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.
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.”
Making Scotland’s Landscape is split into various themes wood, earth, sea, water and air and filming took place from February to August.
“We were making the water programme in February, in the middle of the big freeze.
“We were telling everyone that Scotland has water everywhere, yet all the ice meant the rivers and streams were down to just a trickle. It was a little bit awkward.”
When Making Scotland’s Landscape comes to an end next month, it will be followed up by Men of Rock, which is also presented by Iain.
“Making Scotland’s Landscape is my going back to the early stuff I did when I was just starting out, looking at the relationship between society and environment.
“Men of Rock is my thing it’s the science I do on a daily basis and I wanted to get the Scottish heritage side of it out there.
“There’s a tremendous appetite for understanding the planet just now and so much of what we do know comes from Scotland.”
Since the world was first mapped people noticed the suspiciously neat way in which various continents’ coastlines fitted together, as if they were pieces in some kind of massive jigsaw.
But no one had ever been able to suggest a plausible way that such huge land masses could possibly move, so for centuries it was shrugged off as coincidence.
“Arthur Holmes, an Edinburgh University professor, was the first to suggest a plausible way by which the continents could move,” Iain explains.
“He used physics to describe the mechanisms by which they could, over millions of years, move great distances.
“He did this in the 30s and 40s, long before the field of plate tectonics developed in the 1960s.”
In spite of having travelled to some of the most remote and inaccessible places on earth and seen sites that few others will, making the series was not without its moments of wonder for Iain.
“Early in filming we went to Loch Maree. You go over this lip and then the whole loch is laid out before you. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in my life.
“And I’d never been to Glen Affric before, it was just amazing. You do forget we have some of the most stunning landscapes in the world.
“What I think is nice is that Scotland’s people have a real affinity with their environment. Most of us live in the central belt but we all look to the Highlands as part of our heritage and something we can proudly show off to visitors. If we get a few days without rain and midges that is.”Making Scotland’s Landscape starts on Sunday, October 24, at 8pm on BBC1 Scotland. Men of Rock will be on BBC2 Scotland in late November.