Coast (2005) s02e03 Episode Script
Arran to Gretna
1 The gorgeous island of Arran is the first stop on our journey along the southwest coast of Scotland, via Dumfries and Galloway and all the way down to the border with England.
This is my home patch, the coastline where I grew up.
This is a landscape I love.
We're taking in jagged mountains, ancient volcanoes, rocky headlands and vast mudflats.
And best of all, Coast hasn't been here before.
It's all virgin territory! Alice Roberts is exploring how Scottish sand dunes Firing! .
.
tamed Swedish high explosive.
Nick Crane is searching for the hard evidence that links a tiny island to the Olympic Games.
Mark Horton is conjuring up musical memories of a melancholy sound we've lost from our coastline.
FOGHORN SOUNDS And I'll be rekindling the spirit of my youth - although it's not quite as I remember it! Welcome to Scotland's Deep South.
Today's journey is taking us to Scotland's forgotten corner, between the mountains of Arran and the English border at Gretna.
Even as a native Scot, I find the island of Arran utterly breathtaking.
It's hard to believe that all this rugged magnificence is only a stone's throw from the urban sprawl of Glasgow.
Over two million people live across the Firth of Clyde from Arran, just a 55-minute ferry ride away.
For an isolated island it's very well connected.
That's the sort of contrast that Arran takes in its stride, with its dramatic variety of landscapes.
Jagged peaks tower above peaceful shores.
Apparently Arran owes its mountainous landscape to the time when, 60 million years ago, two vast continents that had been stuck together started to drift apart.
And Scotland was right on the fault line.
The continent that would become America and Greenland went one way, Europe went the other, and in between the Earth's crust was stretched to breaking point.
That created volcanoes.
And it's molten rock that shaped Arran's spectacular mountains.
The upshot of all this wild geology is that Arran's become a very popular place to be - and not just for tourists.
Arran has the feel of a wild island refuge.
With Glasgow only 30 miles away as the crow flies, is it any wonder that many mainland folk want to make it their own bolt-hole from the rat race? Fiona Laing, who's giving me a lift down Arran's west coast, couldn't resist the island's pull.
She uprooted here 13 years ago.
Like many coasters, she juggles umpteen jobs, from fire-fighting to farm help.
And she delivers the newspapers.
Fiona's learned that people might come to Arran for peace and quiet, but they like to do it on their own terms.
Is that you? That's me finished.
So what's this with the newspapers? I thought island life was about getting away from all of that.
By and large it is, but there's a strange obsession.
I've heard of people that wouldn't come to live here cos they don't get their newspaper till after 11 o'clock in the winter, and that stops them coming.
I guess getting away from it all is different for everyone, but some things you just have to get used to.
It's an island, and every now and then it's truly an island, because there is no communication by boat.
That's it.
You're stuck here.
You get on with it, and I like that.
I like to know the weather's still in control sometimes.
And what are the qualities that make the perfect islander? Waterproof? Impervious to rain and wind? It's not always like this.
Most of the time! No, not always like this.
You just have to relax and accept things the way they happen, and don't be so headstrong about doing things.
And, because it's a small community everybody interacts a bit more with each other.
So maybe that's the quality that makes it a wee bit special? Yeah.
A different kind of person, a special kind of person, lives here.
I'd be foolish to think of life here as idyllic.
Making a living and coping with the weather, it's no piece of cake.
And yet Arran reminds me of what I love about the coast from here down to England.
It feels as remote and wild as anywhere in Scotland.
That lighthouse on the tiny island of Pladda off Arran's southern tip leads the way towards Scotland's southwest coast.
The coastline has a fascinating mix of people and landscape and nature and industry.
It's going to be a great journey.
We're swinging around Arran's southern tip to strike back over the Firth of Clyde towards the mainland of Ayrshire.
Along the mainland coast, a sprinkling of towns and industries seems washed along the shore.
The isolated, coastal scrubland at Ardeer looks good for nothing.
How many people would spot this as the perfect location to found a worldwide business empire? One 19th-century visionary did, and his legacy is still with us today.
Incredibly, this desolate spot was once the site of the world's largest explosives factory.
But why here? Transforming this bleak wilderness into an industrial powerhouse would take someone with drive, ingenuity and imagination.
That man was Alfred Nobel - not Scottish but Swedish.
Nobel's era was the 19th century, a time of empire-building that would shape the modern world.
Canals, tunnels and mines needed an explosive far more powerful than gunpowder.
Nitroglycerine fitted the bill.
But nitroglycerine was a fickle liquid that would blow up without warning.
Many people were killed or maimed using it.
The race was on to harness its power safely.
Alfred Nobel and his family threw themselves at the challenge, but in 1864 Alfred's younger brother, Emil, was killed by the deadly explosive.
Alfred was determined to tame the explosive.
His breakthrough was to take the liquid nitroglycerine, which was very dangerous, mix it with powder and make it into solid which could be made into sticks like this - dynamite.
It was much safer to handle and much safer to transport, and it was to make Nobel a very, very rich man.
With dynamite, Nobel had invented a winner - bangs and bucks guaranteed! The whole industrialised world was at his feet.
So why did Nobel end up here in Scotland? John Dolan was working at Nobel's Scottish factory when it was still making dynamite.
Alfred Nobel wanted desperately to get into the United Kingdom.
Why? Because the UK was the centre of the British Empire.
Anything from Britain had access to the whole international market, and he wanted to get into it.
But what Nobel needed were people who'd invest in this risky business.
He found them in Glasgow.
And they, being Glasgow people with an eye to where the good things lay, saw in his dynamite, really, a magnificent investment opportunity.
So they said, "Look, we'll invest in this, but not only that, "we'll try and find you a place where you can make it.
" So they found this place? They found this place.
The whole thing was a beautiful set-up - access to the sea, in the central belt of Scotland, isolated.
It was an ideal place for explosives.
A hundred years ago, this was the biggest explosives plant in the world - a vast web of buildings manned by a workforce which in time grew to 13,000.
It seemed almost haphazard - hundreds of wooden buildings scattered amongst the sand dunes that rippled along the shoreline, each one packed with high explosive.
Clearly this was not a typical factory.
The sand dunes seemed to be a key part of Nobel's plan.
They're everywhere - all pretty overgrown though.
But, while some are clearly natural, others are anything but! The shapes are just too regular.
Nobel didn't just take what nature gave him here in Ayrshire.
He decided to improve on it.
He built his own dunes.
David Pittam is an explosives expert.
He's going to help me work out just how Nobel re-shaped the coast's landscape to protect his workers and his investment.
David is going to blow up two boxes - miniature versions of Nobel's wooden factory huts.
The blue box represents a hut surrounded by dunes .
.
the red box a wooden hut in a landscape without dunes.
Firing! My God! That worked! I'm glad I was wearing ear defenders.
It's quite a pulse you're seeing at this distance.
You can imagine a full building with thousands of kilograms in.
It would make a fair old bang.
And the red box is gone! Right, blue box time, then.
Blue box.
This time, our scaled-down wooden factory building is surrounded by sand dunes to match.
Firing! That was significantly different.
When the red box went, it went horizontally.
That one, there was much more vertical projection, wasn't there? The role of these re-shaped dunes in the factory is clear.
Bits of our exploding blue box were either sent harmlessly upwards, or stopped dead by the sand bags.
But bits of the red box flew off in all directions, and in Nobel's factory they could have hit other buildings and triggered a lethal chain reaction.
There's loads of little bits.
A big bit over here.
A bit of red.
All this is red.
There's thousands of splinters.
There's fragments of it everywhere.
And this is just so different.
When you come over to the blue box, it's all here.
Or practically all of it.
It's been contained by the bags.
There's certainly a lot of it here, yes.
Our mini experiment has shown that Nobel's idea of surrounding a building with sand does actually work, it does contain the blast.
Yes, it's a good a principle and we've shown it works.
Yeah.
Shall we do it again? Again? Why not? The coastal landscape itself was the key to protecting lives at Nobel's dynamite factory here in Scotland, and the secret of its global success.
The factory exported explosives across the world and, although Nobel never intended them to be used for war, it didn't stop him being seen as a merchant of death.
Before he died, he tried to set the record straight by leaving money in his will for the legacy for which he is best remembered, the Nobel Peace Prize.
A sandy coast like this is made for golf.
Every step south can be measured in lost golf balls.
None more so than at Royal Troon.
The links here are whipped by the onshore Atlantic wind, and the undulating terrain makes playing notoriously tricky.
A day's golfing will set you back a couple of hundred quid.
As for membership - sorry, there's a waiting list.
But behind those hallowed links, on the municipal course of Troon itself, local teenagers with a tenner to spare can enjoy the truly democratic game for which Scotland is famous.
Hi, I'm Louise.
This is Kate.
And we live in Troon, the home of golf.
I think Troon is so recognisable because of Royal Troon, which is where the Open is played.
All the most famous golfers in the world, like Tiger Woods, come here.
If you say you're from Troon, people know where you are, which is a nice feeling.
Louise and I can't play on Royal Troon, because we're not members.
I don't think we really want to be, because it's really expensive, and there's huge waiting lists.
We're happy just playing on the municipal course.
Nice shot, Kate! Playing golf in Troon becomes difficult because of the winds.
Because of the sea, it's so much stronger than inland.
You have to think about what you're doing.
The minute you hit it you know if it's good or not.
Stop! Just stop! She jumps up and down and stomps on the ground a lot - it's quite funny.
If you combined Kate and my shots, then they would be the perfect shot, because I seem to want to hit them quite far, but then Kate's are right down the middle.
And did you know that if you play 18 holes of golf, then you burn 900 calories, which is the same as a Big Mac? There you go - Louise's random fact of the day! If the coast is the point where the sea meets the land, what do you call a place where the sea and the land meet the air? Its name is Prestwick.
An international airport just where you'd least expect it.
Miles from the big cities, you'd be forgiven for wondering why it's here at all.
But Prestwick Airport has one vital selling point.
Thanks to its unique position on the coast, it's the most reliably fog-free airport in the whole of the United Kingdom.
The stats show Prestwick is blessed with unusually clear skies.
The Met Office say that's because of the islands, hills and headlands surrounding it, which block sea fog from most directions.
That's the reason the airport is so big.
During World War Two, American pilots used fog-free Prestwick as a key refuelling stop.
The military connection has continued right to the present day - a little bit of the USA in Ayrshire.
So in 1960, it was Prestwick Airport's fog-free reputation that brought its most famous visitor, US Army Private 53310761, a humble private better known as The King! Elvis Aaron Presley was heading homewards from 18 months' National Service in Germany.
When he stepped onto the Tarmac at Prestwick, the Sergeant's stripes were still fresh on his uniform.
It was the only time Elvis would ever set foot in Britain.
After just two hours on British soil, Elvis left the building, and the UK, never to return.
Maybe I didn't love you Elvis was just one of many thousands of GIs to pass through Prestwick - so many that their transit to and from the States has left a lasting mark here.
Thanks to that original military investment, Prestwick's become one of the most important air traffic control centres in the world.
If you've ever flown over the Atlantic, there's a good chance your life was in the hands of air traffic controllers in Prestwick.
Tucked away behind the airport tower, this is where it all happens.
Northwest 5-1 resume on navigation.
The controllers here guide nearly a million flights a year between destinations in Europe and North America.
They are responsible for all the aircraft over a quarter of the North Atlantic, before handing over to their colleagues in Canada.
It's the busiest oceanic airspace on the planet.
So, whether you've come from Heathrow, Paris or Berlin, next time you're having your peanuts and tomato juice halfway to America, remember - A Little Less Conversation! Raise a glass to the backroom boys and girls in Prestwick, keeping you safe at 40,000 feet.
Wooded bays and rocky headlands - a Scottish idyll! Yet links across the Pond are here, too.
The splendid apartment at the top of Culzean Castle was once owned by none other than General Eisenhower.
Now anyone can holiday here.
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was given the apartment by the owners of the Culzean estate.
And if you'd just won a world war, this is just the kind of place you'd want to come and relax.
The penthouse was Eisenhower's personal reward in a spirit of thanks from the Scottish nation for his role as leader of the Allied forces.
It offered the General suitably commanding views over the water towards Arran.
But more captivating still is the view to the southwest - Arran's little sister, the perfectly formed, and delightfully named, Ailsa Craig.
Ailsa Craig is a bird sanctuary, long renowned for its population of seabirds, especially gannets.
More recently, puffins are making a comeback, now that the rats that ate their eggs have been ousted from the island.
Ailsa Craig isn't strictly for the birds.
There's plenty to interest people, too.
Nick Crane is on the trail of Ailsa Craig's unlikely treasure.
Believe it or not, within living memory people actually used to live on that tiny island.
They were there to quarry Ailsa Craig's remarkable granite.
Through spring to autumn, the island's lighthouse keepers were joined by a hardy band who worked the rock for shipment back to the mainland.
Hew Girvan knows Ailsa Craig and its rocks intimately from helping his father quarry on the island as a boy.
I'm going back with Hew to discover the secrets of Ailsa Craig.
It does have this very unnatural symmetry to it, rather like a child's drawing of an island or a great bald head sticking up out of the ocean.
It does indeed.
This way, it's a tea cosy shape.
Whereas, if you look at it from down there, or Turnberry Point, it's more of a sugar loaf.
It seems to change shape all the time.
The remarkable shape of the island comes from its turbulent birth.
Like Arran's mountains further north, Ailsa Craig used to be molten rock.
Around 60 million years ago, this cooled, deep within the heart of the volcano.
Surrounded by the sea, the outside of the volcano wore away, leaving behind a hard plug - Ailsa Craig.
Its ancient geology has made this island an El Dorado for enthusiasts of the Scottish sport of curling.
Ailsa Craig's unusually tough granite is perfect for making curling stones.
It was quarrying these that kept Hew's family working on Ailsa Craig for nearly a century.
Can I pick it up? Yes, by all means.
Cor! It weighs a ton! 40 pounds exactly.
Wow! That's beautiful! Isn't that amazing! That's the common Ailsa or Ailsite.
The thing is, I'm used to granite being very rough and hard.
This is so smooth! It polishes up very well.
That's the running part of the stone.
That's the bit that slides on the ice? Slides on the ice, yeah.
Beautiful! You wouldn't think that a hunk of rough granite hauled out of the top of a volcano would turn into something like that! And now we're taking one of your stones home.
Taking it back! Back to its island.
Back to its island.
Hard to believe that such a smooth object came from this rugged place.
As we get closer to the granite, I get a sense of just how hard quarrying must have been on Ailsa Craig.
Yet for four generations, Hew's family owed their living here to curling stones.
This is the tenant's cottage which Eventually, our family lived there.
Your family lived there? Our family lived there.
But it's sad to see it's gone to rack and ruin.
What was it like living on the island? My times were very happy times, especially when the lighthouse keepers and their families were staying here.
We used to enjoy ourselves.
In fact, further up here's where we had our cricket pitch.
There was little time for cricket.
This is Hew's father, seen in 1947.
His daily life was tough - chiselling and blasting the living rock.
EXPLOSION Day after day, Hew's family rolled away the stones of Ailsa Craig for export around the world to wherever curling was played.
Tough work that left its mark on them.
So this is the quarry here, Hew, one of the sources of Ailsa Craig granite.
This particular granite cooled very fast, so the crystals didn't grow large, which is why it has these qualities, I guess.
Yes, indeed.
Hard graft.
My father used to lose stones in weight, just with working in the heat.
In fact, working with the stone, it being so rough, you would have no fingerprint left, because they were worn through.
It wore out the end of your fingers? The end of your fingers, because of the roughness of the granite.
But now I'm soft.
You're a city boy! A city boy now, I'm afraid! After 200 years, this harsh way of life finally came to an end in 1971.
It was no longer economic to live and to work on Ailsa Craig.
But there are still countless unfinished slabs lying at the foot of the cliffs.
And, because of the rock's unrivalled toughness, for many competitors they're the curling stones of choice for the Winter Olympics! So curling stones will be coming from Ailsa Craig for years to come.
Our journey takes us on towards the Mull of Galloway in deepest southwest Scotland.
The Mull sits right between Ireland, England and the Isle of Man.
There's a collision of busy shipping lanes and treacherous seas, so a lighthouse comes as no surprise.
But there's also another, almost forgotten, gem of coastal technology.
The Mull of Galloway is a great place to discover the life-saving story of the lowly foghorn.
FOGHORNS SOUND Alongside so many of Britain's lighthouses sit their less conspicuous companions, the foghorns.
But their low, mournful song has all but disappeared from our coastlines.
Britain's foghorns have been switched off.
FOGHORN SOUNDS For 150 years, every time fog rolled in, the foghorns would call out around the coast.
Their low boom spoke of mystery and hidden dangers.
By the 1980s, electronic navigation was making them all but redundant.
One by one, the foghorns fell silent.
FOGHORN BLASTS But they're not entirely forgotten.
Jim Oliver, lighthouse and foghorn keeper for 38 years, knows the ingenuity required to generate their distinctive, evocative call.
Jim, we associate foghorns with this enormously loud booming sound.
How is that made? Well, it's actually made by compressed air.
And, to get the compressed air, we have all this machinery in the engine room here.
When the horn was in operation, we required two of those engines running, driving the compressors, pumping air through the green pipes and then out through the red pipes and into these receivers.
So these are enormous storage tanks for compressed air? That's exactly what they are.
The space between the blasts allows the engines to pump up air and refill the tanks ready for the next blast.
So each hoot of the foghorn requires the air from all of these tanks.
Yes.
40% of the air from all of these tanks.
This here is the handle that turns the whole thing on.
Once we turn this handle on, the air goes down that pipe and goes off to the foghorn.
Once it gets to the foghorn, there's a clockwork mechanism down there that controls the frequency of the blast.
So once you've turned this on, it's all go.
Unfortunately, we're not allowed to power it up, and that's a shame, because I want to work out how the foghorns came to have such a distinctive call.
FOGHORN BLASTS The man who usually gets the credit is Scots-born inventor Robert Foulis.
One foggy night in 1853, it's said that Foulis heard his daughter's piano out across the bay.
He noticed that the piano's low notes seemed much more distinct than the higher ones.
Foulis concluded that low notes must travel further, and designed his prototype foghorn to match.
FOGHORN SOUNDS To put Foulis' foghorn theory to the test, I'm going to need help from Mark Horton and Open University acoustics expert David Sharp.
You're going out in the boat Yes.
I shall stay behind and play the piano.
Brilliant.
David, there's a lifejacket for you.
Is that the equipment? It is.
Bon voyage! See you in a bit! The theory predicts that low notes should travel further because they lose less energy over distance than high notes.
But is that true at sea? The invention of the foghorn was supposedly inspired by distant piano music on a foggy night, so Mark's going to play high and low notes on the piano while microphones and speakers boost the volume to foghorn proportions.
Mark, can you hear me? Hi, Alice, yes, loud and clear.
Right, we're ready for you to play something on the piano.
Go ahead.
Right, here we go.
Right HE PLAYS "CHOPSTICKS" To my ears, Mark's high and low notes seem equally loud.
David's recording apparatus separates the sound waves out.
So what's going on here, then? On the left-hand side we're seeing the low-frequency notes, these peaks coming up here.
On the right-hand side are the high-frequency notes, the high-pitched notes, we see the peaks coming up there.
Shall I stop him? I think we should.
Had enough of Chopsticks? Yes! Mark! Mark! At the moment the low notes and the high notes are about the same in terms of how loud they are, so we're going to go a little bit further out and then try the experiment again.
Right, I'll wait here.
I'm quite happy to put some distance between us and Mark's piano playing, but there's a serious point.
Will the low notes carry their energy further than the high ones? Mark, can you hear me? Yes, there you are, loud and clear, you're almost on the horizon now! Can you possibly play one low note over and over again? Okey-dokes! NOTE SOUNDS I can hear it Yeah.
The peaks still present there at the left-hand side of the screen.
And it's still quite clear.
It's still quite clear to the human ear.
That's great, we can hear those low notes really well out here.
Could you possibly play a high note over and over again? Let's see what we can find.
NOTE SOUNDS FAINTLY I can just hear that.
Yes, just about coming through, it's not so clear on the graph any more.
It's a lot lower.
Yeah.
That's great.
Mark, it works! So that means that our foghorn theory is vindicated! And it's great, Alice, that science actually works! Foghorn genius Robert Foulis was right.
Low sounds do carry the warning call further.
Of course, the call was also very loud, 130 decibels.
That's on the threshold of pain.
And lighthouse keeper Jim Oliver had to live next to one.
How did you sleep through the noise of the foghorn? You actually went to the stage where you never heard it.
You would hear the first couple of blasts, and then your mind just attuned to it.
I get woken up by a clock ticking.
I can't believe you slept through the sound of the foghorn! Well, I was finding it, ehwhen I shifted or when I left the service and moved into the town, I was finding it more difficult to deal with the traffic passing.
Oh, really? So the traffic's keeping you awake, but foghorns are fine.
Foghorns were just a natural part of life, aye, aye.
Here on the Mull of Galloway, people had little choice but to get used to the sound.
30 years ago, there were as many as 12 different foghorns blaring out to the ships lost in the channel.
But with so many sounding out at once, how could sailors identify their position? The answer - every foghorn made its own unique, distinct sound, each different but now all silent.
So please welcome, for one final foggy chorus, the recorded massed foghorns of the British Isles.
HORNS BLARE We're about halfway along our journey from Arran to Gretna, discovering the coastline stretching from the Scottish mountains to the English border.
It's a coast that's never far from the cities but often feels wild and remote.
Although I used to come to the Galloway coast on holiday as a kid, much of it feels far off the tourist trail.
But people have beaten a path to this place for centuries.
This, it's said, is where Ninian - later to be St Ninian - established Christianity in Scotland 1,500 years ago.
This little cave was always a must-see for Christian pilgrims, and tradition has it that St Ninian himself, the man credited with bringing Christianity to Scotland, used to take time out of the office to come down here and be alone with his thoughts.
It's a good place for that, cos the world does seem quite far away from here.
This remote and windswept stretch of coastline might seem an unlikely spot to try and establish Christianity in Scotland, but 1,500 years ago, this bit of Galloway was buzzing.
The sea made Galloway a commercial crossroads, not just for Britain and Ireland, but for trade with Europe.
They may have been pagans, but the good people of Galloway were very open to new ideas.
So this might have been the perfect springboard for St Ninian's Christian mission.
Firm evidence of Ninian's impact on this coast has always been hard to come by.
But 20 years ago, an archaeological dig nearby unearthed the true scale of St Ninian's following.
I know, because I was a fresh-faced archaeology student on that very dig.
In the late '80s, our trowels uncovered more than 1,600 skeletons dating back 700 years, the remains of a thriving town geared up to service the St Ninian pilgrimage industry.
St Ninian's story has certainly been a major attraction for centuries.
On this part of the coast, there are many tales of struggles between Christians and pagans.
Some may be legend.
Others are pure fiction.
Galloway's also famous as the location for a legendary cult movie, The Wicker Man.
Mighty god of the sun, bountiful goddess of our orchards, accept our sacrifice and make our blossoms fruit! The film tells the story of a fervently Christian policeman, Edward Woodward, who falls victim to Christopher Lee and his effigy-burning locals.
Summer is a-comin' in Loudly sing cuckoo The Wicker Man was supposedly set in the Outer Hebrides.
But filming there was a ferry ride too far for a low-budget British horror.
Instead, the film-makers came to Galloway, far more convenient and, they thought, the perfect lookalike landscape for a remote pagan community.
Yay! But it's the locals who've had the last laugh.
That cult '70s movie spawned its own worldwide following, and the tourist industry here is only too happy.
Of course, this is just folk here having a bit of fun with the wild and untamed reputation of this part of the coast.
But you can't help wondering what St Ninian would make of all this.
There are all sorts of odd surprises tucked away along this coast.
The coves and mudflats around Palnackie are the haunt of flatfish which live and feed in the soft mud of the sea bottom.
Locals hold an annual championship to catch the biggest flatfish at low tide.
They have to stand on them with their bare feet, so it's called flounder tramping.
The tradition has been kept going by Brian Carson and the Palnackie Flounder Tramping Committee.
Sensitive souls.
How's that for a small flounder? Craig! It's a flounder.
That's unbelievable.
Put it in the water.
Drinks are on Brian tonight.
Of course! You pay ã2 or ã3 to get in, and if you stand on the biggest fish, you get a ã150 prize and you're a world champion.
If you want to try and catch a fish, you've got to think about it, put your foot down, don't just splash about cos they'll swim away.
Keep your foot down, or he'll shoot away.
Some people take it quite seriously.
People are known to cheat, believe it or not.
Hey-hey! Bigger than I usually catch! There you go.
That's just been taken out of the water.
I might as well not go in this year, cos that's the only one I'll get.
I'll let it go for somebody else to share.
There he goes! What better way than to spend a day flounder tramping in Palnackie? We're continuing our journey into the inner Solway Firth.
Now salt marshes and vast mudflats come together to give us a coast that's neither land nor sea.
The huge skies reflect its epic history.
This is where Mary Queen of Scots bade her last farewell to Scotland as she crossed the Solway to England.
Such great human dramas are a thing of the past here.
Nature's taken centre stage.
The Solway might appear a windswept no-man's land, but it teems with wildlife around the clock.
By day, the marshes are a playground for huge flocks of barnacle geese.
Hard to believe that just over 50 years ago hunting had almost wiped them out.
It's great to take the time to watch the geese as they feed together.
There's a huge group of them, they like to stay together.
It's that sense of protection, safety in numbers.
Their heads are all down, moving like an army across the field.
It's a lovely sight.
This army of geese vanishes for five months of the year.
They spend the summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard, where their goslings feast on clouds of insects.
But when snows come to the Artic, the geese fly a 2,000-mile route down the coast of Norway to the Solway Firth in Scotland.
They eat grass, and the Solway provides enough grass to fuel their epic migrations.
As evening approaches, the barnacle geese take flight to the mudflats in search of a safe place to roost for the night.
As the geese clock off, the night shift takes over.
The sand dunes are home to an elusive nocturnal amphibian, the natterjack toad.
Threatened with extinction in Britain, natterjack colonies are confined to a few isolated pockets.
Great storms in the 1960s almost destroyed the Solway colony.
To see how they're doing now means staying up late.
Natterjack toads are nocturnal, so we're using special night-vision equipment to film them so we don't disturb them.
But the best way of locating them is by using your ears, because they're the noisiest amphibians in Britain.
To help me find my natterjack toad, I've recruited help from one of their local protectors, Brian Morrell from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.
We're getting near the point where we'll hopefully find natterjacks now, so if we just turn the torches off and make our way over here, we've got a good chance.
OK.
OK, we'll try down here near the pond.
They'll either be in the pond itself or round the edges, maybe hunting or getting down to the pond.
Is that one there? There's movement over here.
Oh, well done! Oh, fantastic! You can see him walking there, crawling.
That's where they get their name - "natter" is the Old English for crawling.
They can move very quickly after certain prey, and you can see the yellow line down its back.
That's the diagnostic feature on the natterjack toad - a yellow stripe going down its back.
I'm tempted to pick it up, but you need a licence to handle the toads, don't you? Yes, these are very rare animals now.
These are the rarest amphibians in Britain, and we need to protect them.
And very noisy as well, those males make a big sound, don't they? Yes.
When they all call together, the toad chorus, you can hear it from over a mile away.
It's the males calling the females to come down to the pond to spawn.
Yeah, and they inflate those vocal sacs again, considerably much more than the common toad would do.
It almost looks like it's swallowed a ping-pong ball.
It really inflates its throat up, and that acts as an amplifier, makes its voice really loud.
It's starting to get a bit warm in my hands now, so I think it's maybe time Ohlet him go.
OK? OK.
Just pop him down here.
Morning, and the toads have lost the cover of darkness, but they're back in the protection of their burrows.
The unique landscape of the Solway gives them a chance of survival.
Their numbers are on the increase in this half-world between land and sea.
The shifting sands of the Solway are no place to linger.
In fact around here, it's not just the landscapes that can take you by surprise.
In the 18th century, the local customs man wasn't the usual establishment lickspittle, but Robert Burns, radical trailblazer and Scotland's foremost poet.
It fell to him to stamp out booze smuggling hereabouts.
Now, I'm a Scottish person, you might have noticed, and as a Scottish person you would expect me to bang on about Rabbie Burns.
But forget the tourist hype - he was a great poet.
That's true because his words still move the hearts of millions of men and women around the world.
He's a truly international figure.
But like me, he spent part of his life in Dumfriesshire, and around these parts they claim him as a local lad.
And if you've ever been drunk at a New Year's Eve party, you must have been involved with the following.
For auld lang syne, my jo, for auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.
Now that's poetry! As the Solway Firth narrows, Scotland and England are brought steadily face to face.
Border lands have always been places of conflict, and the Solway is no different.
Shaped like a shield, Caerlaverock Castle faces three directions at once.
Its owners were notorious for changing sides during the worst of the wars between Scotland and England.
Even today the Solway's sands are hotly disputed territory.
Local fishermen working the cockle beds are facing stiff competition from illegal gangs.
Charlie Wilson is one of the few with a licence to gather cockles.
He's been doing it for 20 years.
That's what it's all about.
That's the meat, which is quite good meat.
The size of the cockle, that's not too bad.
They say it's an aphrodisiac, but it's never done anything for my sex drive, really.
We use a6ft to 7ft board and rock it back and forward, and the suction and the movement of the sand brings the cockles to the surface.
If you stay here too long when you know the tide's coming in, and your vehicle doesn't start, that's you.
Actually, illegal fishers have been in trouble here, and nobody's told them about these tides, and they're getting caught between the likes of See the water down there? That comes up behind you.
If you walk off, you can't get through it.
That's similar to what happened to the Chinese people that got drowned in Morecambe Bay.
And out there, there's some patches of the sand that's like jelly.
The likes of today, we've done quite well today.
Some of the boys have had 15 bags, some of them have had eight bags.
I think there's a team out there have had 20 bags today.
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, Charlie.
Right, Reg.
The Solway's mudflats are hazardous enough in daylight, but the coastguard are routinely called out in the dead of night to rescue illegal cockle-pickers.
The lure is cash.
Cockles destined for a French or Spanish fish market can bring a cockle-picker around ã350 for a day's work.
It's more than enough to tempt the illegal pickers to risk their lives.
I have to say, this looks like a pretty forbidding landscape to me.
I wouldn't fancy going much further out than we are.
What you've got in this area is a lot of quick-moving sands.
You've obviously got the tide that plays a big factor in it.
The tide comes in like a galloping horse, and it ebbs like a galloping horse, so you havnae got much chance if you don't know what you're doing.
Sometimes I've come to call-outs and you get the guys in and they havnae got a clue what time the tide is.
They haven't got the proper gear on, no lifejackets, no mobile phones to make contact with anyone.
Nothing at all to assist theirself for a rescue or a help.
How big a problem is it for the coastguard here? Everybody's on tenterhooks.
We work on a pager system, but with the cockling situation everybody's keeping an eye on what is going on, and you just cannae settle down.
You're frightened that your pager is just going to gan off at any time.
We're entering the innermost Solway, with our journey almost at an end.
But there's one last surprise here.
Today it's a tranquil place, but 90 years ago there was a massive influx of newcomers drawn to the Solway by a secret project.
Mark Horton is in search of the forgotten army of the First World War.
On the other side of this fence is an inconspicuous military depot, but it wasn't always like this.
This was the site of one of the largest factories ever built in the world.
90 years ago, at the height of the First World War, a huge munitions factory was built here on the Solway coast.
By 1915, Britain was resigning itself to a long and bitter war with Germany.
But the Army was already running out of ammunition.
The problem was a shortage of cordite, the propellant that fires the bullets and shells from the guns.
The cordite crisis prompted the government to construct a giant munitions factory, code-named Moorside, on the Solway Firth.
Just like Alfred Nobel before, they selected this quiet coastline for their explosives project, well away from prying eyes.
MOD storage huts stand sentry now, but 90 years ago the whole site was one gigantic explosives factory, nine miles long and two miles wide.
But that's only half the story.
It's really difficult to appreciate today the sheer scale of what was once here.
Perhaps the best evidence comes from the sale brochure when the whole place was sold off by the government after the war, because it includes not just a munitions factory but entire towns that went under the hammer.
The workforce was drawn from all over the British Empire.
To house them, two new entire towns were built - Gretna, better known today for the weddings, and at the far end of the nine-mile site, Eastriggs.
There were 30,000 workers in all, and most of them were women.
With the young men in the trenches, it fell to the women to risk life and limb in the munitions factories.
So explosive was the cordite mixture that it was nicknamed the devil's porridge.
For the authorities, there was a more potent danger still - temptation! 20,000 women workers plus 10,000 hard-drinking navvies could really set the sparks flying.
I'm meeting local historian Anne Dickie to discover how the government tried to keep passions under control.
You've got 20,000 young girls, 10,000 navvies that's a real explosive combination.
Well, we had a women's police force, and if you were caught talking to the gentlemen too long, they used to stop and ask you why.
But for the entertainment of this massive workforce, how do they control excessive drinking? Well, there was entertainment halls, but the government brought in state management.
So all the pubs were owned by the government? Yes.
This lasted until 1972.
One may joke about all this drinking and so forth, but actually the work that those young girls were doing was critical for the war.
It was, we wouldn't have won the war without them, and it was very dangerous work they were involved in.
Their skin and hair went yellow, their teeth fell out because of the mixture they were working with, and there was always the chance of explosion.
One remembers the sacrifice of the young men fighting on the Western Front, but these young girls in some ways were Britain's forgotten army.
They were Britain's forgotten army, and it was the most important jobs that any of the young girls could have done in Britain at that time.
We've reached the head of the Solway Firth, journey's end.
Scotland's southwest coast has revealed its astonishing variety of landscapes.
But if this coast seems quiet, that's far from the truth.
It's not that nothing happens here - more that it happens to a different beat and a longer rhythm.
Time now, sadly, to catch up with the rest of the world.
From this point, I can hear something I haven't heard before on this journey, and that's the roar of distant traffic.
Those cars and trucks over there are travelling along the A74, that crosses the border between Scotland and England, marking the end of my journey.
And so for now the tranquillity of Scotland's southwest coast is behind me.
This is my home patch, the coastline where I grew up.
This is a landscape I love.
We're taking in jagged mountains, ancient volcanoes, rocky headlands and vast mudflats.
And best of all, Coast hasn't been here before.
It's all virgin territory! Alice Roberts is exploring how Scottish sand dunes Firing! .
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tamed Swedish high explosive.
Nick Crane is searching for the hard evidence that links a tiny island to the Olympic Games.
Mark Horton is conjuring up musical memories of a melancholy sound we've lost from our coastline.
FOGHORN SOUNDS And I'll be rekindling the spirit of my youth - although it's not quite as I remember it! Welcome to Scotland's Deep South.
Today's journey is taking us to Scotland's forgotten corner, between the mountains of Arran and the English border at Gretna.
Even as a native Scot, I find the island of Arran utterly breathtaking.
It's hard to believe that all this rugged magnificence is only a stone's throw from the urban sprawl of Glasgow.
Over two million people live across the Firth of Clyde from Arran, just a 55-minute ferry ride away.
For an isolated island it's very well connected.
That's the sort of contrast that Arran takes in its stride, with its dramatic variety of landscapes.
Jagged peaks tower above peaceful shores.
Apparently Arran owes its mountainous landscape to the time when, 60 million years ago, two vast continents that had been stuck together started to drift apart.
And Scotland was right on the fault line.
The continent that would become America and Greenland went one way, Europe went the other, and in between the Earth's crust was stretched to breaking point.
That created volcanoes.
And it's molten rock that shaped Arran's spectacular mountains.
The upshot of all this wild geology is that Arran's become a very popular place to be - and not just for tourists.
Arran has the feel of a wild island refuge.
With Glasgow only 30 miles away as the crow flies, is it any wonder that many mainland folk want to make it their own bolt-hole from the rat race? Fiona Laing, who's giving me a lift down Arran's west coast, couldn't resist the island's pull.
She uprooted here 13 years ago.
Like many coasters, she juggles umpteen jobs, from fire-fighting to farm help.
And she delivers the newspapers.
Fiona's learned that people might come to Arran for peace and quiet, but they like to do it on their own terms.
Is that you? That's me finished.
So what's this with the newspapers? I thought island life was about getting away from all of that.
By and large it is, but there's a strange obsession.
I've heard of people that wouldn't come to live here cos they don't get their newspaper till after 11 o'clock in the winter, and that stops them coming.
I guess getting away from it all is different for everyone, but some things you just have to get used to.
It's an island, and every now and then it's truly an island, because there is no communication by boat.
That's it.
You're stuck here.
You get on with it, and I like that.
I like to know the weather's still in control sometimes.
And what are the qualities that make the perfect islander? Waterproof? Impervious to rain and wind? It's not always like this.
Most of the time! No, not always like this.
You just have to relax and accept things the way they happen, and don't be so headstrong about doing things.
And, because it's a small community everybody interacts a bit more with each other.
So maybe that's the quality that makes it a wee bit special? Yeah.
A different kind of person, a special kind of person, lives here.
I'd be foolish to think of life here as idyllic.
Making a living and coping with the weather, it's no piece of cake.
And yet Arran reminds me of what I love about the coast from here down to England.
It feels as remote and wild as anywhere in Scotland.
That lighthouse on the tiny island of Pladda off Arran's southern tip leads the way towards Scotland's southwest coast.
The coastline has a fascinating mix of people and landscape and nature and industry.
It's going to be a great journey.
We're swinging around Arran's southern tip to strike back over the Firth of Clyde towards the mainland of Ayrshire.
Along the mainland coast, a sprinkling of towns and industries seems washed along the shore.
The isolated, coastal scrubland at Ardeer looks good for nothing.
How many people would spot this as the perfect location to found a worldwide business empire? One 19th-century visionary did, and his legacy is still with us today.
Incredibly, this desolate spot was once the site of the world's largest explosives factory.
But why here? Transforming this bleak wilderness into an industrial powerhouse would take someone with drive, ingenuity and imagination.
That man was Alfred Nobel - not Scottish but Swedish.
Nobel's era was the 19th century, a time of empire-building that would shape the modern world.
Canals, tunnels and mines needed an explosive far more powerful than gunpowder.
Nitroglycerine fitted the bill.
But nitroglycerine was a fickle liquid that would blow up without warning.
Many people were killed or maimed using it.
The race was on to harness its power safely.
Alfred Nobel and his family threw themselves at the challenge, but in 1864 Alfred's younger brother, Emil, was killed by the deadly explosive.
Alfred was determined to tame the explosive.
His breakthrough was to take the liquid nitroglycerine, which was very dangerous, mix it with powder and make it into solid which could be made into sticks like this - dynamite.
It was much safer to handle and much safer to transport, and it was to make Nobel a very, very rich man.
With dynamite, Nobel had invented a winner - bangs and bucks guaranteed! The whole industrialised world was at his feet.
So why did Nobel end up here in Scotland? John Dolan was working at Nobel's Scottish factory when it was still making dynamite.
Alfred Nobel wanted desperately to get into the United Kingdom.
Why? Because the UK was the centre of the British Empire.
Anything from Britain had access to the whole international market, and he wanted to get into it.
But what Nobel needed were people who'd invest in this risky business.
He found them in Glasgow.
And they, being Glasgow people with an eye to where the good things lay, saw in his dynamite, really, a magnificent investment opportunity.
So they said, "Look, we'll invest in this, but not only that, "we'll try and find you a place where you can make it.
" So they found this place? They found this place.
The whole thing was a beautiful set-up - access to the sea, in the central belt of Scotland, isolated.
It was an ideal place for explosives.
A hundred years ago, this was the biggest explosives plant in the world - a vast web of buildings manned by a workforce which in time grew to 13,000.
It seemed almost haphazard - hundreds of wooden buildings scattered amongst the sand dunes that rippled along the shoreline, each one packed with high explosive.
Clearly this was not a typical factory.
The sand dunes seemed to be a key part of Nobel's plan.
They're everywhere - all pretty overgrown though.
But, while some are clearly natural, others are anything but! The shapes are just too regular.
Nobel didn't just take what nature gave him here in Ayrshire.
He decided to improve on it.
He built his own dunes.
David Pittam is an explosives expert.
He's going to help me work out just how Nobel re-shaped the coast's landscape to protect his workers and his investment.
David is going to blow up two boxes - miniature versions of Nobel's wooden factory huts.
The blue box represents a hut surrounded by dunes .
.
the red box a wooden hut in a landscape without dunes.
Firing! My God! That worked! I'm glad I was wearing ear defenders.
It's quite a pulse you're seeing at this distance.
You can imagine a full building with thousands of kilograms in.
It would make a fair old bang.
And the red box is gone! Right, blue box time, then.
Blue box.
This time, our scaled-down wooden factory building is surrounded by sand dunes to match.
Firing! That was significantly different.
When the red box went, it went horizontally.
That one, there was much more vertical projection, wasn't there? The role of these re-shaped dunes in the factory is clear.
Bits of our exploding blue box were either sent harmlessly upwards, or stopped dead by the sand bags.
But bits of the red box flew off in all directions, and in Nobel's factory they could have hit other buildings and triggered a lethal chain reaction.
There's loads of little bits.
A big bit over here.
A bit of red.
All this is red.
There's thousands of splinters.
There's fragments of it everywhere.
And this is just so different.
When you come over to the blue box, it's all here.
Or practically all of it.
It's been contained by the bags.
There's certainly a lot of it here, yes.
Our mini experiment has shown that Nobel's idea of surrounding a building with sand does actually work, it does contain the blast.
Yes, it's a good a principle and we've shown it works.
Yeah.
Shall we do it again? Again? Why not? The coastal landscape itself was the key to protecting lives at Nobel's dynamite factory here in Scotland, and the secret of its global success.
The factory exported explosives across the world and, although Nobel never intended them to be used for war, it didn't stop him being seen as a merchant of death.
Before he died, he tried to set the record straight by leaving money in his will for the legacy for which he is best remembered, the Nobel Peace Prize.
A sandy coast like this is made for golf.
Every step south can be measured in lost golf balls.
None more so than at Royal Troon.
The links here are whipped by the onshore Atlantic wind, and the undulating terrain makes playing notoriously tricky.
A day's golfing will set you back a couple of hundred quid.
As for membership - sorry, there's a waiting list.
But behind those hallowed links, on the municipal course of Troon itself, local teenagers with a tenner to spare can enjoy the truly democratic game for which Scotland is famous.
Hi, I'm Louise.
This is Kate.
And we live in Troon, the home of golf.
I think Troon is so recognisable because of Royal Troon, which is where the Open is played.
All the most famous golfers in the world, like Tiger Woods, come here.
If you say you're from Troon, people know where you are, which is a nice feeling.
Louise and I can't play on Royal Troon, because we're not members.
I don't think we really want to be, because it's really expensive, and there's huge waiting lists.
We're happy just playing on the municipal course.
Nice shot, Kate! Playing golf in Troon becomes difficult because of the winds.
Because of the sea, it's so much stronger than inland.
You have to think about what you're doing.
The minute you hit it you know if it's good or not.
Stop! Just stop! She jumps up and down and stomps on the ground a lot - it's quite funny.
If you combined Kate and my shots, then they would be the perfect shot, because I seem to want to hit them quite far, but then Kate's are right down the middle.
And did you know that if you play 18 holes of golf, then you burn 900 calories, which is the same as a Big Mac? There you go - Louise's random fact of the day! If the coast is the point where the sea meets the land, what do you call a place where the sea and the land meet the air? Its name is Prestwick.
An international airport just where you'd least expect it.
Miles from the big cities, you'd be forgiven for wondering why it's here at all.
But Prestwick Airport has one vital selling point.
Thanks to its unique position on the coast, it's the most reliably fog-free airport in the whole of the United Kingdom.
The stats show Prestwick is blessed with unusually clear skies.
The Met Office say that's because of the islands, hills and headlands surrounding it, which block sea fog from most directions.
That's the reason the airport is so big.
During World War Two, American pilots used fog-free Prestwick as a key refuelling stop.
The military connection has continued right to the present day - a little bit of the USA in Ayrshire.
So in 1960, it was Prestwick Airport's fog-free reputation that brought its most famous visitor, US Army Private 53310761, a humble private better known as The King! Elvis Aaron Presley was heading homewards from 18 months' National Service in Germany.
When he stepped onto the Tarmac at Prestwick, the Sergeant's stripes were still fresh on his uniform.
It was the only time Elvis would ever set foot in Britain.
After just two hours on British soil, Elvis left the building, and the UK, never to return.
Maybe I didn't love you Elvis was just one of many thousands of GIs to pass through Prestwick - so many that their transit to and from the States has left a lasting mark here.
Thanks to that original military investment, Prestwick's become one of the most important air traffic control centres in the world.
If you've ever flown over the Atlantic, there's a good chance your life was in the hands of air traffic controllers in Prestwick.
Tucked away behind the airport tower, this is where it all happens.
Northwest 5-1 resume on navigation.
The controllers here guide nearly a million flights a year between destinations in Europe and North America.
They are responsible for all the aircraft over a quarter of the North Atlantic, before handing over to their colleagues in Canada.
It's the busiest oceanic airspace on the planet.
So, whether you've come from Heathrow, Paris or Berlin, next time you're having your peanuts and tomato juice halfway to America, remember - A Little Less Conversation! Raise a glass to the backroom boys and girls in Prestwick, keeping you safe at 40,000 feet.
Wooded bays and rocky headlands - a Scottish idyll! Yet links across the Pond are here, too.
The splendid apartment at the top of Culzean Castle was once owned by none other than General Eisenhower.
Now anyone can holiday here.
Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe, was given the apartment by the owners of the Culzean estate.
And if you'd just won a world war, this is just the kind of place you'd want to come and relax.
The penthouse was Eisenhower's personal reward in a spirit of thanks from the Scottish nation for his role as leader of the Allied forces.
It offered the General suitably commanding views over the water towards Arran.
But more captivating still is the view to the southwest - Arran's little sister, the perfectly formed, and delightfully named, Ailsa Craig.
Ailsa Craig is a bird sanctuary, long renowned for its population of seabirds, especially gannets.
More recently, puffins are making a comeback, now that the rats that ate their eggs have been ousted from the island.
Ailsa Craig isn't strictly for the birds.
There's plenty to interest people, too.
Nick Crane is on the trail of Ailsa Craig's unlikely treasure.
Believe it or not, within living memory people actually used to live on that tiny island.
They were there to quarry Ailsa Craig's remarkable granite.
Through spring to autumn, the island's lighthouse keepers were joined by a hardy band who worked the rock for shipment back to the mainland.
Hew Girvan knows Ailsa Craig and its rocks intimately from helping his father quarry on the island as a boy.
I'm going back with Hew to discover the secrets of Ailsa Craig.
It does have this very unnatural symmetry to it, rather like a child's drawing of an island or a great bald head sticking up out of the ocean.
It does indeed.
This way, it's a tea cosy shape.
Whereas, if you look at it from down there, or Turnberry Point, it's more of a sugar loaf.
It seems to change shape all the time.
The remarkable shape of the island comes from its turbulent birth.
Like Arran's mountains further north, Ailsa Craig used to be molten rock.
Around 60 million years ago, this cooled, deep within the heart of the volcano.
Surrounded by the sea, the outside of the volcano wore away, leaving behind a hard plug - Ailsa Craig.
Its ancient geology has made this island an El Dorado for enthusiasts of the Scottish sport of curling.
Ailsa Craig's unusually tough granite is perfect for making curling stones.
It was quarrying these that kept Hew's family working on Ailsa Craig for nearly a century.
Can I pick it up? Yes, by all means.
Cor! It weighs a ton! 40 pounds exactly.
Wow! That's beautiful! Isn't that amazing! That's the common Ailsa or Ailsite.
The thing is, I'm used to granite being very rough and hard.
This is so smooth! It polishes up very well.
That's the running part of the stone.
That's the bit that slides on the ice? Slides on the ice, yeah.
Beautiful! You wouldn't think that a hunk of rough granite hauled out of the top of a volcano would turn into something like that! And now we're taking one of your stones home.
Taking it back! Back to its island.
Back to its island.
Hard to believe that such a smooth object came from this rugged place.
As we get closer to the granite, I get a sense of just how hard quarrying must have been on Ailsa Craig.
Yet for four generations, Hew's family owed their living here to curling stones.
This is the tenant's cottage which Eventually, our family lived there.
Your family lived there? Our family lived there.
But it's sad to see it's gone to rack and ruin.
What was it like living on the island? My times were very happy times, especially when the lighthouse keepers and their families were staying here.
We used to enjoy ourselves.
In fact, further up here's where we had our cricket pitch.
There was little time for cricket.
This is Hew's father, seen in 1947.
His daily life was tough - chiselling and blasting the living rock.
EXPLOSION Day after day, Hew's family rolled away the stones of Ailsa Craig for export around the world to wherever curling was played.
Tough work that left its mark on them.
So this is the quarry here, Hew, one of the sources of Ailsa Craig granite.
This particular granite cooled very fast, so the crystals didn't grow large, which is why it has these qualities, I guess.
Yes, indeed.
Hard graft.
My father used to lose stones in weight, just with working in the heat.
In fact, working with the stone, it being so rough, you would have no fingerprint left, because they were worn through.
It wore out the end of your fingers? The end of your fingers, because of the roughness of the granite.
But now I'm soft.
You're a city boy! A city boy now, I'm afraid! After 200 years, this harsh way of life finally came to an end in 1971.
It was no longer economic to live and to work on Ailsa Craig.
But there are still countless unfinished slabs lying at the foot of the cliffs.
And, because of the rock's unrivalled toughness, for many competitors they're the curling stones of choice for the Winter Olympics! So curling stones will be coming from Ailsa Craig for years to come.
Our journey takes us on towards the Mull of Galloway in deepest southwest Scotland.
The Mull sits right between Ireland, England and the Isle of Man.
There's a collision of busy shipping lanes and treacherous seas, so a lighthouse comes as no surprise.
But there's also another, almost forgotten, gem of coastal technology.
The Mull of Galloway is a great place to discover the life-saving story of the lowly foghorn.
FOGHORNS SOUND Alongside so many of Britain's lighthouses sit their less conspicuous companions, the foghorns.
But their low, mournful song has all but disappeared from our coastlines.
Britain's foghorns have been switched off.
FOGHORN SOUNDS For 150 years, every time fog rolled in, the foghorns would call out around the coast.
Their low boom spoke of mystery and hidden dangers.
By the 1980s, electronic navigation was making them all but redundant.
One by one, the foghorns fell silent.
FOGHORN BLASTS But they're not entirely forgotten.
Jim Oliver, lighthouse and foghorn keeper for 38 years, knows the ingenuity required to generate their distinctive, evocative call.
Jim, we associate foghorns with this enormously loud booming sound.
How is that made? Well, it's actually made by compressed air.
And, to get the compressed air, we have all this machinery in the engine room here.
When the horn was in operation, we required two of those engines running, driving the compressors, pumping air through the green pipes and then out through the red pipes and into these receivers.
So these are enormous storage tanks for compressed air? That's exactly what they are.
The space between the blasts allows the engines to pump up air and refill the tanks ready for the next blast.
So each hoot of the foghorn requires the air from all of these tanks.
Yes.
40% of the air from all of these tanks.
This here is the handle that turns the whole thing on.
Once we turn this handle on, the air goes down that pipe and goes off to the foghorn.
Once it gets to the foghorn, there's a clockwork mechanism down there that controls the frequency of the blast.
So once you've turned this on, it's all go.
Unfortunately, we're not allowed to power it up, and that's a shame, because I want to work out how the foghorns came to have such a distinctive call.
FOGHORN BLASTS The man who usually gets the credit is Scots-born inventor Robert Foulis.
One foggy night in 1853, it's said that Foulis heard his daughter's piano out across the bay.
He noticed that the piano's low notes seemed much more distinct than the higher ones.
Foulis concluded that low notes must travel further, and designed his prototype foghorn to match.
FOGHORN SOUNDS To put Foulis' foghorn theory to the test, I'm going to need help from Mark Horton and Open University acoustics expert David Sharp.
You're going out in the boat Yes.
I shall stay behind and play the piano.
Brilliant.
David, there's a lifejacket for you.
Is that the equipment? It is.
Bon voyage! See you in a bit! The theory predicts that low notes should travel further because they lose less energy over distance than high notes.
But is that true at sea? The invention of the foghorn was supposedly inspired by distant piano music on a foggy night, so Mark's going to play high and low notes on the piano while microphones and speakers boost the volume to foghorn proportions.
Mark, can you hear me? Hi, Alice, yes, loud and clear.
Right, we're ready for you to play something on the piano.
Go ahead.
Right, here we go.
Right HE PLAYS "CHOPSTICKS" To my ears, Mark's high and low notes seem equally loud.
David's recording apparatus separates the sound waves out.
So what's going on here, then? On the left-hand side we're seeing the low-frequency notes, these peaks coming up here.
On the right-hand side are the high-frequency notes, the high-pitched notes, we see the peaks coming up there.
Shall I stop him? I think we should.
Had enough of Chopsticks? Yes! Mark! Mark! At the moment the low notes and the high notes are about the same in terms of how loud they are, so we're going to go a little bit further out and then try the experiment again.
Right, I'll wait here.
I'm quite happy to put some distance between us and Mark's piano playing, but there's a serious point.
Will the low notes carry their energy further than the high ones? Mark, can you hear me? Yes, there you are, loud and clear, you're almost on the horizon now! Can you possibly play one low note over and over again? Okey-dokes! NOTE SOUNDS I can hear it Yeah.
The peaks still present there at the left-hand side of the screen.
And it's still quite clear.
It's still quite clear to the human ear.
That's great, we can hear those low notes really well out here.
Could you possibly play a high note over and over again? Let's see what we can find.
NOTE SOUNDS FAINTLY I can just hear that.
Yes, just about coming through, it's not so clear on the graph any more.
It's a lot lower.
Yeah.
That's great.
Mark, it works! So that means that our foghorn theory is vindicated! And it's great, Alice, that science actually works! Foghorn genius Robert Foulis was right.
Low sounds do carry the warning call further.
Of course, the call was also very loud, 130 decibels.
That's on the threshold of pain.
And lighthouse keeper Jim Oliver had to live next to one.
How did you sleep through the noise of the foghorn? You actually went to the stage where you never heard it.
You would hear the first couple of blasts, and then your mind just attuned to it.
I get woken up by a clock ticking.
I can't believe you slept through the sound of the foghorn! Well, I was finding it, ehwhen I shifted or when I left the service and moved into the town, I was finding it more difficult to deal with the traffic passing.
Oh, really? So the traffic's keeping you awake, but foghorns are fine.
Foghorns were just a natural part of life, aye, aye.
Here on the Mull of Galloway, people had little choice but to get used to the sound.
30 years ago, there were as many as 12 different foghorns blaring out to the ships lost in the channel.
But with so many sounding out at once, how could sailors identify their position? The answer - every foghorn made its own unique, distinct sound, each different but now all silent.
So please welcome, for one final foggy chorus, the recorded massed foghorns of the British Isles.
HORNS BLARE We're about halfway along our journey from Arran to Gretna, discovering the coastline stretching from the Scottish mountains to the English border.
It's a coast that's never far from the cities but often feels wild and remote.
Although I used to come to the Galloway coast on holiday as a kid, much of it feels far off the tourist trail.
But people have beaten a path to this place for centuries.
This, it's said, is where Ninian - later to be St Ninian - established Christianity in Scotland 1,500 years ago.
This little cave was always a must-see for Christian pilgrims, and tradition has it that St Ninian himself, the man credited with bringing Christianity to Scotland, used to take time out of the office to come down here and be alone with his thoughts.
It's a good place for that, cos the world does seem quite far away from here.
This remote and windswept stretch of coastline might seem an unlikely spot to try and establish Christianity in Scotland, but 1,500 years ago, this bit of Galloway was buzzing.
The sea made Galloway a commercial crossroads, not just for Britain and Ireland, but for trade with Europe.
They may have been pagans, but the good people of Galloway were very open to new ideas.
So this might have been the perfect springboard for St Ninian's Christian mission.
Firm evidence of Ninian's impact on this coast has always been hard to come by.
But 20 years ago, an archaeological dig nearby unearthed the true scale of St Ninian's following.
I know, because I was a fresh-faced archaeology student on that very dig.
In the late '80s, our trowels uncovered more than 1,600 skeletons dating back 700 years, the remains of a thriving town geared up to service the St Ninian pilgrimage industry.
St Ninian's story has certainly been a major attraction for centuries.
On this part of the coast, there are many tales of struggles between Christians and pagans.
Some may be legend.
Others are pure fiction.
Galloway's also famous as the location for a legendary cult movie, The Wicker Man.
Mighty god of the sun, bountiful goddess of our orchards, accept our sacrifice and make our blossoms fruit! The film tells the story of a fervently Christian policeman, Edward Woodward, who falls victim to Christopher Lee and his effigy-burning locals.
Summer is a-comin' in Loudly sing cuckoo The Wicker Man was supposedly set in the Outer Hebrides.
But filming there was a ferry ride too far for a low-budget British horror.
Instead, the film-makers came to Galloway, far more convenient and, they thought, the perfect lookalike landscape for a remote pagan community.
Yay! But it's the locals who've had the last laugh.
That cult '70s movie spawned its own worldwide following, and the tourist industry here is only too happy.
Of course, this is just folk here having a bit of fun with the wild and untamed reputation of this part of the coast.
But you can't help wondering what St Ninian would make of all this.
There are all sorts of odd surprises tucked away along this coast.
The coves and mudflats around Palnackie are the haunt of flatfish which live and feed in the soft mud of the sea bottom.
Locals hold an annual championship to catch the biggest flatfish at low tide.
They have to stand on them with their bare feet, so it's called flounder tramping.
The tradition has been kept going by Brian Carson and the Palnackie Flounder Tramping Committee.
Sensitive souls.
How's that for a small flounder? Craig! It's a flounder.
That's unbelievable.
Put it in the water.
Drinks are on Brian tonight.
Of course! You pay ã2 or ã3 to get in, and if you stand on the biggest fish, you get a ã150 prize and you're a world champion.
If you want to try and catch a fish, you've got to think about it, put your foot down, don't just splash about cos they'll swim away.
Keep your foot down, or he'll shoot away.
Some people take it quite seriously.
People are known to cheat, believe it or not.
Hey-hey! Bigger than I usually catch! There you go.
That's just been taken out of the water.
I might as well not go in this year, cos that's the only one I'll get.
I'll let it go for somebody else to share.
There he goes! What better way than to spend a day flounder tramping in Palnackie? We're continuing our journey into the inner Solway Firth.
Now salt marshes and vast mudflats come together to give us a coast that's neither land nor sea.
The huge skies reflect its epic history.
This is where Mary Queen of Scots bade her last farewell to Scotland as she crossed the Solway to England.
Such great human dramas are a thing of the past here.
Nature's taken centre stage.
The Solway might appear a windswept no-man's land, but it teems with wildlife around the clock.
By day, the marshes are a playground for huge flocks of barnacle geese.
Hard to believe that just over 50 years ago hunting had almost wiped them out.
It's great to take the time to watch the geese as they feed together.
There's a huge group of them, they like to stay together.
It's that sense of protection, safety in numbers.
Their heads are all down, moving like an army across the field.
It's a lovely sight.
This army of geese vanishes for five months of the year.
They spend the summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard, where their goslings feast on clouds of insects.
But when snows come to the Artic, the geese fly a 2,000-mile route down the coast of Norway to the Solway Firth in Scotland.
They eat grass, and the Solway provides enough grass to fuel their epic migrations.
As evening approaches, the barnacle geese take flight to the mudflats in search of a safe place to roost for the night.
As the geese clock off, the night shift takes over.
The sand dunes are home to an elusive nocturnal amphibian, the natterjack toad.
Threatened with extinction in Britain, natterjack colonies are confined to a few isolated pockets.
Great storms in the 1960s almost destroyed the Solway colony.
To see how they're doing now means staying up late.
Natterjack toads are nocturnal, so we're using special night-vision equipment to film them so we don't disturb them.
But the best way of locating them is by using your ears, because they're the noisiest amphibians in Britain.
To help me find my natterjack toad, I've recruited help from one of their local protectors, Brian Morrell from the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust.
We're getting near the point where we'll hopefully find natterjacks now, so if we just turn the torches off and make our way over here, we've got a good chance.
OK.
OK, we'll try down here near the pond.
They'll either be in the pond itself or round the edges, maybe hunting or getting down to the pond.
Is that one there? There's movement over here.
Oh, well done! Oh, fantastic! You can see him walking there, crawling.
That's where they get their name - "natter" is the Old English for crawling.
They can move very quickly after certain prey, and you can see the yellow line down its back.
That's the diagnostic feature on the natterjack toad - a yellow stripe going down its back.
I'm tempted to pick it up, but you need a licence to handle the toads, don't you? Yes, these are very rare animals now.
These are the rarest amphibians in Britain, and we need to protect them.
And very noisy as well, those males make a big sound, don't they? Yes.
When they all call together, the toad chorus, you can hear it from over a mile away.
It's the males calling the females to come down to the pond to spawn.
Yeah, and they inflate those vocal sacs again, considerably much more than the common toad would do.
It almost looks like it's swallowed a ping-pong ball.
It really inflates its throat up, and that acts as an amplifier, makes its voice really loud.
It's starting to get a bit warm in my hands now, so I think it's maybe time Ohlet him go.
OK? OK.
Just pop him down here.
Morning, and the toads have lost the cover of darkness, but they're back in the protection of their burrows.
The unique landscape of the Solway gives them a chance of survival.
Their numbers are on the increase in this half-world between land and sea.
The shifting sands of the Solway are no place to linger.
In fact around here, it's not just the landscapes that can take you by surprise.
In the 18th century, the local customs man wasn't the usual establishment lickspittle, but Robert Burns, radical trailblazer and Scotland's foremost poet.
It fell to him to stamp out booze smuggling hereabouts.
Now, I'm a Scottish person, you might have noticed, and as a Scottish person you would expect me to bang on about Rabbie Burns.
But forget the tourist hype - he was a great poet.
That's true because his words still move the hearts of millions of men and women around the world.
He's a truly international figure.
But like me, he spent part of his life in Dumfriesshire, and around these parts they claim him as a local lad.
And if you've ever been drunk at a New Year's Eve party, you must have been involved with the following.
For auld lang syne, my jo, for auld lang syne.
We'll tak a cup of kindness yet for auld lang syne.
Now that's poetry! As the Solway Firth narrows, Scotland and England are brought steadily face to face.
Border lands have always been places of conflict, and the Solway is no different.
Shaped like a shield, Caerlaverock Castle faces three directions at once.
Its owners were notorious for changing sides during the worst of the wars between Scotland and England.
Even today the Solway's sands are hotly disputed territory.
Local fishermen working the cockle beds are facing stiff competition from illegal gangs.
Charlie Wilson is one of the few with a licence to gather cockles.
He's been doing it for 20 years.
That's what it's all about.
That's the meat, which is quite good meat.
The size of the cockle, that's not too bad.
They say it's an aphrodisiac, but it's never done anything for my sex drive, really.
We use a6ft to 7ft board and rock it back and forward, and the suction and the movement of the sand brings the cockles to the surface.
If you stay here too long when you know the tide's coming in, and your vehicle doesn't start, that's you.
Actually, illegal fishers have been in trouble here, and nobody's told them about these tides, and they're getting caught between the likes of See the water down there? That comes up behind you.
If you walk off, you can't get through it.
That's similar to what happened to the Chinese people that got drowned in Morecambe Bay.
And out there, there's some patches of the sand that's like jelly.
The likes of today, we've done quite well today.
Some of the boys have had 15 bags, some of them have had eight bags.
I think there's a team out there have had 20 bags today.
25, 26, 27, 28, 29, Charlie.
Right, Reg.
The Solway's mudflats are hazardous enough in daylight, but the coastguard are routinely called out in the dead of night to rescue illegal cockle-pickers.
The lure is cash.
Cockles destined for a French or Spanish fish market can bring a cockle-picker around ã350 for a day's work.
It's more than enough to tempt the illegal pickers to risk their lives.
I have to say, this looks like a pretty forbidding landscape to me.
I wouldn't fancy going much further out than we are.
What you've got in this area is a lot of quick-moving sands.
You've obviously got the tide that plays a big factor in it.
The tide comes in like a galloping horse, and it ebbs like a galloping horse, so you havnae got much chance if you don't know what you're doing.
Sometimes I've come to call-outs and you get the guys in and they havnae got a clue what time the tide is.
They haven't got the proper gear on, no lifejackets, no mobile phones to make contact with anyone.
Nothing at all to assist theirself for a rescue or a help.
How big a problem is it for the coastguard here? Everybody's on tenterhooks.
We work on a pager system, but with the cockling situation everybody's keeping an eye on what is going on, and you just cannae settle down.
You're frightened that your pager is just going to gan off at any time.
We're entering the innermost Solway, with our journey almost at an end.
But there's one last surprise here.
Today it's a tranquil place, but 90 years ago there was a massive influx of newcomers drawn to the Solway by a secret project.
Mark Horton is in search of the forgotten army of the First World War.
On the other side of this fence is an inconspicuous military depot, but it wasn't always like this.
This was the site of one of the largest factories ever built in the world.
90 years ago, at the height of the First World War, a huge munitions factory was built here on the Solway coast.
By 1915, Britain was resigning itself to a long and bitter war with Germany.
But the Army was already running out of ammunition.
The problem was a shortage of cordite, the propellant that fires the bullets and shells from the guns.
The cordite crisis prompted the government to construct a giant munitions factory, code-named Moorside, on the Solway Firth.
Just like Alfred Nobel before, they selected this quiet coastline for their explosives project, well away from prying eyes.
MOD storage huts stand sentry now, but 90 years ago the whole site was one gigantic explosives factory, nine miles long and two miles wide.
But that's only half the story.
It's really difficult to appreciate today the sheer scale of what was once here.
Perhaps the best evidence comes from the sale brochure when the whole place was sold off by the government after the war, because it includes not just a munitions factory but entire towns that went under the hammer.
The workforce was drawn from all over the British Empire.
To house them, two new entire towns were built - Gretna, better known today for the weddings, and at the far end of the nine-mile site, Eastriggs.
There were 30,000 workers in all, and most of them were women.
With the young men in the trenches, it fell to the women to risk life and limb in the munitions factories.
So explosive was the cordite mixture that it was nicknamed the devil's porridge.
For the authorities, there was a more potent danger still - temptation! 20,000 women workers plus 10,000 hard-drinking navvies could really set the sparks flying.
I'm meeting local historian Anne Dickie to discover how the government tried to keep passions under control.
You've got 20,000 young girls, 10,000 navvies that's a real explosive combination.
Well, we had a women's police force, and if you were caught talking to the gentlemen too long, they used to stop and ask you why.
But for the entertainment of this massive workforce, how do they control excessive drinking? Well, there was entertainment halls, but the government brought in state management.
So all the pubs were owned by the government? Yes.
This lasted until 1972.
One may joke about all this drinking and so forth, but actually the work that those young girls were doing was critical for the war.
It was, we wouldn't have won the war without them, and it was very dangerous work they were involved in.
Their skin and hair went yellow, their teeth fell out because of the mixture they were working with, and there was always the chance of explosion.
One remembers the sacrifice of the young men fighting on the Western Front, but these young girls in some ways were Britain's forgotten army.
They were Britain's forgotten army, and it was the most important jobs that any of the young girls could have done in Britain at that time.
We've reached the head of the Solway Firth, journey's end.
Scotland's southwest coast has revealed its astonishing variety of landscapes.
But if this coast seems quiet, that's far from the truth.
It's not that nothing happens here - more that it happens to a different beat and a longer rhythm.
Time now, sadly, to catch up with the rest of the world.
From this point, I can hear something I haven't heard before on this journey, and that's the roar of distant traffic.
Those cars and trucks over there are travelling along the A74, that crosses the border between Scotland and England, marking the end of my journey.
And so for now the tranquillity of Scotland's southwest coast is behind me.