Episode description

Helen visits a mobile laboratory in St Andrews as it travels around various European coastlines to explore coastal habitats and collect samples from the soil, water and air to assess things like pollution.

Mark chats to John Fletcher, the first person to set up a commercial deer farm in Scotland back in the 1970s. As well as being a farmer, John is a vet and an author and he tells Mark what it was that first interested him in red deer.

Helen heads to Glen Dee to meet a group of archaeologists. For the past couple of years, Graham Warren, Professor of Archaeology at University College Dublin has spent a fortnight each summer carefully scraping away and sieving the soil in search of evidence of prehistoric hunter gatherers.

There has been a Mill of Benholm in some form on the site in Aberdeenshire for hundreds of years. The current Mill was open to the public until 2014 and now a group has applied for a community asset transfer to take over the site from Aberdeenshire Council. Mark went for a visit to find out about the work they are doing and what their plans are for the future.

We chat live to Linsay Chalmers from Community Land Scotland as they celebrate Community Land Week. There are now more than 700 projects and over half a million acres under community control in Scotland. We hear about some of the successes and events that are happening to mark them.

Last year we heard from walking artist, Claudia Zeiske, as she travelled through Aberdeenshire collecting memories of the Covid lockdown and stitching them onto a pink tablecloth. A few weeks ago Maud Start caught up with her and a new tablecloth on a new journey called the Slow Coast 500.

The Scottish Coastal Rowing Project was started in 2010, the idea behind it is for communities to build their own skiffs and get people out onto the water. There are now over 70 clubs across the county and Helen went to meet members of one of the newest based at Forfar Loch.