This is a story of Britain, but not as you've seen her before.
If you really want to understand how this country works,
then there's only one way to get the big picture -
from above.
Already in this series, we've unpacked 24 hours in our nation's life,
looked at how we all survive on the very lip of chaos.
We've plummeted head-first
over the classic patchwork quilt of the British countryside...
...and discovered how our natural landscape
has, in fact, been moulded by human hands for centuries.
In this third and final episode, we're going to explore untamed Britain.
We're going to strip bare patterns and rhythms of forces we can't control,
but can at least try to understand.
We're going to uncover the powers deep in the Earth
that have shaped these islands for millennia
and the riches they've left under our feet to plunder.
We're going to reveal the course of the wind
and the weather as it sweeps across us every hour of the day...
...and sometimes overwhelms us.
We're going to track and expose the habits of the untamed creatures of our landscape,
from sika deer
to school children.
And finally, we're going to meet 150,000 people
doing the wild British pleasure hunt.
Biggles, off the leash at Glastonbury.
This is Britain From Above.
The island of Skye, on the west coast of Scotland.
The Skye mountain rescue team are on exercise.
Their task? To practise picking up an injured climber
from a 2,000-foot-high crag
in what is perhaps the wildest and most untamed corner of Britain.
As the helicopter closes in,
so does the weather.
Swirling rain clouds cut visibility to yards.
It's no easier on the ground.
This mountainside is formed from crystallised volcanic lava,
sharp enough to cut a climber's hands to ribbons.
The rocks produce so much magnetic interference,
compasses are useless.
You don't mock nature round here.
So extreme is this landscape,
rescue teams like this are out on call almost every day of the year.
We tend to think of this country as having a rather genial, almost cosy landscape.
And yet, all around us, there are great forces at work, mostly out of sight.
Below our feet, the rocks are shifting, squeezing, pushing, muscling.
Over our heads, there are vast jets of air, constantly moving.
And all around us, the untamed world of nature is fluttering
and burrowing and migrating.
And it's really only from above that you get some sense of the delicacy
and sheer scale of this country we don't really own
and a lot of the time, can't control.
The island of Skye is one ripped corner of a great, rumpled wildness
that stretches across the entire north of Britain.
These are the Scottish Highlands and Islands.
Even now, you get off the usual tourist routes
and there are just a handful of roads, dodging mountain and water,
to link scattered settlements.
And there are great tracts with no roads at all,
a vast hinterland, to be explored from above.
(BUZZ OF CONVERSATION)
I've headed to the Northeast of Scotland,
to the Black Isle, just north of Inverness.
I'm going to take a trip in the air, with Dougal Jerram, a geologist.
He's going to explain how this epic landscape first came into existence.
We're going up in a pair of microlights
and we'll be talking to each other over a radio link.
- Perfect. - I'm wrapped up like a very fat onion.
- With many layers! - With many layers.
These microlights are strange, slightly disconcerting little machines.
They look like a motorised tricycle, attached to a paper dart
and powered by what appears to be a giant desk fan.
But they do give you an extraordinary view. It's like being in a plane
except there's no plane around you.
(ENGINE DRONES)
And here is Loch Ness.
Most of us think of it as the home of a mysterious and probably mythical monster.
But it's also the largest stretch of fresh water in Britain...
...holding more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined.
And, for Dougal, it has an even greater significance.
DOUGALJERRAM: Loch Ness has the great monster as its popularisation,
but it's a fantastic body of water.
It's about two cubic miles of water.
It's about 23 miles long in a straight line
and it has a straight line for a particularly important geological reason.
ANDREW MARR: Loch Ness is just one part of a giant crack,
millions of years old, that slices, ruler-straight,
across the entire width of Scotland.
It's known as the Great Glen Fault.
DOUGALJERRAM: It's a fault where two bits of crust have torn themselves apart.
It wouldn't be too dramatic to say that this is the San Andreas Fault of the UK.
ANDREW MARR: We peel away from the loch and out onto the high mountains beyond.
And here, the landscape becomes even more breathtaking.
These mountains piled around the Great Glen Fault,
the silent witnesses to an extraordinary geological event
where the north of Scotland once hit the rest of Britain.
DOUGALJERRAM: Over 400 million years ago,
two huge continents that were floating on the Earth's surface collided
and they were moving together as much as the speed our nails grow on our hands,
but over millions of years.
ANDREW MARR: As these two land masses crushed together,
the mountains were pushed up like molten toffee
although, 400 million years ago,
they'd have been even more spectacular.
DOUGALJERRAM: The mountains that we see now
are remnants of probably a much bigger mountain chain,
possibly even of Himalayan proportions.
ANDREW MARR: It took millions of years and several ice ages
for these Himalayan peaks to be ground down to the worn stumps we see today.
Flying by microlight is a cold but extraordinary way
to discover the untouched landscapes of Britain.
And yet, I've not even scratched the surface
of the geological history that formed them.
For over 150 years,
geologists like Dougal have been surveying every corner of the country
with maps and little picksxes.
Now, locked inside computers, they have the most comprehensive picture
of Britain from above there's ever been.
I'm going to be escorted through this virtual landscape
by geologist Kathryn Goodenough.
So, Kathryn, this is a three-dimensional map of the country,
but what are you able to do with it?
Well, that's right. This is the geovisionary system...
- Geovision? - Geovision. Exactly.
A terrain model, essentially.
We've got a 3-D impression of the countryside of Great Britain.
This isn't just a video game of our landscape.
Kathryn could overlay detailed aerial photographs...
...Ordnance Survey maps...
...infrared satellite imagery that strips away vegetation
to reveal the raw land underneath.
And layer upon layer of geological maps
that show a maze of different rock types spread across the land.
Then she shows me how we can drill down
to see what's happening far beneath the surface.
We can actually turn it round and have a look at what we could see
- if we went under the surface of Britain. - That is astonishing!
- So you're slicing the cake, as it were. - That's right, absolutely.
The grey lines that you can see coming down there,
that's your faults extending down at depth underneath Britain.
And the Great Glen Fault goes down really deep.
ANDREW MARR: But this whirling kaleidoscope of views
isn't just geological eye candy.
For its size, Britain has the most diverse geology in the world.
And this has given us an equally vast range of natural resources.
Kathryn whisks us from the far north of Scotland to South Wales
in a matter of moments
to demonstrate how our geology has shaped the Britain we know and live in today.
So this abstract pattern here, what is it?
Well, it's an example of a geological map, of course.
The important thing here is that grey stripe you can see going along.
- Zig-zag, yeah. - Exactly.
And what it actually represents
is where you've got rocks that might have coal in them at the surface.
Ah.
And it's the area where there's some of the largest opencast coal mines in Europe.
Look at that. Yeah. OK, so these are the Welsh coal-mining valleys.
Exactly.
If it wasn't for the coal that lies under them, the valleys of South Wales
might be almost as wild and untouched as the Scottish Highlands are.
But when you look down, villages snake along every valley.
Slag heaps punctuate the scenery.
Giant excavators are still clawing away at the land.
And coal mines have reshaped more than South Wales.
Many of our greatest cities - Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle -
are there because they've been built next to or on top of major coal reserves.
And it's not just coal that's built the Britain we know today.
Our iron ore has been forged into steel, into bridges and railways.
Our clay has been moulded into billions of bricks.
Great plants are still transforming our limestone
into everything from cement to roads to toothpaste.
And some of our mineral resources remain unique in the world.
These are the china clay pits of St Austell in Cornwall.
120 million tonnes of clay have been pulled out of this lunar landscape.
And it's still working,
producing everything from paper to electrical insulators
to ladies'foundation powder.
Back in the 18th century, these mines were the original source
of almost all the fine china in the world.
The great trove of underground wealth revealed by Kathryn's geovisionary system
offers a key to unlocking great parts of our island's history.
This actually changes the shape of the country.
Absolutely. Geology underpins absolutely everything.
Even now, we're still discovering buried treasure in the landscape.
Garth Earls is senior geologist with Northern Ireland Geological Survey.
He's the first man to strike gold in Britain for 2,000 years.
He knew there were some tiny traces of this most precious of metals
in the water of a small stream in County Tyrone.
And there were ancient tales of gold mines in the area.
Historical records of gold in Northern Ireland go back to the 16th century.
There is a mystery of Irish gold artefacts as to where they came from
and it would be nice to think that some of the Irish gold artefacts
came from ancient mines in the Sperrin Mountains.
Although people have been panning for tiny quantities of gold
in this stream for years, Garth set out to try and find proper veins of gold,
buried in the rocks.
At one spot, they found a vein of gold-bearing quartz
in a stretch of the river bank.
The white material in the middle is quartz.
But it's within the dull, brassy iron pyrite that the gold is contained.
Garth now knew that there was one vein of gold in one spot of the river bank,
but could there be more?
Looking down from above, at an aerial photograph of the site,
Garth realised that the stream followed a peculiar, winding path
and that his gold-bearing rock occurred at a bend in the stream.
Every time the stream comes across one of these veins,
it's much, much harder than the bedrock.
So it flows along, it hits one of these veins
and then flows along the vein. It changes direction.
And every time we see one of those doglegs,
you find a quartz vein that contains the gold.
With the aerial photographs as a guide,
Garth and his surveyors started to investigate the whole hillside.
They came to an astonishing calculation.
There are 600,000oz of gold - minimum - under this particular hillside.
So, with gold at approximately $1,000 an ounce,
there's $600 million worth of gold - at least.
If there was this much gold in this one hill,
perhaps there were further deposits spread across Northern Ireland.
Garth and his team at the geological survey
decided to look at the whole of the country from above
using something rather more sophisticated than just an aerial photograph.
For three years, they flew in a survey plane, packed with scientific instruments,
up and down the countryside.
It scanned the landscape below for geological clues, testing for magnetism...
...for electrical conductivity...
...even for radiation.
Probing up to three miles below the ground, this survey made Northern Ireland
one of the most intensively analysed pieces of land
anywhere on the Earth's surface.
We knew the broad skeletal structure of Northern Ireland,
but we didn't know the detail.
And this information provided a lot more detail for us.
Some of the results we found were absolutely outstanding.
It was like putting flesh on a skeleton.
By tying these images to soil records,
Garth and his team worked out that there were possible gold deposits
scattered across all of Northern Ireland - a huge economic opportunity.
This is Cavanacaw Gold Mine.
Opened in 2007, it's just 30 miles down the road from Garth's original stream,
sitting on almost the same rock formation.
It's the first working gold mine in Northern Ireland in recorded history.
And it's a matter of great personal and patriotic pride to Garth Earls.
This gold mine produces 30,000oz of gold per year.
And most of that is sold on the open market, but some 10% is retained
and makes genuine Irish gold jewellery.
Natural resources like these were forged millions of years ago
by forces deep in the Earth.
Our landscape, our heritage, have been shaped by the hidden power of geology.
But these natural forces don't just work deep in the ground below us.
Over our heads, there is another great cauldron of activity,
an atmosphere that simmers and churns
and then, sometimes, swoops down on us with almost unimaginable force.
There are 800,000 cubic miles of air sweeping across the country
every single day, moving at, sometimes, hundreds of miles an hour.
And the higher you go, the more extreme it gets.
Down on the ground, we can see the wind, eddying and gusting over the land,
the direction and speed constantly changing
with the contours of the landscape.
But as we rise higher, into the free atmosphere,
the wind becomes more constant and uniform,
whistling over us at around 80mph.
And then, six miles up, a high-speed superhighway of air
snakes around the entire northern hemisphere - the jet stream -
that moves at hundreds of miles an hour.
We are slowly beginning to harvest this great whirlwind of energy.
Wind farms are appearing in every corner of the country.
Here, on the high peaks of the Cairngorms in northern Scotland,
at Scroby Sands off the coast of Norfolk.
It's said that the United Kingdom has the best wind resources in Europe.
And this tidal wave of air can, of course, also be highly destructive.
For most of us, most of the time, the wind is an invisible,
almost mundane presence in our lives.
You wouldn't think that it can redraw the very shape of our country.
But it can. Why am I so sure?
Because not so long ago, out there, there were houses.
This is the village of Happisburgh in the northeast corner of Norfolk.
It won't be here for much longer.
This coastline is shifting faster than anywhere else in Britain.
The wind and the waves are eating it away at the rate of 40 foot a year.
In a matter of months, this house will have fallen into the sea.
Mike Page is Norfolk born and bred
and he's watched this village steadily crumble away.
This feels like a very solid, English seaside lane.
We've got some pretty solid-looking brick-built...
What are these houses worth, would you say?
I would say, at the moment, very little.
Very, very little.
How much is ''very little''?
Probably £1?
- £1?! - £1, yes. You could buy one for £1.
- So, the road finishes pretty abruptly. - It does.
The road ran, more or less, out to the metal stake which we can just see.
There were 15 or 20 properties along there.
They've all been lost to the sea.
Mike Page hasn't just watched this story of destruction from the ground.
He's also been observing it from the air.
In medieval times, much of this land was salt marsh.
It was drained in the 11th century to make farmland.
The trouble is, it lies, at best, just a few feet above sea level.
Holding back the wind and the waves has been a never-ending battle.
And it's a battle that, in places, we are now losing.
- This is Happisburgh here? - This is Happisburgh village, yeah.
ANDREW MARR: Being above it gives you a perspective on what's really happening.
MIKE PAGE: It's the only way you can see what's happening.
From up here, I can see lines of wooden fencing,
stretching out along a full mile of the shoreline.
Mike explains that these are revetments,
barriers designed to hold back the force of the sea.
But they were first installed back in the 1950s
and the ceaseless battering of the wind and waves has now reduced them to stumps.
- So you can see the revetments. - They're the wooden lines of...
Now, all the wooden boards have gone off the front of them. This is the trouble.
- So they were a very simple... - Very simple thing.
As we buffet on down the shoreline,
I'm shown the sheer number of different methods
that have been used to try and preserve this one little piece of coast.
Thousands of tonnes of rock have been dropped into the water,
kind of home-made protective reefs, except they've only been partially successful.
In actual fact, the first four, as you can see, aren't working,
because they're too far apart and the sea erodes in between each reef.
I see, yes.
Further down the shore, there's yet another coastal defence system,
this time a big, concrete wall.
It's the only thing protecting the farmland behind it,
land that, here, lies below sea level.
But, like the revetments at Happisburgh, the wall's now more than 50 years old
and the Government says it's just too expensive to maintain.
Ministers are now pursuing a policy of managed retreat.
In other words, they're going to let the wall crumble away.
25 square miles of Norfolk could end up under water.
This is the area that will flood if they let the sea defences go.
So those churches, those farms, those woods...all go.
Yeah.
This hill is in the rolling Welsh borders.
More than 60 hang-gliders have gathered here
for the final day of the British Open Hang-gliding Championships
and it's a remarkable sight.
The pilots launch into the air like ungainly insects
and then, they start gently spiralling upwards, thousands of feet.
No propellers, no engines,
no flapping,
because these hang-gliders are riding on thermals,
invisible columns of warm air, pushing up through the atmosphere.
But riding thermals is a skill that takes years to learn
and there's only room for one in a hang-glider.
So I'm going to be spirited up into the heavens in a paraglider,
a kind of ground-to-air parachute,
by Jockey Sanderson, one of Britain's great experts in powerless flight.
You'll run forwards and as long as you keep your feet on the ground,
- keep running... - Yep.
- Your feet will get lighter and lighter. - I have to run to get us going?
We both do the running. And we'll start soaring.
- Clip. So, now you're in. - Right.
At first, I feel rather like a distressed chicken,
being prepared for the Sunday dinner.
OK, ready? Three, two, one.
But then, suddenly, in the absence of feathers,
I'm launched into the air.
Wow! We're off!
Controlled by nothing more than a plastic bag, some string
and a great deal of ingenuity and wisdom behind me.
I hope!
We climb steadily into the busy skies above.
We're completely surrounded by hang-gliders.
It's astonishing. It's like swimming through a shoal of fish at the moment.
Jockey begins to show me how he can ''read''the skies around us,
searching out thermals to lift us higher.
- What are you looking for? - We're looking for cumulus clouds.
They mark the top of the column of air that's rising.
Cos as the warm air rises, as it gets into cooler air,
it condenses and forms a cloud.
And each of these clouds is the top of an invisible column of air?
- Warm air? - That's correct, yeah.
Jockey's also on the lookout for other creatures
riding the same currents of warm air.
There's a kite. So, because he's going up,
we're gonna go over to him. He's not flapping, so if he can stay up,
then we can, generally. So we're gonna glide over
and you can see, he's right underneath a cumulus cloud.
- Yeah. - That's a good thermal.
- That bucking is the thermal. - Yeah.
This feels extraordinary.
Just in terms of how high up we are already.
But Jockey's using more than just his eyes to work out where the thermals might be.
JOCKEY SANDERSON: Sounds also travels up in a thermal.
So you could actually fly over a village and all you can hear is wind noise now,
but suddenly, as you go over a village,
you'll hear children playing in a playground
- or you'll hear roadworks going on. - That's fantastic!
And also, smell. If we went over a pine forest, for example,
and a thermal bubbles up from the top of it,
- then you'll smell the pine... - Get the resin. Ah! Fantastic!
We end up in the air for almost an hour,
held aloft only by Jockey's amazing ability
to read and understand invisible movements all around us.
At last, it's time to get back down again, but Jockey has one final treat in store.
He throws us into an extraordinary, spiralling dive,
plummeting down towards the fields below.
The acceleration pushes me back into the seat,
forcing my face into a slightly manic grin.
That was amazing!
That's fantastic.
- It's a nice feeling, isn't it? - Ah, it's wonderful! Ha!
Jockey now has to find a field with, preferably,
no cows, bulls or sheep, to land in.
It is amazing to think there's been,
what, a hundred and something years of air travel
getting evermore sophisticated and you can just do it like this.
Absolutely extraordinary.
And then we hit the ground.
All in all, not the most graceful experience!
But there are others who understand our skies in even greater detail.
Looking down from space through the eyes of robots, not angels.
Satellites gazing unblinkingly on this crowded little planet,
taking measurements from every angle of the globe...
...men, using computers that are amongst the most powerful ever made.
And why?
To try and find out if there's going to be a bit of drizzle over Swindon.
Welcome to the world of the weathermen.
The Met's chief meteorologist is Ewan McCallum.
To forecast for the British Isles,
we actually need the weather reports from the whole world
and not just from the surface, from land and from sea,
but in three dimensions, from the upper atmosphere, using balloons and aircraft.
And that sheer mass of information floods in here to the hub, here in Exeter.
Forecasting Britain's weather is notoriously difficult
as every one of us knows.
It isn't the weathermen's fault. We are plonked at a weather crossroads.
We're an island surrounded by seas, nestled slap-bang between the Tropics
and the North Pole and our weather can be blown to us from almost any direction.
Britain, actually, doesn't have its own weather in some senses,
but it gets its weather from somewhere else.
The most important element is the wind direction.
But this position, sitting between six different weather systems,
also gives us a notoriously unpredictable and occasionally extreme climate.
The summer of 2007 was a good example.
In some places,
a month's rainfall fell in just an hour.
Rivers burst their banks,
leaving towns yards deep in water.
And suddenly the only way
to see large tracts of Britain
was from above.
And the reason?
We were caught between a great bank of cold, wet air
coming in from the Atlantic
and hot air, sweeping in off the Continent.
We've basically got cool, unstable air coming in from the west.
We've got hot air over the near Continent and if you look here,
where the two air masses meet, look at the development of storms.
There's the spiral,
right at the centre of the low itself that was over the Worcester area.
Swathes of Britain were paralysed
as hundreds of thousands of people
were left without drinking water or electricity.
The RAF carried out
its biggest ever rescue effort in peacetime Britain.
Although in the grand timescale of nature,
floods like this aren't actually that unusual -
they happen once every 20 or 30 years.
It's just that in the meantime, we have modified our landscape.
We have concreted over Britain.
In London alone, at least two-thirds of front gardens
have been paved in the last 20 years.
Elsewhere, we've built houses in flood plain.
Out-of-town shopping centres and business parks
have concreted over thousands more acres
and suddenly, there's nowhere for the rain to go...
except gurgling into drains
that were never designed for freak storms like this.
But, for Ewan McCallum, these great moments of atmospheric turmoil
still hold a terrible fascination.
This is the atmosphere in motion.
This is the sheer dynamics, the energy, the heat
producing these massive cumulonimbus clouds and heavy rainfall.
Absolutely spectacular event, but, of course,
if you're one of the poor people that were underneath these storms, not so good.
We've explored the geological forces under our feet
and the weather patterns over our heads.
And we've seen how they shape our lives in ways we often struggle to control.
But we share these landscapes with countless millions of untamed creatures.
Hordes flocking and migrating all around us
and, frankly, trying to avoid us a lot of the time.
And their lives, their secrets, are lit up when you look down from above.
Every year, the winds above our heads bring with them
more than 50 million flying creatures,
migrating from as far afield as Russia, South Africa, Greenland.
This area of soggy, waterlogged ground in the heart of West London
is, in fact, a carefully maintained bird sanctuary.
It's just down the road from Heathrow Airport. Welcome to Terminal Quack.
Less shopping, but fewer delays and almost no cancellations.
Mark Grantham is an expert in this ever-shifting aerial population.
We have arrivals, we have departures
and we have a lot of birds that are just in transit.
It's incredibly important they have staging posts like this
where they can drop in, birds that need to refuel can refuel.
It's a tiny piece of land, really.
But here, there are birds that have flocked from the other side of the world.
MARK GRANTHAM: We have sand martins from places like Senegal in West Africa.
The ducks will be coming from places as far east as Central Siberia.
In the scrubby bushes along the side,
we'll also have things like lesser whitethroat.
These are birds that spend the winter in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon,
so it's a real mix of birds coming in from all directions, really.
This being Britain, a country of migrants, it's a cosmopolitan, chattering place.
Mind you, how do they get here?
These days, it isn't only aircraft that have GPS tracking.
You can put them onto birds as well.
This is the GPS trace of a single osprey
as it makes its journey all the way from West Africa
to northern Scotland, three and a half thousand miles.
These are the traces of five barnacle geese as they migrate 1,500 miles
from Svalbard in the Arctic Circle to the Solway Firth.
And these mark the extraordinary journey of three brent geese,
all the way from the Canadian Arctic, over Greenland,
Iceland and into Ireland.
We still don't really know how these millions of migrating birds
manage so accurately to find their way over thousands of miles to our shores.
To a degree, they have an innate sense of where they're going, an internal compass,
that helps guide them on theirjourneys.
They can also use stars, so they can get a rough bearing looking at stars.
''I want to go south, so I'll head away from the North Star.''
What we do know is that birds are also using the landscape we've created
in order to guide them in the final stages of theirjourney.
Tracking has shown that some pigeons will follow motorways
to navigate their way home.
They've even been seen to fly around roundabouts.
Birds have a mental picture of where home is, so once they're close in,
they bring up their map, birdie sat nav, and home in on where they want to be.
(GUNFIRE)
But birds aren't the only beasts
leading their lives in the hidden corners of our nation with scant regard for man.
This is Lulworth Range in Dorset.
It's where the army practises.
(GUNFIRE)
Tanks blast off tons of explosive shells
into the surrounding, defenceless hillsides.
Sharing the land with these machines of war
is a community of squatters -
an ever-growing population of sika deer.
Like many of our birds,
sika deer are also immigrants.
(GUNSHOT)
Originally brought here as pets from the Far East,
they soon escaped from an island, swam ashore
and are now running wild across the country.
So, how do we know how many there are?
And where?
We're going to use the thermal-imaging camera?
I'm taking to the air with Matt Wilcock.
In his day job, he's an Apache helicopter pilot for the British Army,
and when the light falls, he turns into a deer-tracker.
Matt has chased Taleban guerrilla fighters across the mountains of Afghanistan
and, rather bizarrely, the sika deer present him with much the same challenge.
So he uses much the same gear -
a high-resolution thermal-imaging camera - to find them.
Normally, we're either looking for the enemy who are either hiding in wood lines
or tanks moving in the open,
or even, potentially, looking for friendly forces, our soldiers on the ground.
We're doing similar tasks, but we're going to look for wildlife,
looking for deer in wooded margins.
I can't see a thing, but it doesn't take long for Matt's trained eye
to spot his first target.
OK, what we've got here, you can see. You've got two hot spots there.
You've got probably a hind there, so a mother with her calf.
The calf's just tucked away in the bushes there.
So if we go to the normal day camera, you can't see, even if we zoom in.
Let's zoom in on that...bushes. She's hiding in that gorse there.
Very, very hard to see her.
That's astonishing. If you just go back to the thermal, then back to the real,
the real thing, you can barely see them.
MATT WILCOCK: We've got a couple of stags here,
with the antlers on. This time of year, they've got velvet on their antlers,
so they're growing their antlers. Gives a lot of heat away.
This is the only way that Matt and the Ministry of Defence
can properly get a handle on their skipping tenants.
We can pick up a number of things in this.
We can pick up their movement patterns, the time of day they feed,
the time of night they feed.
We can also actually count them fairly accurately.
But what's perhaps even more surprising
is that the Ministry of Defence actually wants to protect and nurture
these intruders.
It seems a bit hippy of them.
And yet, these military ranges
are actually some of the least tamed and cultivated parts of Britain left.
Here at Lulworth, no farmer has tilled these fields in over 50 years,
and the wild sika deer are exactly what the wilderness needs.
Lulworth Range, obviously, it's a unique lowland habitat.
Because it's been untouched by intensive agricultural pressures
and, basically, man's influence on the land,
it would overgrow with trees, given time.
Now, to maintain that, they need something to browse and graze
and to keep this heathland habitat growing,
and the sika deer, we believe, is helping us do that.
It would surprise people that, um, an Army range is a centre for wildlife.
Actually, these military ranges, the animals have thrived.
They've been enhanced, they've found shelter and refuge on here,
and they've been able to really adapt to this unique environment
that they find themselves in.
So, unless you're blown up by a shell, if you're an animal,
- this is a very good place to be? - Yeah.
There's another fast-multiplying species infiltrating the British landscape.
All around us, with their own mysterious language,
wild instincts and strange rules,
and at certain points of the day, they take over.
Take, for most of the year, the middle of the afternoon,
when suddenly, gates across the land slide open
and eight million kids pour out onto the pavements.
Every afternoon, you'll find mobs of school kids
whooping their way to the bus stop,
hanging round street corners,
slouching on benches in the parks...
It tends to make many adults rather uncomfortable.
We just want to get on with where we're going as quickly as possible.
But our children seem to have their own maverick agenda.
Celia Hannon spends her time trying to understand
the rhythms and movements of the younger generation.
Adults have been schooled, they've been socialised in how to move.
They've been told that you walk along the street in a certain way,
you go from A to B, and you get things done.
If you look at how a child might find their way to a certain point, for example,
you might find that they are doubling back, taking inexplicable detours,
and that's something adults find quite hard to wrap their head around.
To try to understand these baffling patterns of movements,
we gave a bunch of children some GPS trackers,
trying to find out what they get up to on their way home from school.
And looking from above,
we can catch all kinds of strange
and, at first, seemingly pointless little squiggles of movement.
Here's one group meandering up and down a street corner
over and over again.
Another child has gone to the tennis courts but isn't playing tennis.
And one more has gone to a football pitch
but spends as much of his time on the touchline as playing.
Children use spaces in unexpected ways.
They're interested in in-between places and in-between activities,
so finding those little slivers of land, playing on them,
foraging, exploring them, and perhaps loitering round the edges
of places like playing fields, for example.
Hanging out seems to be one of our children's favourite pursuits.
This is the corner where the local sweet shop is,
and there's a great smudge of loitering youth right there.
This is the cafe in the local park and, yes,
another smudge of young folk seemingly doing nothing.
When adults see a group of children loitering, they jump to some conclusions.
They're up to no good.
Actually, this is a really important part of developing as an adult.
You can test out your social interactions, define your identity away from the family.
To be honest, even in these allegedly dangerous,
health-and-safety-obsessed times,
I think we could afford to be a bit more relsxed about what our children get up to.
But there is another kind of urban mass movement
I have never understood.
(INAUDIBLE)
It's Saturday afternoon in Glasgow,
where I was born.
50,000 fans are gathering for what is
one of the highest-stakes football fixtures in Britain.
Glasgow Rangers are playing Glasgow Celtic -
a footballing rivalry that stretches back over a century.
These so-called Old Firm games used to have a terrible reputation
for tipping into violence.
Boozed-up bigotry in full-colour tribe vision.
But things are changing.
I've taken to the air over Ibrox, the Rangers ground.
Flying with me is Clifford Stott,
the UK's premier football crowd psychologist.
CLIFFORD: What we have here is a massive football match, a massive cultural event.
We can see the real significant build-up of the fans moving into the stadium.
You can see how densely crowded these areas are.
Down on the ground, I've always found football crowds a bit awe-inspiring.
You want untamed Britain?
This is it!
Except that from 1,000ft up, you get a completely different perspective.
We tend to think of football crowds as meaty, clammy, violent,
aggressive and anarchic.
Looking down from above, it's rather delicate.
It's almost ballet-like, what we're seeing here.
What's also striking is the lack of heavy police weaponry -
vans, Land Rovers, riot gear.
It's a long kind of ripple of blue, quite relaxed-looking,
and only a couple of specks of fluorescent-yellow policing.
These police don't look like they're equipped
to deal with any kind of violence.
There's no batons,
no shields...
CLIFFORD: They're in ordinary uniform,
they're communicating with fans, interacting positively. That sets a tone.
It sets a friendly tone for the crowd as a whole that, in effect,
undermines the opportunity for anybody seeking to create widespread disorder.
Strathclyde Police are in fact one of the very few forces in the country
who don't deploy riot police at major football matches like this.
They still keep an eye out for troublemakers
but they do it from above, at a distance...
...because, according to Clifford, squads of riot police on the ground
can actually encourage outbreaks of violence.
Heavy-handed policing can inadvertently create the conditions
where hooligan minorities can create more disorder and more influence in the crowd
than they might otherwise achieve.
At the one spot where the rival fans could meet,
at the corner of the stadium,
the police have carved out a buffer zone.
Even though the Rangers fans have gathered here to goad and taunt their opponents,
they stick behind the thin line of officers.
Why?
It seems as if the fans have tacitly agreed
just how untamed they're going to be.
The match itself ends without any major incidents.
(FANS SINGING)
Rangers win by a single goal,
and as the two rival tribes stream out of the stadium,
I summon up the courage to head back down and see what it feels like on the ground.
I mean, this is what I would expect a football match to be like.
It's... No, it's not. That's not true.
It's better humoured, you know.
There's a lot of abuse. There's a lot of very rude things being said,
but in a genial and cheerful way.
It's a lot less threatening than it would have been five, ten years ago, I suspect.
Is that right?
Despite the notorious reputation of this fixture,
what we're actually looking at is a relatively jovial, boisterous
- level of confrontation. - A lot of smiling people.
And the smiles are on that side of the fence.
And not that side. Exactly, yeah.
Here, the patterns and movements of two rival tribes
are being traced out on the urban landscape.
But there are other times when we, the British,
decide we're all on the same side,
when the ordered landscape of the country
is reshaped by our desire to band together
and have a thoroughly, riotously good time.
Below me is Glastonbury.
It's the biggest festival of its kind in the world.
Around 150,000 people have created
an impermanent, makeshift city.
You'd think it'd be utter chaos and madness down there.
But it isn't.
Well, not entirely.
What we're looking at is a briefly-flowering miniature society
with the tents and the wigwams...
...market stalls and high streets...
It's a society that's developed its own rituals, its own rules,
its own folklore...
It's got its own border.
It's crowded.
Cheerful.
Dirty.
Mildly anarchic.
It's got a celebrity culture.
It's got a transport system which barely works.
Now, what does that remind you of?
In fact, it's a little like Britain in miniature...
with one significant difference.
Everybody is here just to have fun.
During the course of this series, we've flown, hovered, staggered,
driven and plummeted up and down this crowded, busy little country.
The question is, what have we discovered?
Well, I've been struck by how embedded we still are in our history,
how shaped we are by our geology and our geography...
...and how extraordinarily intricate and difficult it is
simply to keep the show on the road.
Day after day, we grumble and moan when something goes wrong.
Looked at from above,
it is remarkable that more doesn't go wrong -
all the time we are living absolutely on the lip of chaos.
So, why does it work?
Is it down to the experts?
Well, yes, and we've met plenty of them.
But it's also really about the quality of the people,
our mutual patience, good humour and tolerance.
You can learn a great deal about Britain from above...
...but it's time to land again.
And on our website, you can go behind the scenes of the series,
and find a whole new perspective on Britain from above.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
Email subtitling@bbc.co.uk