs. A lot of our rivers feed reservoirs or hydro-electric schemes. Almost nothing is unchanged."
The five-part series begins with Iain on a group of protected islands on Loch Maree in Wester Ross, which are the last remnant of a forest that once covered half of Scotland.
"There were lots of reasons why our forests declined, but we went through a period of extensive man-made deforestation and over the last couple of hundred years have been attempting to recloak Scotland.
Forests
"You had the Planter Dukes of Atholl, who grew larch for building ships. But then ships started being made out of metal and that came to an end. Then when world war one started we didn't have enough wood so the Forestry Commission was set up.
"It's only over the last couple of decades the Forestry Commission has realised we don't need wood to fight wars anymore and have started to change their focus towards leisure and recreation facilities for walkers, mountain bikers and so on."
Regular Courier readers will be aware a scheme to build a wood product burning biomass plant in Dundee's docks is currently afoot. It would see woodchip shipped in from Europe to be burned for ‘green' energy, a process some observers suggest undermines the environmental argument.
"At the moment we're a net exporter of wood, but if we build a few of these power stations we will become an importer," Iain continues.
"You see all these issues — climate change, limited natural resources and so on — in the news but people don't know the background to them. Sometimes their roots go back hundreds of years or more.
"We're not offering any solutions in these programmes, we just want people to know the history of it."
08.41pm - 22.11.2010 Eloise Duckworth - Paxford, Gloucestershire Report This
Dear Professor Stewart<br /> Thank you for making such a beautiful programme. I am loving every moment. Eloise
10.50am - 23.11.2010 Karol J Gajewski - Accrington, United Kingdom Report This
Iain Stewart's series is very much like the curate's egg: good in parts.<br />He's at his best when explaining geology and environmental change. He is at his worst when dabbling in history - loaded words pop up like gunshots. I lost count of how many times 'posh' appeared in last night's episode.
07.10pm - 24.11.2010 walt allan - colne, uk Report This
iain missed the chance, to reply with the perfect answer about the scots being fed on oats, famously, the reply was "thats why we have fine people and you have fine horses"
03.35pm - 27.11.2010 Catherine Cameron Buchanan - Edinburgh, Scotland,U.K. Report This
My husband and I greatly enjoy Prof. Stewart's programmes and find them both enlightening and entertaining. We have recommended them to our sons and their families in New Jersey and Virginia; they in turn are passing on the good news to others.
02.58pm - 05.12.2010 Wendy White - Northampton, England Report This
I love this programme. Professor Iain Stewart has a lovely soothing voice and presence and is an asset to the BBC as a presenter, as is Neil Oliver in Coast. Must be their Scottish accents. I'm English but would love to visit some of the lovely sites I've seen on these programmes.
02.59pm - 29.12.2010 Mrs. J. Cowan - Burlington, Ontario, Canada Report This
We are currently watching "How the Earth Changed" by Prof. Iain Stewart-what a wonderful presenter! Living in Canada we hope it won't be too long before we see all of his programmes! <br />I lived in Inverness, Invergordon and Aberdeen,so it made me quite homesick! Thank you Prof. Stewart!
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