"This is Great Britain." "Over a third of our country is made up of mountains." "And Scotland is home to the highest summit of all." "It's a landscape of fantasy castles..." "Lovely." "Do the Munsters live here?" "..bleak wastelands where you can spend a night in the snow..." " Are we going to be cosy in there?" " We'll be very cosy." "..and where a little toil and effort can have magnificent rewards." "What a view!" "Look at that!" "This was where Britain's mountains were first tamed for visitors to enjoy." "What challenges do they have to offer us today?" "These are the Central Scottish Highlands." "The 1 0..50 train that puffs its way from the Scottish coastal town of Mallaig into the remarkable scenery of the Central Scottish Highlands seems gentle and rather quaint." "It feels almost the natural way to travel there." "But in fact, only a few years before the railway line was built, this was outlaw country." "Quite frankly, mountains have always meant trouble." "You think of mountain men or hillbillies." "The authorities have always struggled to control them." "200 years ago, these were Britain's badlands, inhabited, or so the central authorities thought, by little more than savages." "Today, this train is full of day-trippers on a bit of a jolly." "And they are threatened by no more than overpriced souvenirs." "Let me have a look." "So this is the "West Highland Railway Ben Nevis Scotch Whisky"." "There's not much left to tell us that the place we're arriving at, after our three-hour journey, was once a military outpost, except the name." "Because this is Fort William." "It was built in the early 1 800s as a garrison town, to control the unruly peoples of the Highlands." "Nowadays, it's a barracks for holiday-makers, drawn here by Britain's biggest mountain," "Ben Nevis." "Their guidebooks may tell them Ben Nevis means "The mountain closest to heaven", but some experts believe the Gaelic name is more likely to translate as "Mountain of Dread"." "For generations, the slopes of giant mountains like the Ben were as fearsome as the people who lived amongst them." "But today, this place is almost a playground." "I told a friend I was going up it, and she said, "l think I pushed a baby buggy up there once."" "So it's not considered the most arduous of climbs." "In fact, 1 00,000 visitors a year toddle up to its summit, 4,406 feet in the air." "All they have to do is follow the zigzag path winding all the way up its slope, and as long as you go at your own pace, pretty much anyone can do it." "Someone even drove a motor car to the summit in 1 91 1." "So the Mountain of Dread is easy-peasy." "Unless, of course, you run up it." "Morag, Emmie and Nicki are in training." "They run the Ben most weekends, and today, I'm going with them." "Now, girls, you need quite strong thighs, dare I say, to do this, do you?" " lt builds up with time." " Lung capacity." "Ooh, lung capacity!" "But this is more like a gymnastic exercise than going for a run, isn't it?" " lt is on the way down, yes." " lt's tricky, it's very tricky." "What do I do about the pain?" "Do you take tablets before you go?" " No." " lt's a drug-free thing, is it?" " A wee whisky." " We have a pint at the end." "The annual Ben Nevis race was established in 1 938." "I've been let off lightly with what they call a half-Ben." "So I'm going to be due a half pint." "Even if it half kills me." " You don't do the tanning lotion either, I see." " No, I don't." "Well, that makes me feel better." "Perhaps if I fell over and banged my head now, I wouldn't have to go." "Who's got the phone for ringing the ambulance?" " l've got one." " You have?" "Good." " Are you ready?" "Shall we time this?" " Yes, please." " Let's go." " l've got 50 minutes to get to the halfway line." "So, all I have to do is trot halfway up the highest mountain in Britain, to a large pond called the Halfway Lochan." "That's at 2,200 feet." "And if I can do it in under an hour, then I get a reward." "I'll qualify to do the whole lot in a proper race." "Don't you think that it's really relentlessly manly, too much of this outdoor sport?" "Well, I don't find it manly. I find it romantic." "Romance made me do it." " Did it?" " l followed my husband into the Ben race." " He did it first?" " Oh, yes, he'd done a few." "And he always tries to find me on the Ben, so that he can give me a snotty kiss." "Well, I'm sure it's worth a snotty kiss." "But hey, I'm fit." "I run around Regents Park with my dog." "But after 20 minutes of this punishing stuff," "I'd happily take mouth-to-mouth from my Labrador." "She's an iron man." "I can't do it. I'm dying." "Oh, God!" "90 per cent of it's just staggering." "Up!" "After another 20 minutes," "I've lost my will to breathe." "I'm being overtaken by people walking to the top." "Yup, I'm just one amongst many having fun on the mountain." "Fun runs, fun walks, fun... even carrying a keg of ale to the summit." "Fancy a beer?" "Just a few more agonising steps and I'm there." "Half way." "Did I make it in under an hour?" "Or did it really take the six weeks it felt like?" "I...once...went...pony trekking." "And as we got to the hill, the horse started going..." "..for the next six hours, and I felt, "l'm killing this horse."" " So now the horse has had its revenge." " Now you know what it's like." " You did your 43 minutes." " 43?" "So if I were to throw myself off the edge of this cliff and roll down to the bottom, I'd have done the half Ben." " That's my fastest time." " Good." " You animal!" " ls it?" "Here's the two hundred quid." "What a view!" "Look at that." "Look at that!" "Well, I needed a breather." "This is my reward." "I can see most of Scotland, and my thighs have grown to the size of pumpkins." "The girls are on the way back down, but I decide to plough on and see if I can make it to the summit." "Off with the running shoes, on with the sturdy boots and all the other sensible walking kit." " Hi." " Hi." "What race are you in?" " Three Peaks short race." " Three Peaks short race?" "Good luck." " Want to join us?" " No, well, I've done my bit for today." "And I'm glad I got my kit back on." "Out of nowhere, a storm roars in, bringing 7 0mph winds that threaten to hurl me off the peak." "With 1 4 foot of rainfall on this mountain every year, you can see why, until recently, people needed a definite purpose to come up here." "200 years ago, the only people who really came up mountains were scientists, exploring them like..." "like they were new countries." "The path that's behind me here was built, not to enable tourists to get up and down, but to enable a man to ride a pony to the top to make observations about the weather, which, as you can see, is changeable." "This intrepid man was called Clement Wragg, and I'm beginning to understand why he was quickly nicknamed Inclement Wragg." "He and his pony made the trip every day for two years, whatever the conditions, in order to send weather reports back to Glasgow." "He petitioned to have a weather station built at the very top of the mountain, and it finally opened in 1 883, thanks to sponsors who included Queen Victoria." "Three men lived here permanently, as if it were a station in Antarctica." "And they took hourly readings 365 days of the year, battling gallons of rain and towers of ice." "In 1 904 though, the observatory was abandoned." "And Clement?" "Well, he would have certainly ploughed on today." "But not me." "Local wisdom has it there's just a one-in-three chance of the Ben being clear enough to actually get a view from the summit." "But if you are lucky enough to get that break, there's still some evidence of the observatory to be found up there." "You can take a breather amongst the crumbling ruins, and look out on the extraordinary vistas." "To the scientists who first set foot up here, this must have felt like a whole new world." "From the tourist path of the Ben to the A82," "I've come 1 6 miles south of Ben Nevis to Glencoe, to look for the evidence of how the taming of the mountain regions began." "Glencoe is known as the gateway to the Highlands." "This five-mile stretch of highway cuts through a valley so exquisite it's difficult to keep your mind on the road." "I absolutely love driving through the Highlands." "You get these incredible roads, brilliant scenery, and hardly any speed cameras at all." "But I don't suppose half the people who come up here at the weekend and bomb around on motorcycles have any idea how inaccessible these hills once were." "300 years ago, to get past these towering mountains," "Buachaille Etive Mor, Bidean nam Bian, you went through bog, crossed rivers and traversed moors." "And to get where?" "To yet more mountains, inhabited by marauding, unruly Scottish tribes." "This was the home of fierce clans who, a hundred years after Scotland and England had been yoked together under one king, were still deeply opposed to government interference." "What sort of a fool would even think of building a road through their back yard?" "Here we are." "This is what we're looking for." "Just by the modern road, the new modern road, are the remains of the original road to the Highlands." "And it was built by soldiers for soldiers." "It was a General George Wade, no fool at all, who started the road building campaign in 1 724, which brought a staggering 1, 1 00 miles of new roads into this rebellious territory." "His aim was to get troops into trouble spots quickly, but quite frankly, the whole place was a trouble spot." "Each soldier was issued with nine rounds of ammunition." "Half of them were down here, digging away, and the other half were stationed up on the rocks above, keeping guard in case the wild highlanders suddenly descended on them and killed the lot." "ln fact, the ones up there were rather envious of the ones down here, because the ones down here got paid extra for doing the work." "At any one time, there would be upwards of 500 soldiers working on the project." "It was a massive undertaking." "But then the Highlands were a big thorn in the side of the government." "So, when the National Anthem came to be written," "General Wade featured in it." "There is a sixth verse which you might not know of. lt goes:" "Lord, grant that Martial Wade" "May, by thy mighty aid" "Victory bring" "Let him sedition hush" "And, like a torrent, rush" "Rebellious Scots to crush" "God save the King!" "Of course, it's not actually sung very much these days." "Well, not in Scotland, anyway." "Rebellious Scots might be interested to know, though, that's Wade's roads were, in fact, used very effectively for moving troops around, by Bonnie Prince Charlie, who led the last great rebellion in the Highlands in 1 7 45." "But long before that happened, the authorities had decided to use any means, no matter how brutal, to try and put the Highlanders down." "30 years before General Wade got here, this valley was soaked in blood." "This is the site of the Glencoe Massacre." "At the end of the Glencoe valley is an island on the dark waters of Loch Leven." "The graves of the slaughtered lie here." "Stuart Nichol is a local guide and historian." "He's taking me there, dressed in the authentic garb of a Highland warrior." "I'm all dressed up, as you can see, Stuart, in waterproof things." " ls what you're wearing waterproof?" " lt is waterproof." "The wool is actually "walked", which means that it's soaked and kneaded, so that it actually contracts, and it makes it waterproof." "It's wind and watertight, as well as being very nice and warm." "The whole landscape, the low clouds and the black waters, seem to reflect the drama of this place, where chieftains were buried." "An island of the dead." "Well, the whole island is completely littered with graves." "Anywhere that you can dig, almost, there is a grave." "So we can get off here and have a look and a wander round." "It's not a particularly easy place to get a coffin ashore, I wouldn't have thought." "The massacre was a betrayal of trust and hospitality." "In 1 692, government soldiers marched into Glencoe." "The MacDonalds, who lived here, as was Highland custom, took them in, fed them and gave them shelter." "They had no idea that after 1 2 days they would be murdered in cold blood." "It was a punishment for not having pledged allegiance to the king quickly enough." "Well, the orders that came in to Captain Robert Campbell only came in the night before." "And he was basically told that he had to start the massacre at five o'clock in the morning." "And nobody under the age of 70 was to be spared." " That includes children?" " That included children, yes." "Absolutely." "And they reckoned that 38 died in total, though many more would have died in the high glens that they escaped to." "But what's fascinating about it is that the act of murder that we witness here, the act of massacre, was an attempt to suppress the Highland people." "It was followed by the banning of tartan, the banning of erm...weaponry, wasn't it?" "Yeah." "The weapons, tartan, the plaid, playing of the bagpipes." "The whole lot were banned about 50 years later, after the Battle of Culloden." "All these things now have more life, live on shortbread packets." " They march up and down the Royal Mile." " Absolutely." "They're worn by financial advisers in Canada." "They have more life than they could possibly have ever had," " if they'd just been allowed to fade out." " Absolutely." "Speaking as a Welshman, if only they'd tried to massacre a few Welshmen, we'd all be wearing those funny hats!" "The struggle to bring the rebellious Highlanders under control lasted over half a century." "The government finally imposed their will on these mountainous areas when nearly 2,000 clansmen were wiped out in the Battle of Culloden in 1 7 46." "It was a bloody and extreme measure, but one the authorities believed was necessary." "These were the last remaining feudal, almost tribal, lands in Britain." "Highlanders were brought up to fight, to serve their laird and to kill their neighbours." "Blood feuds could last for generations." "Perhaps a little of that spirit lives on in some Highland games." "Ladies, have you got boys, men, out there, doing their stuff?" " Yes, two." " Two boys?" "The sport of shinty carries on an ancient hand-to-hand tradition." "They may sometimes live only a few miles apart, but rival teams still break heads in this brutal version of hockey." "The game is as old as the hills." "The Celtic heroes of Ireland and Scotland often had a shinty stick in their hand." "There is one legend about a warrior called Cucullon." "He could knock the ball with his stick so fiercely through the jaws of a ferocious dog, so hard, that it took the entrails right out the other end." "The women were so impressed by this that they came to him with their breasts exposed, and his ardour could only be cooled by dunking him in three enormous vats of water." "I've come into the hills to meet John Sloggie." "He's a bit of a mythical figure himself." "A one-time player, revered referee," "John is also the last true craftsman of those vicious, heavy sticks." " Quite an ancient game, isn't it, shinty?" " Aye, it goes back a while." "They used to play it clan against clan, glen against glen." " This is where the sticks are made, John?" " This is where it's all done." "And you've got all the kit for making it from the beginning, have you?" "Near enough." "What I need, anyway." "What I need." " So what's your raw material?" " This is your hickory in there." " Feel the weight of that." " That's heavy stuff." "There's your five laminations." "You put them into your mould, clamp it off." "You bend it round, walk it round and it gives you the strength." " Here's one." "We can see there." " That's one there, yes." "You can see the laminations." "And the different coloured woods?" "The white wood's the sap wood, and the brown is the more mature stuff." "Swing at the ball, turn it and come back with the other hand..." "Although people still lose their teeth and the occasional eye to shinty, in 1 895 the game was given rules, a referee and an association." "It was made fit for the modern age." "Shinty was tamed, just like the mountains themselves had been, a hundred years before." "By the early 1 800s, the Highlands had been pacified." "It was time to see how best to put these mountains to work." "They were rich in minerals, in wool and in timber, which could be best transported on the biggest resource of all, water." "Scotland is divided by the Great Glen, a huge rift, which slices through the Highlands from the North Sea to the Irish Sea." "It has three huge natural lochs, but you couldn't get from one side to the other by boat until the start of the 1 800s, when a great new engineering project finally linked them up." "It was the Caledonian Canal, and ships could now cross mountains." "I'm boarding a boat called The Great Glen, as skipper Ian McKay takes her through Neptune's Staircase." "The water here rises 64 feet across a distance of 500 yards, step by step through an ingenious succession of eight locks." "It was dreamt up by the canal's mastermind, engineering genius, Thomas Telford." "OK, bow off." "And stern off." "Just in terms of the engineering, how complicated was this to undertake?" "It's an amazing feat of engineering." "They had to cut through solid rock in some places, and dig out and stop landslides and actually make it waterproof." "ln some places, they would use Harris tweed on the banks, or tweed on the banks." " Harris tweed?" " Harris tweed." "It did keep the canal from leaking, with clay and with rock." "Like most canals, it's a navigation..." "it's a waterway." "The intent was to bring wealth and commerce to the Highlands, and make sure the Highlands weren't revolting again." "Queen Victoria came up here when she was in Scotland." "The term, "We are not amused", this is where it was originated." "The lock keepers would all go..." "Now they're hydraulic, but the lock keepers all put poles in the capstan and put it round." "She was getting bored, and that's where the term, "We are not amused" came from." "So she was actually waiting to go through the lock and she said..." ""We are not amused." That's true." "Built at a whopping cost of $91 2,000, by the time the canal was finished, sea-going boats had become too big to get through the narrow canals." "But what it really represents is the optimism of an age, that believed it could bring these remote mountain areas under control and into the service of the Commonwealth." "After all, over the next hundred years," "British engineering was to bring civilisation everywhere, from the African jungle to the Indian plains." "Why not to Scotland, as well?" "But Timbuktu has nothing on Rannoch Moor." "It's a vast, barren, mountainous basin, 1,000 feet above sea level." "All that rain washing off the Highland peaks sinks into this mire." "And anyone venturing up here risks doing exactly the same." "Rannoch's soggy marshes can be up to 20 feet deep." "So what did the intrepid Victorians do?" "They built a railway straight across it." "Sweet little station, isn't it?" "It's Rannoch Station." "And it's probably the most remote railway station in the entirety of the British Isles, right down in the middle of 56 square miles of unutterable bog." "5,000 navvies spent five years overlaying Rannoch's sodden peat with bark, tree roots and ash to build a foundation for the track, which sort of floats above the bog." "The West Highland Line was made to take fish from the Atlantic port of Mallaig to the markets of London." "But it also worked the other way around, and brought something that was to have a big effect on the economy of the Highlands, even today." "Tourists." " Good morning." "You're a very welcome sight." " Good morning." " ls this a sleeper, then?" " This is a sleeper, yes, from London." " And there are passengers currently asleep?" " Well, most of them have got up by now." "There's odd ones still asleep, having a long lie in." "They've been able to do that for..." "for over a hundred years?" " 1895, it started." " Did it?" " Fantastic." "Well, I'll have a cup of tea, please." " No problem." "This may be one of the last remaining truly wild places in Scotland." "As Robert Louis Stevenson commented in his novel Kidnapped," ""a wearier looking desert a man never saw. "" "But nonetheless, people still want to see it." "When the first tourists came to Scotland in the early 1 700s, they could write best-selling books about the horrors of the experience." "Mrs Murray from Kensington recommended that you take a spare pair of carriage springs, your own cutlery and dinner service." "But as the century wore on, a sort of rage for visiting this wild place started to take over." "And this was largely down to literature." "And particularly to one book, Waverley, by Walter Scott." "Waverley, published in 1 81 4, is a swashbuckling, tartan-tinted story, set against the background of the 1 7 45 Jacobite rebellion." "What had, only 50 years before, been a bloody, violent and terrifying reality, became an entertainment." "The country went tartan crazy." "Like people travelling to New Zealand to see where Lord Of The Rings was made, so everybody wanted to set foot in Waverley land." "Over the next hundred years, these sodden, midge-ridden, cold wastes of northern mountain and bog became the most fashionable place in the world for a wealthy man to have a holiday home." "Historian Daru Rooke has come to pick me up and take me to look at one." "Great car!" "See if you can get yourself in there." "Poop poop!" "No seat belts!" "We're off to Ardverikie, the romantic Highland estate with a thousand year history, on the banks of Loch Laggan." "But the breathtaking romantic vision that we see here was actually created by an industrialist from Leeds." "He bought a crumbling ruin from an impoverished old laird, and set about creating his own private Highland kingdom." "Strictly, you understand, for the holidays." "Every August, the trains would be loaded with people coming up here with luggage, with servants, with grooms." "Off they'd come to have a great time for about ten weeks, enjoying the shooting every year." "Above all, Queen Victoria coming here sets the royal seal of approval here in the 1840s." "The very landscape itself had to be remodelled to suit the new visitors' fantasies." "The industrialists and wealthy characters who came here replanted millions of trees to get it looking like a romantic olde worlde Scotland." "Did they really?" "They literally thought," ""We'll make Scotland more picturesque than it actually is at the moment"?" " So what do you think?" " Lovely." "Do the Munsters live here?" " Well, we're visiting it, aren't we?" " What is this style of architecture called?" " Appropriately enough, it's Scottish Baronial." " ls it?" "It's a kind of hotchpotch of almost every historical detail you could choose." "Pick-and-mix effect." "Ardverikie is actually still a private home, still used as a Highland retreat by its owners." "We're going to have a snoop around, a sort of Through The Scottish Baronial Keyhole." "This was the shooting lodge of Sir John Ramsden." "It's quite a grand building, and all built on the back of industrial money raised in Huddersfield." " The family owned Huddersfield." " lt's absolutely extraordinary." "How many acres of hunting grounds did this estate have?" "I think there was over 100,000 acres attached to the property." "I mean, it's a vast, vast estate." "Plenty of room, then, for that newly fashionable hobby, deer stalking, because Sir John's main pastime in Scotland, apart from spending his vast wealth on his house, was shooting." "And obviously, when there was time, he went hunting stags." ""JWR, 1893."" "Then there's "JWR" there." "ls that the actual man himself, JWR?" "John William Ramsden, and we've got his photograph over here." "He must have been extremely wealthy." "This must have cost a fortune, this place." "He certainly looks that, and he seems to have earned about $168,000 a year, which is about ten million by today's standards." " And he put a lot..." " A year?" "And he put a lot of that into this property." "What facilities..." "What did he spend his money on here?" "Well, it had its own gas plant, so you could have gas lighting in every room," " Highly modern." " Brand-new." "Brand-new." "He had his own telephone system, and he got rid of the peat fires and put in central heating." "You've even got one of the most elaborate radiators I've ever seen over there, covered up in bronze and marble." "So this is the radiator." "This is the house radiator, looking like a sarcophagus." "Yes, you could bury a pharaoh in it." "Oh, I'm sorry." "I didn't mean to disturb you." "Sorry." "It's Her Ladyship." "Look at this." "A commode." "Fantastic." "One for children?" "No." "Newly rich Victorians were new to the wild." "They wanted the mountains to conform to their standards of comfort." "To them, the wilderness seemed an endless resource and they plundered its riches." "They fished, they hunted." "Everything became a trophy." "Even the seemingly innocent Victorian passion for egg collecting had disastrous consequences." "It nearly made the magnificent Highland bird of prey, the osprey, extinct in this country." "So these days, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds tries to reintroduce just one breeding pair a year into this place." "I've come here now in the hope that I might be able to see a male osprey feeding." "It would be a male osprey, because he comes over, catches a fish and carries it back to his mate." "His name is Henry." "He takes the trout off to his mate EJ and their three chicks." "This..." "This is a trout farm, in fact." "And the osprey come here and take trout, not just by the pound or the hundredweight, but over the year, by the ton." "Apparently, the owner doesn't mind so much, because the osprey are fantastically good for the economy." "200,000 people come a year to see them." "And presumably, they buy buns and cups of tea... ..while they wait...for hours..." "..and hours... ..and hours." "There it is, yes." "Yeah, here he is." "Coming in now." "Just see its slightly ragged wing tips." "Coming right down the pond." "There's a seagull dive-bombing it!" "Wow!" "There's a seagull trying to sort of give it the old heave-ho." "Clearly, the osprey's seen as some sort of threat." "It's like watching a dogfight there." "Yeah, here he is, coming in now." "Wow!" "Look at that. lt's amazing." "It is." "Henry is a wild animal in his natural, wild habitat." "Of course, unlike the Victorians, we now recognise that the wild wants to exist on its own terms." "Even so, we still don't want to exclude ourselves from it." "In fact, we're going to greater and greater efforts to experience wilderness in the raw." "I've crossed the Grampian Mountains again, to get back to Ben Nevis." "I was surprised to find that the Ben itself has a hidden side which I'd never seen, a dark and unwelcoming one - the rugged, inhospitable north face." "I'm going up there with climber Heather Morning." "Nobody really attempted to climb these huge, unforgiving walls of granite at all, until the 1 890s, well after climbing as a sport had been established in the Alps." "Dodgy subject, because the first route to be done on Ben Nevis was actually done by Sassenachs, two English people." "As you can imagine, the Scots weren't too impressed that their highest mountain had been conquered for the first time on an ice route by two English climbers." "We are following the route taken by those first climbers, led by an engineer from Manchester, John Hopkinson." "Coming up the back way, unannounced, they rather startled the meteorologists in their observatory." "I have to say, it looks pretty daunting to me." "As we're talking about it, a chill wind begins to blow, and the wind..." "Hey, Griff, there's nothing like being thrown in at the deep end." "The Hopkinsons were a new type of mountain climber, for whom the summit was not as important as the experience of the climb itself." "They, and those who followed them, named the new routes they forged up this face.." "East Chimney, North Tower." "They seem chosen to remind me how steep this side of the mountain really is." "Heather and I are heading for a route named Number Four Gully." "Heather is intending to lead me straight up a frozen waterfall and go climbing on the ice." "It's a beautiful, warm spring day, and that's the problem." "It's calm today, which is not normal." "It's often pretty windy up here, so that's good." "But what I'm a little concerned about today is the temperature." "There's a slim possibility of avalanche or cornice collapse." "Looking over here, you can see where a lot of this snow has sloughed out of this gully, which is called Number Five." "Close to, the avalanche is far from soft and fluffy." "These are icy blocks, dirty with broken stone and mud." "I mean, what you get here, which is just extraordinary, is you get this feeling of the power of nature gradually wearing these mountains away." "Only a matter of time, if we stood here for five or six million years, we'd see the whole thing getting worn away." "We certainly would." "An avalanche this size does quite a lot of damage, eh?" "But when you use the word "drama" to describe this, that's what you mean." "It's like a giant set, and you can see why they use words like "buttress" and "pinnacle", because it is like a castle, isn't it?" "It is." "Pretty dramatic, eh?" "Pretty dramatic." "And what's extraordinary is, the other side of Ben Nevis, the side that people have driven motor cars up and ridden ponies up, and had a race up, 150,000 tourists a year." "And then you come round here, and this is like the secret, hidden side, isn't it?" "It is, really, yeah." "It's like she takes her clothes off!" "Heather and I need to get a foot on the cliff face." "It's another 2,000 feet to the summit, but as we get closer, things begin to look a little more risky." "I'm getting twitchy about the temperature." "The forecast today was saying that the freezing level was going to be above the summit, so it's not ideal conditions for climbing on snow and ice." "And it looks like there's a lot of stuff come down very recently." " And it's falling down?" " Yeah, it's coming off there." "There's some big lumps." "You wouldn't want to get wiped out by one." " So, do you think...?" " Well, it's not looking very good." "I don't think it would be very sensible to go up there today." " After everything I've said?" " Bottom lip coming out!" "After I've prepared the entire nation who are watching at home to see me go... I haven't even got my harness on or my hat!" "Oh, well, I'm disappointed for you, Griff, actually." "It would have been really nice to do the route, wouldn't it?" " lcing on the cake." " Yes, it would have been." "The challenge would have helped a bit." "Ah, well, at least it wasn't a failure of nerve." "Perhaps I'll never get to be an ice climber, but I have experienced the granite bowl of Nevis, and one of the most dramatic locations in Britain." "Well worth the walk in itself." "But I'm moving on, and I'm heading 50 miles east, not just to one mountain this time, but to an entire range, the Cairngorms." "The Cairngorm Mountains form an enormous plateau of arctic wilderness." "Snow-capped for much of the year, these peaks spread out across an area the size of Greater London." "Right in the middle of the Cairngorms is the town of Aviemore, where, in the late 1 960s, people began to dream of white gold in the mountains." "Well, the instructions are quite clear." "You are not here to loiter." "You are here in Aviemore to enjoy yourself in an active way." "It must have seemed obvious." "Mass tourism and winter sports could bring new prosperity to the Highlands." "What was needed was a brand-new, purpose-built ski resort." "The Highlands, properly packaged, would at last earn its keep." "ln the 1970s, this village became the height of sophistication." "The name of Aviemore became synonymous with the sport of skiing in Britain." "But this being the 1970s, the glamour was placed somewhere between the pina colada and the pineapple and cheese on a stick." "The House of Fraser, that ancient Highland department store, employed an architect named John Poulson to build a spanking new resort, and they rustled up the head of marketing from Butlins to inject some glamour." "But it wasn't just the introduction of cheap package holidays in European ski resorts that troubled Aviemore." "It suffered badly from the absence of reliable snowfall in the Cairngorms." "In the early '90s, much of the old resort was pulled down, including the old ice rink and Santa Claus Land." "The holiday camp on ice may have been doomed, but people still come seeking thrills here." "It's just that those who want to entertain them have to learn to be a little more inventive." "We're..." "You can tell from the sound of it!" "We're just coming up to a dog sledding centre now, where they train various types of dogs to pull sledges over the snow." "And it sounds a bit of an Alaskan thing, but in fact, it was developed, dog sledge racing was developed in Alaska by a Scotsman." "His name was Scotty Allan and he began racing his dogs in 1 908 to stop his children arguing over which of them owned the fastest huskies." "Today, Alan Stewart takes his sled dogs all over the world." "Here in the Cairngorms, he can be seen daily, speeding across the countryside with his pack of hounds." "And me, too." "Soon." "Although they're not domesticated, they're very, very much human friendly, they really are." "Those eyes!" "Extraordinary, aren't they?" "Look at those eyes." "These guys are not the same as the huskies." "They're a different form of dog altogether." "They're a cross between an Alaskan husky and a New Mexican hunting dog." "All right!" "I guessed this was going to be a bumpy ride in what appeared to be some kind of souped-up kids' go-kart on a dirt track road." " Are you ready?" " Yeah." "The whole system works by just releasing the..." "Waah!" "From where I'm sitting, they seem to be loving it, wagging their tails like crazy." "This is not a vehicle for loose change." "Thank heavens we don't pass any lamppostsl" "Alan stops them taking off across the heather, but otherwise, if there's a bump in the road, we have to take itl" "Go in home, boys." "Go in home." "Go in home." "Go in home." "OK, OK, there we are." "Aah." "Aaaah." "Well..." "Excellent." "We had three speeds." "We had "stop"," ""very fast" and "Look out, it's a cat"!" "But apart from that, really just an extraordinary way to travel." "Imagine going for 1 ,200 miles." "Husky races in Alaska do run for thousands of miles, through trackless wastes of ice and forest." "Alan and his dogs have been there." "But how can this compare?" "Is there really anything here more than a carefully orchestrated fairground ride?" "To find out, I'm going up onto the Cairngorm plateau itself, to see how far it lives up to its reputation as a vast and desolate wilderness." "Modern travellers try to get further and further away from civilisation." "The Victorians may have wanted to capture the wild, we increasingly want to be in it." "I'm with mountain guide Andy Bateman." "We're making our way across this giant expanse of snow, skiing cross-country style." "And almost from the beginning, we enter a true wilderness." " Which valley is this, Andy?" " The upper reaches of Strathnethy." "It's terrific, isn't it?" "You can see why, in the Middle Ages, they thought of all this, the mountains, as being God's mistake." "Given that we've only come just round the corner from Aviemore, already we're in a place which feels completely empty, like a great gash in the earth." "Wow!" "Look at this." "This is the El Alamein hut, named because it was built by the 51 st Highland Division soldiers as a training exercise before going off to war." "At one time, there were huts like this all over the Cairngorms, to provide shelter for anyone stranded on these mountains in really bad weather." "The trouble was that they found that they gave people a false sense of security, and there were a number of incidents, where people would have come to the hut thinking they'd be all right for the night," "and then the temperature would drop so much that there would be unfortunate consequences." "So, they've knocked most of them down." "The demolition was prompted by a tragic incident in November 1 97 1, when five teenage girls and their teacher died on this mountain, trying to reach a similar hut in a blizzard." "Although the huts went from being a refuge to a hazard, people do still stay out here." "In fact, Andy and I are about to try a traditional method of survival when conditions get extreme, the snow hole." "It's a kind of self-build, frozen bed-and-breakfast." "Argh!" "Curses!" "ls this a good spot to do the snow hole, then?" " Are we erm...stopping here?" " We are." " This is the site." " OK, good." "This is it, this is it." "There's a huge amount of snow in here, as you can see." "And it collects to quite a depth." " Are we going to be cosy in there?" " We'll be very cosy." "Very cosy." "Once you're in your sleeping bag and I'm cooking away." "I'll take your word for it." "We're digging our way into the mountain, because the snow acts as a natural insulation against the cold." "Sitting in it is warmer than being outside it." "And in next to no time, he disappeared into the mountain." " Andy?" " Yeah?" " Are we supposed to meet in the middle?" " Yes." "After an hour and a half, it's done." "Welcome to the show apartment." "Come in, come in, I'll show you around." "Mind your head." "It's a bit low on the ceiling there." "But that's how we like it." "And this..." "Here we are." "Well, I'm afraid I'm..." "I'm immensely proud." "As you can see, kitchen area." "Got a few shelves over there." "Anything we want, we just add." "We can add anything, you know." "We went for...white, actually." "We thought white would be nice." "And a sort of curved effect over the top." "Outside, a lovely pink glow rises above the hill." "We have the whole of the Cairngorms as our back yard." "Apart from our own humble dwelling, there isn't a single human footprint to be seen anywhere." "And this must surely be incredibly rare in our crowded island." "Night begins to fall, the temperature falls with it, and our snow hole is almost as snug as Andy promised." "I think that one of the reasons snow holes work at all is because people exhaust themselves building it, so they deserve a rest when they finally get inside." "It certainly gives you a feeling of being a hundred per cent closer to the idea of the mountain." "Mmm." "I have some unfinished business to attend to before I leave." "I've yet to make the summit that is the biggest of them all." "Back at the grim north face of Ben Nevis, it's grey, cloudy and very, very wet." "The ice has gone." "This climb is going to be a clamber up the dripping cliff in boots and bare hands." " Hi, Griff." " Mark." "To lead me on my third attempt at the Ben is mountain expert Mark Diggins." " Hiya." "Well done." " How are you?" "All right?" "I'm very good, thank you." "So..." "Oh, hello, it's disappeared in the mist!" "The whole thing." "Just a few minutes ago, we could see the lot." "The route that we're going to do is pretty complicated and it does require visibility." "So we'll have to follow our noses a bit." "We want to sniff our way up, if you like, up the north face, and get onto the top." "The torrential rain has made the mountain path loose and slippery." "Each step has to be taken with care." "There's a 500-foot drop, and we've only just started climbing." "The summit is higher above us than that, but hidden in thick cloud." " Which way are we going now?" " We're heading up." "There's a goat track." "We're heading up there." "Right... I think we'll put a bit of rope on from here." "Well, as you can see, the ground opens up below us." "And so, our trail is a really thin trail, just on this steep slope." "And then way across, up to that ridge." "A line to the top." " Very slow with our feet." " Yep." "I'm roped up for safety because we're reaching the most difficult part of our route to the top, what mountaineers refer to as a "scramble"." "Down the side of this cliff is a drop of 1,300 feet, almost the same height as the Empire State Building." "Any mistakes here will have a certain air of finality attached to them." " Wet as hell." "Slippery." " Yeah." "Right..." " We're getting to a tricky bit." " Right." "You're going to climb." "You're going to go over there." " A little bit of climbing to do." " l'll stick the rope round here." "Move your hand." " l will move my hand..." " Left hand." "Oh!" "Oh, I see." "Oh, I see. lt's down there, is it?" "OK, so you're going to make your way across." " You'll let me have a bit of spare rope as I go?" " Yeah." " l'll just..." "I've got to be sort of be right on top..." " Drop down a little, that's good." " ..of the ridge." " OK?" "Yeah, yeah." "With the beetling drop." " Now, you want to lower yourself a little bit." " Yes." "Just putting my knee down." "Putting my foot down." " Yeah." " All right." "Got that." " OK?" "All right there?" " Yeah, I am, yeah." " Coming down." " You just have to guide me down here." "ls that OK?" " Are you all right there?" "That's a foot, yeah." " ls that it?" " That's it, yeah." " Excellent." "Good one." "And this is part of what makes...this place the most extreme climbing in Britain, is it?" "Oh, yeah. I mean, look at it." "Look at the view down there." "I don't know if I dare!" " l'm just gonna have a look." " See, just over there, look." " Have we come up all the way?" " Yeah, it's really impressive country." " l'm quite pleased with myself, so far." " You're doing brilliantly." "At erm...3,000 feet." "lsn't it 3,000 feet we are now?" "3,000?" "Nearly four." "We've cracked it pretty much now, so it's fairly moderate terrain, although it's pretty exposed." " There's the summit, at last." " The cairn." " We haven't got a view." " No, nothing." "I'm sorry. I just want to go and touch it." "Oh!" "Ah!" "Mark, thank you." "That was erm..." "That was...." " That was extraordinary." " Well done." " lf you'll just bear with me." " A good job on a day like today." "I just want to put a rock to commemorate our visit." "Yeah, there's a gap there, look." " Thank you." "There you go." "Good." " Was it worth it?" " Yes." " lt was." " We had fun." "We had fun." "Wow!" "I'd made it to the summit of Britain's highest mountain, though I still hadn't seen that view." "Today, we're on our own up here." "We weren't passed by any fun runners or overtaken by a barrel of beer." "But neither were we confronted by wild Highlanders." "There still seems to be a lot of room up here." "Room enough for everybody, if they're prepared to find it." "In fact, we seemed to encounter a bare, empty, undisturbed and involving place." "A unique and humbling place." "A marvellous place, and perfectly untameable." "Next time on Mountain, I'll be crossing the backbone of Britain, the Pennines." "I'll uncover the hidden treasures of this huge range... ..and see how it powered some of our biggest industries."