Ravenscraig, Mud Snails and Basalt Rock in Farming
Mark Stephen and Rachel Stewart with stories from the great outdoors.
Mark visits the Ravenscraig Steelworks near Motherwell. Though demolished, the site still holds a lot of meaning for the community. Artists Frank McElhinney and Hamshya Rajkumar have been working on the site as part of an exhibition named ‘A Fragile Correspondence’. Mark finds out more about their work, and nature's reclamation of the former industrial site.
Diarmid Mogg has been digging deep into the historical lives of Edinburgh’s tenement residents. Maud Start finds out more about his Tenement Town project, and the residents who once occupied a tenement on South Clerk Street.
The Climate Innovation Hub at the Glensaugh research farm in Aberdeenshire is investigating how basalt rock can enrich agricultural soil and sequester carbon. Rachel meets Antonia Boyce from the James Hutton Institute to see how this can be used to cut emissions.
Mark ferries out of the Tayvallich harbour with Hans Unkle, co-owner of Scotland’s first ever electric, solar-powered fishing vessel. They chat about the future of electric vessels, and reel in an interesting catch.
An excerpt from our midweek podcast sees Helen Needham discussing the Cairngorms and Nan Shepherd with writer Merryn Glover.
Rachel visits the Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Red Moss of Balerno Wildlife Reserve near Edinburgh, with Dr Helen Taylor and Katarzyna Ruta, where a conservation breeding project to boost numbers of the rare pond mud snail has reached a major milestone.
Rachel joins the P7 class at St Cyrus Primary in Aberdeenshire as they swap the classroom for the beach in what is now their favourite lesson of the week, Beach School, with St Cyrus National Nature Reserve Manager Therese Alampo.