My love letter TO Scotland

TV star and historian Neil Oliver shares his favourite hidden gems on new ‘bespoke tour’

HIS distinctive voice has made him a star of some of the BBC’s most popular historical documentaries. Now presenter and archaeologist Neil Oliver is carving out a new role for himself as a podcaster.

In a new series, Love Letter to the British Isles, the historian – whose TV shows include Coast and Vikings – plans to take listeners on a ‘bespoke tour’ of the four nations to reveal his favourite hidden gems.

Produced along with his long-time friend, Paul Radcliffe, who directed Oliver’s first TV series, Two Men in a Trench, the half-hour episodes will look at 100 remarkable places and objects.

Yesterday, he said: ‘Television is like a magic carpet and I’ve been taken to thousands of places around the British Isles over the years.

‘The ones I talk about in the podcasts are the ones when I close my eyes, they are the lights that stay on. I’ve had a personal connection to each one and I hope having heard of these places that matter to me, people might be inspired to think of the places that matter to them, because this is my love letter to the British Isles and other people will surely have their own places and own stories that fascinate them.

‘Mine is not a definitive list and it’s certainly not a conventional history. But it is a bespoke tour of Britain and not one a bus company would put together.

‘I’ve tried to stay away from the more obvious, although there are some that people will recognise, such as Stirling Castle.

‘The main thing is all the places and objects tell a story, from the ancient past up until the modern day, and the podcasts allow me to express in the moment what I feel about them, their significance and resonance. You can’t really get that across freely in a formal TV documentary.’

The first episode, In the Footsteps of Pioneer Man, starts on the Norfolk coast, in Happisburgh, where a cliff collapse caused by coastal erosion in 2013 revealed a set of perfectly preserved muddy footprints left behind by hunters around one million years ago.

Moving forward in time, the second podcast, The Red Lady of Paviland, focuses on a 34,000-year-old grave in a cave on the Gower Peninsula, Wales, which has the oldest human remains in the British Isles.

Episodes north of the Border include a focus on the Fortingall Yew, an ancient tree in the churchyard of the Perthshire village from which it takes it name. Legend says Pontius Pilot was born in its shade and played under it as a child.

Other podcasts feature the Ness of Brodgar, a large Neolithic site found on Orkney just 17 years ago by a farmer ploughing his field; Cambuskenneth Abbey, near Stirling, formerly one of the most important churches in Scotland; and the National Covenant, signed in February 1638, in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, by nobles, church ministers and thousands of ordinary people who pledged themselves to defend Scotland’s rights against King Charles I.

An episode will look at the Montrose Basin, in Angus, an estuary of the River South Esk with links to an 8,000-year-old tidal wave, while others will shine a light on the isle of Iona, in the Inner Hebrides.

The presenter said: ‘A lot of people, like me, are looking for perspective at the moment.

‘There’s so much change coming and I get a great deal of perspective and comfort by remembering the places that matter to me. I know all of them are still out there, even though I can’t visit them.

‘We are living in a tumultuous moment but the story is a million years long. We’ve been through times of great tragedy and distress before, periods where thousands and thousands of people have died, it happens again and again in history, and we will go on.

‘It’s important to value what we have and what we’ve had. Hopefully I speak about them well enough that people can be transported in their imagination to places which at the moment are off limits. They can listen to these stories and be an armchair traveller.’

Here, in his own words, he describes his top Scottish jewels…

I get a great deal of comfort by remembering the places that matter to me