In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to travel,
what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm making a series of journeys across the length and breadth of the country
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
Ripped By mstoll
I've travelled almost halfway along the stunning West Highland Line.
Using my late-19th-century Bradshaw's Guide,
I'm continuing my journey up the west coast of Scotland from Ayr to Skye.
The Scots have been blessed with beautiful coasts,
with rivers of sweet water, with wonderful rolling countryside.
Today I'll discover how the Scots have managed to harvest the best from each.
The line was completed only at the end of the 19th century,
so I've exchanged my usual 1860s "Bradshaw's" for a later edition.
I'll be using it to plan my route and trace how the railways
brought a new generation of traveller to Scotland.
On this leg of the journey,
I'll be discovering how Victorian railway engineers
conquered Britain's most desolate wilderness...
The bogs on the moor sucked everything up that the engineers laid.
Part of the railway you see here north of the station
has been floated on brushwood and turf.
...visiting a shooting estate favoured by the political elite...
These guys, they were tough.
There was a whole cult amongst very many of these people of being tough.
Deerstalking was part of that.
And learning how the railways helped to make whisky world famous.
This is from pretty much the exact time of the railways arriving in Oban.
I can see the railway here. Here's a train puffing along.
That will be one of the first pictures of the railway.
Starting in Ayr, I've now covered almost 140 miles of the route heading north.
Now the West Highland Line is taking me
through some of Scotland's wildest terrain,
from boggy moors to towering peaks on my way to the Isle of Skye.
Today's route begins in coastal Oban,
then shifts inland to the wilderness of Rannoch Moor,
before climbing up to Corrour, Britain's highest mainline station.
My journey passes through rough country
that posed challenges to the hardy folk who dwelled here.
As we move into Argyllshire, my Bradshaw's Guide is as helpful as ever.
"Oats, potatoes and black cattle are the chief products of this backward district
which has a mossy soil and wet climate unfavourable to agriculture."
Oh, dear. That's not very positive, is it?
"Bradshaw's" may have thought the countryside backward,
but Scotland's rain was key to a booming business.
My first stop is Oban, a town that grew up
on the back of a thriving whisky trade.
Isn't it grand that this stuff is made in Scotland?
Aye, that's true.
Before the railways arrived,
this was an isolated place, difficult to reach except by boat.
It was the ideal location to make whisky.
Hi, Brendan.
I'm meeting distillery manager Brendan McCarron.
I notice that distilleries in Scotland
are quite often spread around in remote places.
What's the historic reason for that?
The distilleries are spread out remotely.
There's various reasons of water and raw materials,
but the main one was to avoid paying tax.
- To avoid paying tax? - It started off as an illicit industry.
Tax costs you money,
so if you make it where no one sees you, then you don't pay the tax.
At Oban, you've been established a couple of hundred years.
We were established in 1794,
so we were one of the very first distilleries to become legal.
As business grew,
the distillery owners invested in Oban, turning it into a busy town.
When the railways arrived in 1880,
trains linked with steamships to the Inner Hebrides
and Oban became a major tourist hub.
The whisky trade received another boost.
All the raw materials came in by train
over different periods and in different amounts.
The really huge one that came in for us was people.
People flocked to Oban after the railway opened.
That's what gets people understanding your whisky,
knowing how good your whisky is, and that's what sells it.
It was massive, actually.
In the 1880s, Oban whisky was in such demand
that the distillery's owner, J Walter Higgin, rebuilt the plant,
carefully preserving the old stills that guaranteed quality.
This is from pretty much the exact time of the railways arriving in Oban.
You can tell that because of the signature. That's J Walter Higgin.
J Walter Higgin.
And a lovely engraving of the harbour at Oban.
I can see the railway here. Here's the station and a train puffing along.
That'll be one of the first pictures of the railway.
That's wonderful.
- And you don't drink that. - Definitely not. That's far too old.
The Oban whisky that we make in the main is matured for 14 years,
so it's a long time.
It's always matured in an ex-American bourbon cask.
We buy them off the bourbon makers
and we use their old casks to make our whisky.
Bourbon used to be imported from America through Oban.
Canny Scottish distillers would reuse the empty casks.
They discovered that the barrels enhanced the whisky's flavour.
The fumes, Brendan!
This hasn't been reduced with water, so this is at about 58 percent alcohol.
- That's why it's knocking me out. - It's got a real kick.
So you wouldn't really want to be tasting this?
You can taste it at that strength. You just wouldn't want...
You wouldn't want to go out for the night on it.
You want to know its strength before you drink it.
It's worth trying at that strength.
Yes.
Very smoky, I think. Orangey.
It's got a slight smokiness to it. It has got oranges in it also.
Some people pick up salt.
Also, because it's been in a cask,
you'll pick up a sweetness, a honeyness, which is influenced by the cask.
I've not drunk enough. Let me see if I can find the honey and the salt.
Help yourself.
Silly old me. There they are.
Honey and salt. I just needed a second sample.
Excellent.
A man knows his limits.
I must leave to investigate another of Oban's 19th-century industries.
The Bradshaw's Guide says that "from the great abundance of seaweed
which is cast ashore, vast quantities of kelp is made."
I'm wondering what Victorians did with vast quantities of kelp.
I have to find out.
I'm heading for Oban's dramatic and rocky coastline,
the perfect habitat for seaweed, to meet Professor Laurence Mee,
director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science.
- How are you? - Alright, Michael.
My Bradshaw's Guide, written in the middle-late 19th century,
talks about a vast abundance of seaweed
and enormous quantities of kelp being harvested. But for what purpose?
Kelp was harvested even from the Middle Ages along the coast of Scotland.
The soils here are very poor.
To eke out an existence, crofters, the local farmers,
soon discovered that harvesting kelp and mixing it with the poor soils
just by basically turning over the turf and adding the kelp,
they could grow vegetables and have a much better existence.
Kelp was a primary source of fertilisers for them from very early on.
Then, at the latter part of the 18th century,
they discovered that by burning kelp, you can produce these chemicals,
sodium carbonate is one of them,
which are primary constituents of glass.
It became a major source for the glass industry of its primary chemicals.
Sodium carbonate, or potash, extracted from seaweed,
helps make glass transparent and lowers the temperature at which it melts.
By 1800, Scotland was producing 20,000 tons of kelp per year.
Suddenly, the entire industry collapsed in about 1820
when potash mines were discovered in Germany
and a cheap substitute became available.
The entire population became destitute as a result of this
in a very short time.
Later on, kelp again became useful.
A new industry grew up, using seaweed to produce iodine and food additives.
Now scientists like Laurence believe
that it could contribute to a greener future.
What we're seeing now is its potential as a biofuel.
Just to give an example, an area of about half the size of a football pitch
of cultivated laminaria, that's these long gooey ones,
can be converted into enough fuel to fuel a household for a year.
Or, with higher technology,
it is possible perhaps to even go to the Holy Grail of transport fuels.
But in contrast to Bradshaw's time,
future harvests will come from farmed rather than wild seaweed.
I can't help noticing that you are carrying
a very strange piece of equipment. What is that for?
What we do is we grow the tiny larvae
and we get them to settle on these strings.
Once they're growing, after about a month, the string can be unwound,
wound onto a rope and lowered into the sea
and then we have a cultivar and a way of producing our own seaweed
without disturbing the natural environment.
- That is very cunning. - It's clever stuff.
- It looks very Heath Robinson. - It is very Heath Robinson.
But it works, and that's the most important thing about it.
Who knows? Perhaps one day our trains will be powered by seaweed.
I'm now quitting the coast and moving inland.
I'm travelling towards Rannoch Moor, 1,000 feet above sea level.
As the route steadily climbs, I'm anticipating breathtaking scenery.
"Bradshaw's" says that the landscape is "mountainous throughout,
on rocks of mica slate and granite covered with heath. "
"Glens of much picturesque beauty are met with. "
This wilderness is truly beautiful.
But it posed innumerable difficulties for the railway's builders,
not least here, where the line diverts around the Horseshoe Curve.
It snakes along the contour, spanning the glens on spectacular viaducts.
Yet the greatest test for the Victorian engineers lay ahead:
How to cross the soggy expanse of Rannoch Moor.
Rannoch Moor really is a forbidding, wind-blown, desolate sort of place.
The interesting thing is that the railway station
is right in the heart of it.
Actually, Rannoch is much more accessible by rail than it is by road.
It just makes you wonder what they must have gone through
to build a railway line across this rock and this peat bog.
Despite being one of the bleakest spots in Britain, railway mania demanded
that the engineers of the West Highland Line find a means to traverse it.
Doug Carmichael knows the story.
- Hello, Doug. - Hello, Michael.
Welcome to the Moor of Rannoch, the great tableland of Scotland.
It's an amazing moor.
I imagine it must have been hellish to build a railway across it.
It was. When Thomas Telford, the road builder,
decided he might be able to get a road to Fort William via the moor,
he gave up. Too hard.
Rannoch Moor is a 50-square-mile plateau of granite
topped with peat bogs up to 20 feet deep.
In 1889, a small party of men was sent to inspect the route
across this hostile environment.
Seven gentlemen set out quite far north of here to walk 40 miles in January.
They were all just businessmen in normal business attire.
No big boots, anything like that.
They found that the weather was against them all the way.
The darkness came down and they were lighting matches in the middle of a moor
to see where they were going. They were falling into bogs continually.
Things weren't very good.
Their near-death experience on the moor didn't discourage the engineers.
They persevered and devised a technique to master the bog.
Part of the railway you see here north of the station
has been floated on brushwood and turf.
The bogs on the moor sucked everything up that the engineers laid,
but they kept putting more and more brushwood and turf.
Finally, hundreds of wagonloads of ash from the industrial south
were brought up, laid on top and finally they had a track bed across the moor.
It must have been terrible when the navvies came to build the line.
Yes. 5,000 navvies were employed between Craigendoran and Fort William.
They had to go through exceedingly hard rock,
as you'd expect in the Scottish Highlands.
They didn't have the equipment at the end of the 19th century
as we expect now... As we accept now, indeed.
There was a lot of blasting. There was some loss of life because of blasting.
What has been the importance of this railway historically
in the more than 100 years that it's existed?
The importance of it was that it took a railway into a land
which had never seen civilisation, let alone a railway.
There were no roads, hardly any tracks.
People from the Highlands could never get down
to the central belt in Scotland for any reason.
When the railway came, they found they could come out of Fort William,
go down to Glasgow, albeit on quite a long trip.
But to them, it was luxury,
sitting in a train as opposed to a horse and cart or walking.
Our ideas of luxury may have moved on since then,
but we recognise it when we see it.
And occasionally we see it in the Highlands.
Here on the bridge at Rannoch
with literally not another human being in sight,
I can hear the sound of a locomotive
powering up the slope towards the station.
And here comes... a very special train.
The Royal Scotsman.
Car after car of luxury and great food and comfy beds.
The Royal Scotsman was launched in 1990
to recreate the elegant travel of the Edwardian era.
It attracts guests from around the globe.
While it makes a brief stop at Rannoch Moor,
I'm gatecrashing pre-dinner cocktails.
- May I join you for a moment? - Certainly.
So, are you enjoying your trip on this luxurious train?
Very much so.
What about you? Are you a railway enthusiast?
This is my first time.
I spent a day on the British Pullman and loved it.
Every time Mum sees a piece of tartan or a bagpipe, she bursts into tears,
so we decided to come and do Scotland and this was the best way to do it.
We're doing the whole week.
We do one side and then go back and reload and do the other.
Would that be a glass of champagne?
That's right. Whenever you want one, you put your finger up.
They look after you very well.
As the party continues,
I feel like the poor relation peering into the family feast.
They've left me behind.
No exclusive cabin on board for me tonight.
But even in this lonely spot
I've found somewhere warm and cosy to lay my head.
A hotel that was originally built
to house men labouring to construct the railway.
I've come, what, about 50 metres from the railway station
and it seems that almost the only thing in Rannoch other than the station
is this charming hotel.
I'm really excited by the idea of staying somewhere inaccessible,
somewhere that's really difficult to reach except by train.
So this is where I'm staying.
- Hello. - Well, hello.
- Michael Portillo. - Liz Conway. Lovely to meet you.
Checking in, if I can.
I've got your key all ready for you.
Even in summer I feel cut off here,
but hotel owner Liz Conway must cope in every season.
We're in splendid isolation,
but we have had the worst winter up here in 50 years.
We had... We were cut off for three days
and some of our neighbours had no water for up to three months.
- You don't have any neighbours. - We have a couple of neighbours.
Five of us live in Rannoch, actually.
- Five of you? - Five of us.
- The Metropolitan Borough of Rannoch. - Five of us.
But, as I said, we're in this splendid isolation.
Although we are in the middle of nowhere,
we have our trains and we can get anywhere.
I'm feeling really excited about staying in such an isolated spot,
and a spot particularly that you reach best by railway.
50 percent of our business comes from the railway.
It's very much a part of our lives. We hardly ever use a car.
Only to go to the vet's. That's the time we use the car.
We use the railway for everything.
- Your dogs don't like the train? - It's cats, actually.
Morning.
It's time for me to resume my journey
and I'm going to enjoy being plucked from this remoteness
by a train that's come directly from London.
The first train of the day for those who are headed north is the sleeper,
which left Euston last night.
Here it is at 8:45.
Anybody who gets off here can expect a very nice breakfast
if they just go into the hotel.
But tacked on the end of the sleeper is a car of seats,
which is very useful for local residents and local journeys.
Morning.
Very comfortable.
I'm whispering because everybody is asleep.
This Caledonian sleeper will take me, as no road can,
just seven miles along the track to Corrour.
We're passing through a forbidding landscape,
but one in which Victorians nonetheless created a lucrative industry.
My Bradshaw's Guide says that,
"The deer shootings of this county are worth £70,000 a year."
"Vast tracts are preserved for deerstalking."
Well, the sums of money may well have changed,
but this is still deerstalking country. I've often been out with deerstalkers.
I don't shoot deer myself, but even if you're not one shooting,
the walk, when you have to follow the deer over the hills,
is absolutely amazing.
At over 1300 feet, Corrour is the highest mainline station in the UK.
It was built to serve the nearby estate.
Despite its remoteness, the rich and powerful could enjoy the king of sports.
Estate owner Sir John Stirling Maxwell took advantage of the new line
to create with his hunting lodge a rural paradise for the ruling class.
Professor Jim Hunter is an expert on Highland history.
- Hi, Jim, very good to see you. - Good to meet you.
As a former politician,
even in this lovely fresh air, I get the smell of power.
This was a place where powerful people used to come.
Very much so. In the late 19th, early 20th century,
just about everybody who was anybody,
not just politically but financially, industrially as it were,
this was where they gravitated around this time of year.
Of course many of them would have come from Westminster
or from their manufactories in Birmingham to these estates by train.
Absolutely. The arrival of the railways in the Highlands, here in the 1890s,
some parts of the Highlands a bit earlier,
that was critical in opening up the area to these kinds of people from the south.
They would come mob-handed.
They would come with an entire entourage of servants
and perhaps take a shooting lodge or a big house here
and be here for two or three weeks.
Hunting, shooting and stalking
were so integral to the life cycle of the good and the great
that they dictated the political calendar.
The period we're talking about, for much of that period,
typically Parliament wouldn't sit at all
during what we would regard as the autumn and winter.
From July to February there was to be no interference with the hunting season.
Yeah. The whole deerstalking thing
was very much a big thing for many of these people.
I think it's worth emphasising that these guys, they were tough.
There was a whole cult amongst very many of these people of being tough.
It was the era of big-game hunting and that kind of thing.
Deerstalking was part of that.
By the late 19th century, the demand for sporting estates far exceeded supply.
The wealthy from south of the border paid up to £5,000 per season
for a Scottish lodge from which they could shoot grouse,
hook salmon and stalk deer.
The rugged pleasures of a terrain like Corrour's
could command £200,000 in today's money.
- What a fantastic, tranquil spot. - Beautiful, isn't it?
- It's gorgeous. Loch Ossian. - Yep.
I'm following in the footsteps of Victorian sportsmen
with head stalker Donald Rowantree.
I'm a late 19th-century traveller
and I've just arrived on the train and I'm on my way to the shooting lodge.
How do I make my journey?
You're going to come off the train. It's a beautiful journey in itself.
Meet the horse and cart at the station.
Your pony man will take you, day or night.
Trek just over a mile from the train station right down to the lochside,
where you'll meet the paddle steamer which will take you down to Loch Ossian.
- A paddle steamer. - Indeed.
- How elegant. - It's quite impressive.
Alas, the paddle steamer is long gone,
replaced by a newer form of transport.
- Not designed for comfort. - No, it's splendid.
The estate stretches across 57,000 acres of splendid Scottish countryside.
Donald regularly patrols this huge area to monitor the deer
and has brought me to a spot
where I can appreciate the grandeur of this wilderness.
- Wonderful view. - Beautiful.
In the 19th-century, no vehicles. All of this would have been done by pony.
We'd have walked right from the lodge
all the way up to the hill with a pony man in tow
and come out here for a spy and select our beast and move on from there.
Once you had your beast, he would be slung on the pony?
He'd signal the pony man. They had signals and flags.
If you left a stone on a certain knoll,
that meant "keep coming forward" or "we've shot a beast".
There were all little signals they'd leave.
We'd move the pony in and sling him on the back of the pony
and take him off down to the larder.
As the estates flourished,
Victorian landowners began to import new species of deer, like the Japanese sika,
to vary their herds.
These days, deer numbers are on the rise.
Although some object to stalking, the estate believes it is the best way
to control the population which might otherwise harm the ecology.
Donald takes the responsibility very seriously.
How long have you been a stalker, and your family?
I've been stalking with my father since I was nine years old.
He stalked with his father and his father's father,
so I'm fourth generation of stalker, or ghillie.
I've got an attachment. It's in the blood.
The day I lose respect for the animals is the day I've done enough.
When the first "Bradshaw's Guide" was published,
the Highlands were a world away from industrial Britain.
But the West Highland Line abolished distance.
Whisky flowed down its tracks to the south
and overnight sleepers disgorged stalkers and anglers.
I enjoy the paradox that these remote hills and valleys,
which are almost unreachable by car,
have a daily direct rail service to London.
The trains that now bring hardy walkers used to bring men of power.
Indeed, they still do.
So the Highlands, whilst quiet, are certainly not any kind of backwater.
On my next journey,
I'll be unravelling one of the 19th century's great geological mysteries...
Charles Darwin, who got so much right, actually got this wrong?
He sees it as a blunder.
...experiencing one of Britain's most stunning journeys by steam train...
The Jacobite has panted its way up the steep incline.
Somehow the wheels are gripping the wet rails
and now we're on the wonderful Glenfinnan Viaduct.
...and admiring Ben Nevis,
where Victorian scientists went to extraordinary lengths
in their quest for knowledge.
We're talking about people going up there to take readings?
They didn't have to go up there, they had to live up there.
Ripped By mstoll