In this third and final episode of Scotland Revealed geographer and presenter Vanessa Collingridge travels east from the Cairngorm Mountains to Aberdeen, then down the East Coast to explore more of the country’s beautiful scenery and delve into its past.
The programme starts with a story which began around 250 million years ago, when masses of granite rock burst through the earth’s crust to form mega mountains, 20 times bigger than the ones we see today.
The Cairngorms is still Britain’s highest land mass; with four of the five highest peaks in the UK, the range reaches heights of over 1300 metres.
Though the mountains seem serene and enticing when Scotland Revealed looks down on them, in snowy sub-zero temperatures the summits are treacherous. Vanessa finds out the dangers first-hand from John Lyle, who has been a volunteer with the Cairngorm Mountain rescue team for 20 years.
The travels continue with Vanessa’s first-ever lesson in fly fishing on the River Dee courtesy of Ian Murray, who knows the river inside out. It’s believed this graceful sport was invented here around one hundred years ago.
Today, salmon and trout fishing is a twelve million pound industry and last year 6000 fish were caught on the Dee, making it the most successful salmon river in Scotland.
Further downstream is Balmoral Estate, the Scottish home of Her Majesty The Queen. This stunning 50,000 acre estate and castle has been in royal hands since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert bought the land in 1848.
Nestled between the Dee and the river Don, Aberdeen is a coastal city - and Scotland’s third-largest city - with a bay that serves as a gateway to the North Sea.
This provides a fishing industry, and a lucrative oil and gas empire. Vanessa visits the Granite City to find out how Aberdeen remains the “Oil Capital of Europe”, explores Union Street and discovers the local source of the unusual stone that gives the city its nickname, Rubislaw Quarry.
Scotland’s East Coast may feature sweeping beaches, ruined castles and dramatic cliffs, but it is also the site of some of the most phenomenal feats of engineering - and just off the coast at Arbroath lies one of the seven wonders of the industrial world: the Bell Rock Lighthouse.
It has a place in the history books alongside the Brooklyn Bridge, the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. At thirty metres high this white stone tower was the brainchild of celebrated lighthouse engineer, Robert Stevenson. The Bell Rock is now an unmanned automated lighthouse, but Vanessa meets the very last lighthouse keeper John Boath, who was stationed there for nearly four years
For almost 200 years it has stood watch on Inch Cape Island, a treacherous rocky outcrop eleven miles off the coast of Arbroath and Dundee. In the 1700s these rocks were wrecking around six ships every winter, and by 1805 engineer Robert Stevenson was charged with the job of putting an end to this horrific loss of life.
Then there’s the Forth Bridge, a design classic a national symbol of enterprise and imagination. Made of out of steel, the monument to brute strength was once described as a fairytale of science. It’s fitting to finish off the journey at the incredible bridge.
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