Exploring Corrieshalloch

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Corrieshalloch National Nature Reserve, which is actually the smallest nature reserve in Scotland. The site is actually one of the 51 best geological sites in Scotland and it’s a very good example of the Moine Rocks and the Box Canyon. So, it’s the canyon, the actual gorge itself, which makes it a very unique setting.

These Moine rocks, they’ve been through an extensive mountain building phase when the piece of crust which is now Scotland and the piece which is England actually joined together and threw up a huge mountain range, probably the size of the present-day Himalayas. And these rocks were way down many kilometres beneath the surface and heated and squeezed and they grew some new minerals in them. And if you look closely, you might see some of these little silver mica minerals within the rock. They’ll glint at you if the rock is wet.

It’s not exactly certain how long ago the gorge started to be formed but it’s the oldest parts of it are probably about 2.5 million years old, and it’s come from a series of ice ages over that 2.5 million years. So, ice was formed and retreated probably 15, 16, 17 times in that 2.5 million years.

The gorge has really been mostly cut from the glacial meltwaters. So, as ice retreated, large amounts of volumes of water were produced, gushed down the valley here, bringing lots of debris with them and cutting out big blocks in the gorge and once it started to cut into the gorge, cut down, it was confined within the gorge system itself. So, all that huge volume of rock that's missing in the gorge is now to be found at the bottom of the gorge, where it rushed out into the sea.

As you continue to explore our site, you’ll come across several significant geological features, including an awe-inspiring Falls of Measach where you can feel the full force of nature by crossing over our bridge suspended 60m above the gorge. If you look down from the bridge, you will see the layers in the Moine rocks that we have been talking about.

Transcript

Halò agus fàilte. Is mise Lisa NicDhòmhnaill.

Hello. My name is Lisa MacDonald. I am a Gaelic teacher and a university lecturer, and I live most of my life in Gaelic.

For us who live here, it’s a really magical thing because this entire landscape was named by Gaels: every rock, every valley, every hill, every inlet, every river. The whole landscape was described by Gaelic speakers.

Having access to the language that is historically the language of this landscape roots you much more deeply in it, and it lets you visualise every little, tiny landscape feature because you can instinctively understand its name on a much deeper level. So, you can instantly, as soon as you see a name or hear a name, you can tell the size of something, whether it's a creag, a rock or a beinn, or a mullach or a maol. In English you would say hill for almost all of them, but in Gaelic you can immediately visualise the shape of that hill, and you can play the landscape like a film before your eyes.

Uill, tapadh leibh a chàirdean. Tha mi an dòchas gun do chòrd sin ribh. Agus tha mi an dòchas gum bi deagh là agaibh.

Thank you for listening, I hope you have a really great day.

Transcript

Hello. This wonderful view of Loch Broom tells us a lot about how this landscape has changed over the last 2 to 3 million years.

As we look down the Loch Broom Valley towards Ullapool, we can see a large U-shaped valley with quite steep sides to it and a flat bottom.

That has been produced by repeated glaciations as ice has flowed down the valley and cut deeper and deeper into the solid rock.

At various times we would have seen ice going completely over our heads and at other times just glaciers sitting in the valley and at other times no ice at all, there would have been an interglacial period.

The very last features that we can see are the flat area at the end of the loch, and that’s come from the glacial meltwaters bringing debris down into the sea at a time when the sea level was a little bit higher than it is today. So, the wave action washed this debris around and made it quite flat topped.

Transcript

Halo agus fàilte. Is mise Lisa NicDhòmhnaill.

Hello, my name is Lisa McDonald. I am a Gaelic teacher and a university lecturer at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, which is our Gaelic college in the island of Skye, and I live most of my life in Gaelic.

For us as Gaelic speakers, the pink Ordnance Survey map, the newest editions, are a source of absolute joy. The Ordnance Survey worked with the Gaelic Landscape Survey Ainmean-Àite na h-Alba to get the grammar just right, and the maps are now so good that we use them as teaching aids.

And we can get lost for hours in these maps, just marveling at the beauty of the place names and the elegance of the grammar within them. So, all of these names that look like a collection of letters on the map they’re actually incredibly evocative of that area around Corrieshalloch.

There’s a tiny little loch here, it's quite a curious round little loch, and it's called Loch an Fhuar Thuill Mhòir, the Loch of the Big Freezing Cold Hole. I can just imagine without ever having been there, I can imagine what it would be like to swim in that water, I can imagine it could be quite cold.

The next one is called Loch nan Eun, the Loch of the Birds. If I look back onto the rivers, there's Allt a’ Choire Bhig: the small river of the little corrie. And the next one, fittingly, is called Allt a’ Choire Mhòir. It's a much bigger river, and it belongs to the big corrie.

The place names are incredibly evocative and very, very often they are the key to the historical truth: a map can decode the history for you.

For example, just near Ullapool, there is a part of the village, which is called Morefield, but in Gaelic it's called Mòr-Choille, which is a big forest. So, how did we come from having - I mean mòr is obviously the word ‘big’, so, Morefield is quite different from Big Forest, and that in itself betrays a historical happening. And it could be to do with forfeited estates and with the loss of the forestation at that point. It could even go back much, much further than that. Did the English come in to use after it was deforested and after people were cleared, and after there'd been an attempt, a very concerted attempt at eroding culture and historical truth? In English, people don't think about it much, but the Gaelic gives you the clue.

Uill, tapadh leibh a chàirdean. Tha mi an dòchas gun do chòrd sin ribh. Agus tha mi an dòchas gum bi deagh là agaibh.

Thank you for listening, I hope you have a really great day and just remember, when you see Gaelic words, they’re far more than just a collection of letters: they are our culture, our history, our truth, our lived experience and they are the key to unlocking an absolute wealth of heritage and inheritance.