Open Country

• Time travel on Orkney

  Rose Ferraby visits Orkney to discover the rich history of a stretch of coastline on the small Island of Rousay. She joins archaeologists from the University of the Highlands and Islands as they travel through the rugged landscape and varied timescales of Rousay's coastline, from prehistory to clearances. They chart the legacy of ancient islanders and uncover stories hidden within the island's brochs, tombs, churches and farmsteads.Producer: Ruth Sanderson

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• Shifting Sands of Sefton

  The Sefton coastline stretches for around twenty miles between Liverpool and Southport. It has one of the largest sand dune systems in the country, but is also one of the fastest-eroding shorelines, shifting back by around four metres ever year. In this programme, Martha Kearney visits Sefton to explore the ways in which this ever-changing landscape has been shaped by both human activity and the elements. She walks along Blitz Beach, where rubble was dumped from buildings destroyed when Bootle and Liverpool were bombed during World War II, and finds out how this has affected erosion over the decades since then. She learns about the treacherous sands of Crosby, where the famous Antony Gormley sculptures on the beach have proved a huge tourist attraction, but where an RNLI lifeguard explains how it is all too easy for unwary visitors to get stuck in the quicksand and mud. A few miles further up the coast at Formby, she finds out how work is going on to restore degraded sand dunes and goes out looking for sand lizards with one of the National Trust rangers. She asks what the future holds for this coastline, with its diverse wildlife habitats and fascinating history.Producer: Emma Campbell Assistant producer: Jo Peacey

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• Cornish Mining

  Martha Kearney takes a trip through the past, present and future of mining in Cornwall, finding out how it has shaped the landscape. After crouching in an old tunnel at Geevor Tin Mine with the miners who used to work in it, she journeys into the future at a new lithium mine based in an old china clay pit in St Austell.Producer: Beth O'Dea

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• These Debatable Lands

  Helen Mark visits 50 square miles that were neither England nor Scotland. The Debatable Lands, between Carlisle and Gretna, were home to untameable crime families that petrified the most powerful of Lords and Kings. For hundreds of years governments in London and Edinburgh left the region to its own laws and moral codes. When they did intervene, the result was an explosion of violence that's still visible in the landscape of derelict towers and still audible in the Border Ballads collected by Walter Scott.Author, Graham Robb guides Helen through the region's complex history and Ian Scott Martin takes her to the ramparts of Gilnockie Tower- the fearsome stronghold of the Armstrong family, one of the most notorious clans of Border Reivers.The Union of the Crowns in the early 17th century brought the age of the Debatable Land to an end, ushering in a long period of peace broken abruptly in 1915. On the Western Front the British Army was running out of shells. In Westminster the government fell and the decision was made to build an enormous 9 mile long munitions factory, stretching across the region. Rebecca Short of the Devil's Porridge Museum guides Helen around the remains of the industrial landscape in which 30,000 people- 16,000 of them women- worked in the production of the cordite that propelled shells across the battlefields of Belgium and France. The western tip of the Debatable Land reaches out to the saltmarshes of the Solway Firth. This apparently peaceful landscape soon yields its secrets. The land is constantly battered and transformed by the tides while animals and plants have to adapt to survive the harsh and dynamic conditions. Helen explores the creeks, bogs and rivers with David Pickett of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust and Chris Miles of the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland.Producer: Alasdair Cross

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• The 100 Mile Wildlife Corridor

  Martha Kearney follows the River Ouse, from the High Weald to the Sussex coast and - finally - into the sea itself. Along the way, she discovers how one of the UK's largest nature recovery projects is taking root. The project is called 'Weald to Waves' - it's a wildlife corridor that has been mapped out over more than 100 miles of Sussex landscape and coastline, to encourage biodiversity on a huge scale, connecting food, farming, nature and people. Encompassing more than 20,000 hectares of contiguous habitat, it is a huge coming-together of farmers, land managers, councils, utility companies, wildlife charities, schools, gardeners and community groups. Martha meets some of the people who have pledged to be a part of this huge collaborative effort.Producer: Becky Ripley

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