Inner Hebrides to Faroe Islands

Kate Rew heads out into the Atlantic

Programme seven

A Norwegian odyssey: exploring vikings, king crabs, the Shetland bus and more. Coast travels from Lillesand to Svalbard.

Neil explores a Scottish superquarry and Kate joins the hunt for the 'bone eating snot flower', as the 2009 BBC/OU series of Coast travels from the Inner Hebrides to the Faroe Islands

1. Europe's biggest superquarry

Location: Loch Linnhe, just east of the Island of Mull
Presenter: Neil Oliver

Neil starts the Scottish leg of his journey at the Glensanda quarry at the mouth of the Great Glen Fault, an area rich in granite. This is the site of Europe’s biggest superquarry, which, although situated on the mainland, relies entirely on the sea for all transportation in and out. The granite from this quarry makes the roads of Britain roll; the hard rock is ideal to stand the pounding of heavy lorries and cars. Neil admires the ‘boys’ toys’ at the quarry, where a single tyre on the super size trucks costs £8,000. Neil is also given an explosive lesson in how the rock is mined.

Find out more

What's beneath our feet
How to identify granite

2. Postcard – kite surfing

Location: Island of Tiree

A professional kite surfing resident of Tiree shows how this windy island in the balmy gulf stream makes an ideal spot for kite surfers.

3. The hunt for the mysterious 'bone eating snot flower'

Location: Tobermory
Presenter: Kate Rew

Tobermory is the embarkation point for many a whale watching trip. Kate Rew joins a team of marine biologists on an experimental mission to find out what happens to whales when they die. Having laid a whale bone 50 metres down on the cold dark Atlantic seabed a year ago, the team head out to sea to retrieve it. The whale bone is now an island home to a whole community of extraordinary wildlife but the biologists are particularly curious about a bone-eating creature, peculiarly named the ‘bone-eating snot-flower’.

4. Soaring with sea eagles

Location: Canna
Presenter: Neil Oliver

The sea eagles which used to soar high above the island of Canna were hunted to extinction. By 1918, there wasn’t a single sea eagle to be seen on the island. But now the sea eagles have been brought back, re-introduced from Norway. Neil Oliver goes to extraordinary lengths to climb into one of their nests perched high on a steep cliff to see if they are eating well enough to survive.

Find out more

Should we worry about extinction?
The end of life

5. Skye kelp cutters and the 'brown gold rush'

Location: Skye
Presenter: Alice Roberts

Two hundred years ago, the quiet shorelines of Scotland’s western isles were literally ablaze with activity, because the beaches are abundant in a particular type of seaweed that, when burnt, releases soda ash, a chemical crucial to the glass making industry. Until the late 1700s, Britain’s source for soda ash was Spain, but then came war with Napoleon, and all imports stopped. The lucrative weed on the shorelines of Skye became a valuable crop. Every summer, 20,000 people across the western islands were involved in this grim, filthy work. Alice explores the island to find out about the desperate lives of the kelp cutters of Skye.

Find out more

Seaweed - part of life on the beach

6. Rockall

Location: Rockall Island
Presenter: Neil Oliver

The tiny island of Rockall, 230 miles west of the Outer Hebrides, is just 27 metres across. It is the rocky remains of an extinct volcano that the UK formally laid claim to in 1955. Although other countries have never challenged the sovereignty Britain established over the rock itself, what is contentious is what may lie beneath the seas off Rockall. The seabed in the surrounding area may be rich in minerals and oil. Neil meets former SAS paratrooper and adventurer Tom McClean, who lived on Rockall for 40 days and 40 nights in 1985, in a bid to secure Britain’s claim to 'the rock’, but the potential riches around Rockall are still up for grabs; Britain, Ireland, Iceland and the Faroe Islands are all claiming a case.

Find out more

How much do we need oil?
More about minerals

7. Our 'infinite' coast: fractal mathmatics and the length of the coast

Location: Mellon Udrigle
Presenter: Nicholas Crane

Armed with a simple ruler on a Scottish beach, Nick Crane learns how the challenge of measuring our coastline led to a new branch of maths that could help our mobile phones get smaller. Nick discovers that the shorter the ruler you use, the longer the coastline becomes because you get further into the nooks and crannies. It was the endless complexity of Britain’s wiggly coastline that inspired Polish-born mathematician Benoit Mendelbrot to invent a whole new branch of mathematics – fractals. Fractal patterns crop up everywhere in nature, from the repeating structures of broccoli to the tiny airways of our lungs; understanding the maths of fractals lets engineers pack the most in the smallest space.

Find out more

Maths: one of the oldest phenomena

8. Operation Valentine: British occupation of the Faroe Islands in the Second World War

Location: Faroe Islands
Presenter: Neil Oliver

Neil journeys far north into the vast Atlantic to explore the staggeringly beautiful landscape of the Faroes: 18 separate islands with nearly 700 miles of coastline. The Faroes are home to fewer than 50,000 people, who are never more than three miles from the sea. In 1940, when the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway, Britain feared the Germans were aiming to occupy the Faroes to use as a key U-boat base, so they decided to get in there first. On April 11th, 1940, Winston Churchill announced that the Danish territory of Faroe was under British control. Far from resisting this occupation, Neil uncovers the romances that developed between some of the islanders and British soldiers during the aptly named ‘Operation Valentine’.

9. Postcard – Faroes' rowing race

Location: Faroe Islands

There’s one day a year where the Faroese really go wild, their national holiday: St Olaf’s Day, July 29th. The rowing races are the highlight of the festival, with pride and prizes at stake. A young female Faroe rowing team show us how it’s done.

10. The 1,000-year-old Viking house

Location: Faroe Islands

Neil visits a remarkable house that has been home to the same family for 17 generations, part of it dates back to the end of the Viking era. With no trees on the island for construction, the house arrived 1,000 years ago as a kit of wooden parts pre-fabricated in Norway. The house reveals the age old Scandinavian skill with ‘flat-pack’ structures.