For Argyll

The Scottish Natural Heritage Press Office have just emailed us the story of remarkable film images of a waterfall flowing backwards up a highland mountainside - during a 160km mountain-top storm. Although this was not in Argyll, it’s a great story of the power of Scotland’s wild places - and the steel required of people who try to record it.

The location was the Beinn Eighe National Nature Reserve. The rare phenomenon was recorded on Ruadh Stac Mor in Wester Ross by a BBC film crew caught in a fierce storm on the summit. This wrecked the team’s campsite, threw one of them into the air from a boulder he’d lashed himself to, blew their equipment to bits and forced them to get off the muntain pronto - crawling down to safety.

Executive producer Fergus Beeley described how his expedition to film ptarmigan and mountain hare in their winter habitat turned into a life-threatening experience for himself and his colleagues. Writing in his online diary on the
BBC website Fergus Beeley said: “We could not ride out this storm without some significant danger of hypothermia. We had to descend off the mountain if the storm wasn’t going to let up soon.”

As the Force 11 storm reached its peak the crew’s mountain top campsite was torn apart by 160 kilometres per hour/100miles per hour winds which scattered film equipment across the hillside. Despite being tethered to a boulder, team safety adviser Jim MacNeill was blown into the air as he fought to lash down tents and equipment as the storm reached its height. In the howling gale a satellite phone call was made to Scottish Natural Heritage Reserve Manager
Eoghain Maclean. He advised Fergus and his crew to crawl back down the mountain for their own safety.

Fergus continues: “Cameraman Ian McCarthy was struggling to remain in the last standing tent, as it shifted with him across the ground. Though he was also safely anchored to our own rope-to-boulder lashings, if anything were to go now, our tents would be lifted straight off the ground and away with the dark, the snow, the mouth of the storm.

“We could not ride out this storm now without some significant danger of hypothermia setting into us. I could just make out Jim shouting down the satellite phone through the din of the whipping and flapping. It was 0900, and
our procedural call back to base was in progress. Eoghain Maclean, the Beinn Eighe Reserve manager and Kinlochewe Mountain Rescue Team member, agreed that an immediate descent was advised.”

The team are spending a year on the SNH reserve filming the spectacular wildlife and nature of Beinn Eighe through its seasonal changes for a BBC2 Natural World special ‘Secrets of the Highlands’.

Now in his fourth month of filming, Fergus says of the experience: “We chose Beinn Eighe because I wanted to film wildlife against the spectacular changes in landscape and conditions which occur across the seasons. Our experience on Ruadh Stac Mor encapsulated some of the harsh challenges of survival faced by the species inhabiting those wild mountain habitats. The ‘uphill waterfall’ footage tells its own story of the force of the wind”

SNH Reserve manager Eoghain Maclean says: “Beinn Eighe is a landscape of extremes throughout the seasons so there was always the likelihood the team could finding themselves in difficult and challenging conditions at the start of the year. But we are delighted to be working with Fergus and his crew who are committed and experienced professionals
and experts at filming nature in the raw. We are working together to bring out the best of Beinn Eighe’s nature and wildlife and I’m confident the finished film will provide a wonderful record of one of the gems of Scotland’s mountain
areas.”

View Fergus Beeley’s ‘uphill waterfall’ footage on the SNH website at: www.snh.org.uk