After three series exploring the wild side of Scotland, BBC Alba’s Dàna series returns to our screens this week. This time the team will be heading further afield, for adventures from the mountains of Norway to the sunny coastline of Spain. The first episode of Dàna | Europe’s Wild Side will premiere on BBC ALBA and BBC iPlayer on Wednesday 6 November at 8.30pm. Watch live or on demand (in Gaelic with English subtitles): Dàna | Europe’s Wild Side on BBC iPlayer.
This week we caught up with presenter Coinneach Rankin as part of our Common Ground series of short interviews.
Can you begin by telling us a bit about yourself and your background?
I belong to the tiny village of Badicaul, on the coast of Lochalsh in the North-West Highlands. The son of a dentist and a Free Church minister, my friends in Plockton Primary School used to joke that they could hardly imagine how I survived having to be both perfectly behaved for my father and denied sweet foods by my mother!
Gaelic language and culture have always been an integral part of my life. Neither of my parents are native speakers, the transmission on Gaelic having halted at my grandparents’ generation on both sides. Later, my mother learned it as an adult, and with the help of a child-minder from Lewis, excellent schoolteachers and a handful of Gaelic-speaking friends, my siblings and I became fluent and grew up thoroughly engaged with the language.
How did you first get started in the outdoors? Can you remember your first trip?
The horizon visible from the family home in Badicaul is utterly dominated by Skye’s Red Hills and Cuillin Ridge, and these captured my imagination even as a young child playing on the rocky shore in front of the house. This fascination was no doubt further enkindled by my dad’s tales of his own scrambles among their rocky ridges – escapades I now understand to have approached the realm of what might be described as ‘sketchy’ on more than one occasion.
The first proper day in the hills I had was with him on Blà Bheinn, I must have been nine. It took us all day, and I vividly remember gazing up at the looming black walls of basalt and gabbro and wondering that anything could possibly be that big.
I always loved being outside and wandering about the local hills and coast, but I guess I was about 20 when I started regularly going into the mountains by myself. A glorious spring day in the Arrochar Alps with my friend Owen Sinclair made for one particularly memorable mission early on, but it was upon moving to Skye for a year at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college in Sleat that I really got going, and had more than a few sketchy Cuillin days of my own!
Can you describe your ideal day out in Scotland’s outdoors?
I’m not typically a morning person, so I would like the chance for a modest lie-in in my van somewhere near the Cuillin, and then maybe have some coffee and pancakes in the sun (I’m picturing this happening in early May) before setting out.
I’ll head off in running shoes, carrying a tiny bag with snacks, a layer and – depending on what I have planned – a wee rope, harness and rock shoes. I’d spend the day roaming about the ridges and maybe throw in a classic scramble or easy climb, until the sky starts to redden and the sun sinks towards the Outer Hebrides in the west.
About this point I’m going to realise that I have left myself slightly less time than was wise to make it back for a planned evening pint with friends, and will be forced to really put the foot down on the descent. I’m sometimes told that this penchant for cutting it fine is a bit stressful, but I do enjoy the extra little injection of adrenaline it brings.
There would also obviously need to be a perfect cloud inversion all day to really top it off.
What does getting outdoors mean to you? Is it about challenging yourself, finding out about the world, getting closer to nature, something to enjoy socially, or just a great way to escape the everyday?
All of the above!
Some of the most important friendships in my life have been solidified in relatively short periods of time through being out having adventures together in Scotland. I love how shared tribulations, like biting off more than you can chew on a sea-cliff adventure or getting emphatically lost in winter can bring a sense of closeness and camaraderie.
For me, exploring the landscape also has a strong connection with my Gaelic heritage. I like to understand as much as I can about a place and spend a considerable amount of time reading local history, researching placenames and listening to archive recordings of oral tradition and music from areas I visit. Keeping these in the forefront of my mind while I am out running, walking or whatever it is on the day brings me a deep feeling of connection with both the places and the people who live and have lived in them.
Have your outdoors’ experiences changed you in any way, perhaps affecting other areas of your life?
I often reflect upon the way that confrontations with certain emotions in the outdoors, particularly fear while trad climbing, have helped me deal with similar emotions more constructively when they arise in other areas of my life.
To climb well, and certainly for me, in order to enjoy the act of climbing, you have to learn to experience the innate fear most of us have of falling off things, while not allowing it to completely take over your body and mind. Be mindful of it, without letting it run the show.
I can definitely point to occasions where I have consciously drawn upon my experience as a climber in order to remain at least a little calmer and more clear-headed in challenging situations. My good friend Jenna Bisset once told me that when stressed or scared, she checks if she is breathing and then asks herself “What can I change? What can I control in this situation?” That is something I think about a lot.
Looking forward, if there was one thing you could change about Scotland’s outdoors – whether that be in something in the environment itself, or in the culture around walking and mountains, what would it be?
I would love to see Scotland’s patterns of land ownership dramatically changed to make it easier and more affordable for the people in our rural communities to access land for building houses, working on and enjoying sustainably. The housing crisis in the Highlands and Islands is hard to ignore.