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The BBC's flagship history series, from Gladiators to Genghis Khan, Bog bodies to Bloody Omaha, find out more in Timewatch.

The Timewatch Team diary about the making of the Wreckers programme.

Tuesday 6 March

We’re in Scotland for our recce of the Orkneys and Hebrides. It’s been a nightmare to sort out from a logistical point of view. The ferry timetables are a law unto themselves and with a winter timetable in place, there are even fewer ferries running at even more erratic times than normal. We don’t seem to be able to get from A to B without a detour to C, and 24 hours wait in between. Our first night is spent in John O’Groats, a strange kind of frontier town. No-one else is staying in our motel and the locals eye us suspiciously. When I tell one of them that we are on the hunt for wreckers, he says: “Nothing of the like happened around here –you need to go to Cornwall, oh yes, they were all at it down that way”. Funny I think, the Cornish were adamant that they didn’t do it either and just pointed the finger at the Scots. It seems no-one wants to own up to this particular piece of coastal history.

About the author

Timewatch is the world’s longest-running history series, having started in 1981, and is the BBC’s flagship history series. Here, members of the production team share the highs, and lows, during the production process as they make some of the next series of programmes.