Rural Affairs correspondent Katharine Hay is walking around Scotland. This week she has arrived at the ruins of the village of Badbea on the north east coast
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00:00Hi, I've been walking some of the John O'Groats trail on my way north as I work through the
00:25Highlands documenting the North Coast 500, the impact of tourism, both positive and negative,
00:31but also looking at routes which are encouraging slow tourism, the John O'Groats trail being
00:37one of them. It's still a work in progress, there are some areas that are still quite
00:41challenging to walk through, but the team behind developing it are working on making
00:47it more accessible. One of the places that I've come across on the route is Bad Bay,
00:53which is where I am just now. I arrived here quite late last night walking from Helmsdale
00:58and it's one of the historic Highland Clearances villages. It's about five miles north of Helmsdale
01:08and as you can see behind me, there's remains of the homes that families, after they were
01:14cleared off the land in Sutherland and Caithness to make way for sheep farming, they came here
01:22and tried to make a life work for them. I think from what I was reading earlier, there
01:27were about 12 families at this specific site. They had challenging circumstances, you're
01:37right on the edge of the cliff here. The land does slope quite a bit, it was pretty difficult
01:45camping here last night trying to find somewhere where it wasn't just going to be all the blood
01:50running to one side of my body. But yeah, also just the wind, it's obviously very exposed.
01:56But again, from what I was reading, families lived in these homes with the livestock that
02:03they brought with them to try and work the land. I also saw that they had to tie the
02:08animals and children as well to the land sometimes because the weather was just against them
02:14a lot of the time. Camping near them was almost quite a haunting experience because after
02:19reading the history and just hearing about how difficult it was for them after they were
02:24cleared from their homes, this was sort of in the 1800s, it must have been very challenging
02:32circumstances for them. And yeah, it's just also a very beautiful spot. I mean, that doesn't
02:39take away from what they had to face, but it's very beautiful to walk through this area.
02:45The heather's out in bloom at the moment and you get a very wide view of the east coastline
02:51as well, which has been pretty spectacular to walk along. I'm just carrying on on the
02:56John O'Groats trail on my way north. I'll be hopefully getting up to Burydale in the
03:02next hour or so and just going to be continuing on my way north towards John O'Groats.