I AM in the air again.

Over Stirling the helicopter circles above the monument and around the castle. I am sitting in the back seat, squeezed in the middle, rubbing my hands to warm them as the cold air pours through the cockpit from where the doors have been removed.

In front of me Shahbaz Majeed is taking aerial photographs of Stirling Castle and the Wallace Monument. For the next hour and a half he will also capture Castle Campbell, Loch Leven, the waterfront in his home town of Dundee, St Andrews, the Forth Bridges and Edinburgh.

But for now Stirling is beneath us. And the River Forth. From 1000ft up I can see almost along the entire length of it. To the west where late evening sun is streaming gold through the cloud cover I can follow the liquid line of the river back to where it joins the Teith and back further to the point where it disappears into the evening haze where the mountains rise.

Directly beneath me the river meanders in huge, arcing threads – almost as tight as a noose at points over Stirling, before widening at Kincardine and then widening again beyond the Forth Bridges, like a pelican opening its gullet.

It occurs to me that in the streets below me right now are where I lived out my entire twenties. I am looking down on my own past in a way. An old song floats through my head. “I have got to find the river/ Bergamot and Vetiver/ Run through my head and fall away …”

As we climb over Fife for a few moments I can see both the Forth and the Tay at the same time. The land below is laid out like a 3D model. Scotland – or rather my vision of it – even now is reshaping itself in my head.

Heading back towards the bridges I can see all the islands in the Forth, Inchkeith (currently owned by Sir Tom Farmer),  Inchholm, Inchgarvie, Inchmickerey, all the way out to Bass Rock and the Isle of May. Here is the Forth estuary. The next leg of the journey.

We fly over Methil and Kirkcaldy and approach the Forth bridges. The elegant upright stays of the Queensferry Crossing – still a couple of weeks away from opening at this point – strobe in my vision in the last of the light as we approach.

“The hope is you go up there and you maybe get a unique image,” Majeed told me before we headed out tonight. “And more often than not that’s what happens. The last time I did one of the bridges the picture ended up on a five pound note.”

The key to good aerial photography, he tells me, is planning, preparation and getting your bathroom breaks in before you take off. And then it’s just a matter of luck.

 “Scotland is four weathers in one day. The light changes and the place looks completely different. That’s part of the majesty of Scotland. We’re very lucky with what we have on our doorstep.”

Ben Chatwin and I are standing on the pier beneath the Forth Bridge. In his hand is a digital hand recorder and a hydrophone which he is casting into the water every time a train crosses. “I’m hoping the bridge makes a noise basically,” he tells me. A jellyfish billows in the water beside us.

Chatwin is an electronic musician and composer who has a dream. He wants to make an album about the bridge, which he can see out of the window from his house in South Queensferry.

He has often used live sound recordings in his work before but now his ambition is more focused, more developed.

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Ben Chatwin 

“I know what rivers and the sea sound like and it’s not that interesting to me. Stuff like that has been done loads of times. Man and nature interacting. That’s what interests me.”

The idea for an album about the bridge came, Chatwin admits, after he read the late Iain Banks’s novel, The Bridge following his move from London.

“This is not a long bridge,” Banks writes at one point, “but it goes on for ever.” The book, engineered to probe the inner and outer world of its characters and the closest perhaps Banks got in his mainstream fiction to the science fiction he also published, was kind of intimidating, Chatwin admits. But then the nearby road bridge was closed because of mechanical faults towards the end of 2015 and it changed the soundscape of the area.

“On my evening walk with the dog I could hear things I’d never heard before. I could hear bats squeaking. You could hear them swooping close to your head, you could hear their wings flapping.

“And then whenever the train did go across it was really loud, deafening. I’m really interested in how sound moves and you could hear the sound of the trains hitting Queensferry and bouncing back again.

“It made me think back to before the bridge and what it must have been like.

“I did a bit of recording then. I wish I’d done more. I didn’t really appreciate it until the noise came back.

He looks up at the bridge above us. “It just owns this space. Out of respect for the bridge I really want to try to find it make some noise.”
We drive to North Queensferry and round and through the tangle of traffic cones waiting for the new bridge to open. As we cut through the streets of the town he tells me about his plans for attaching contact mikes to the steel structure itself, maybe even record the bridge’s electromagnetic frequencies. It’s all about, he says, “trying to capture a space. And then all the music can exist inside the space.”

We finally stand beneath the organised chaos of the bridge’s steel structure on the north bank of the estuary and look up. “There’s something quite beautiful about it,” Chatwin murmurs.

What would that architecture sound like if it was a piece of music, I wonder? A throbbing dance track? A frozen piece of neo-classicism by someone like Max Richter? “Somewhere in between,” reckons Chatwin.

All around us, invisible, I can hear woodpigeons cooing. The sound of my childhood, I say. “Noisy bastards,” Chatwin laughs. “Ruined many a recording.”

Rivers travel through geography and time. Through stories too. For Chatwin this is Iain Banks’s bridge. For myself it belongs to Robert Donat, clambering out of a train to escape in Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. For some others, no doubt, Robert Louis Stevenson comes to mind. The nearby Hawes Inn gets a mention in Kidnapped. This river is written into Scottish literature.

All of this is swirling around us unseen, like woodpigeons and electromagnetic frequencies. I think of of the cobbled streets of South Queensferry, of the Burry Man, this rearing immensity of Victorian engineering in front of us. And I think of Banks living out his life in North Queensferry, a serial futurist surrounded by the past.

Every day we are all time travellers.

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The tidal walkway to Cramond

Irvine Welsh’s River Forth is possibly different to mine and yours. In The Black River (the Gaelic name for the Forth, Abhainn Dhubh, translates as such), a typically scabrous essay for the Caught by the River website, Welsh paints a picture of pollution and pill-popping ravers on the Maid of the Forth as well as its part in Scotland’s failed colonial past (it was from Leith that Scots set sail on the doomed expedition to found a colony in Panama “thus precipitating the unloved and unwanted Union of the Crowns,” he writes.)

Pollution has been a factor on the Forth for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. Distilleries, breweries, paper mills, tan works and textile mills all used the river to flush away what it didn’t need and then as the industrial revolution kicked in coal washing plants and paraffin factories in West Lothian and engineering in Falkirk added to the toxic mix. The petrochemical plant at Grangemouth dates back to 1924. And that’s all before you take sewage into account.

Between the 1920s and 1978 sewage from the city of Edinburgh flowed into the Forth, according to TC Smout and Mhairi Stewart’s book The Environmental History of the Forth, with “minimal filtration”. By 1923 the Fishery Board reported that the death by poisoning or suffocation of salmon and sea trout in the river was an “annual occurrence.”

By the seventies, Smout and Stewart report, sewage, industrial waste, spent gas liquor at Granton, gypsum silting at Leith and used grain from the city’s distillers and brewers was polluting the Firth at Edinburgh. No wonder Welsh describes it as a “dull, manky stagnant-looking stretch of water.”

Mankiness comes in several forms, of course. The island of Cramond, to which you can walk to at low tide, was, Welsh says, where you would choose to get accidentally cut off and be forced to spend the night with your date of choice. “The serious shaggers studied the tidal charts in the Evening News like the most dedicated Old Salts, and never left home without a sports bag containing a jumper and blankets,” he writes.

To be fair on the Thursday I walk out to Cramond I don’t notice too many sports bags. But then it is before lunch. What I do see are dog walkers and detectorists combing the Forth shore. And on the island itself, from the number of African faces and Italian accents I’m guessing Cramond’s TripAdvisor status must be high.

Walking along the tidal causeway to the island between marshy land to my left and Cramond’s large, triangular stone works, all pitted and periwinkled by the tides, I watch the planes on their approach to Edinburgh airport and try to spot the curlew whose pipping call I can hear across the mudflats. Halfway between the shore and the island a large plastic bin lies choking in the mud as if it is being sucked under. In the shallows tin cans and plastic bags float. You can trace human history here back beyond Roman times. Who is to say that when we disappear the marks we have made and the detritus we leave behind will be all that is left to speak for us.

The walk is worth it though. From the island’s modest heights I can look down the Forth towards the estuary mouth, down past Granton to Leith. The Firth glitters and sparkles in the sun.

The land, to be fair, is less prepossessing. Welsh argues that Edinburgh has no real affection for the river. And it’s true that the new build that has grown up on the waterfront in recent decades presents a face to the Forth that is eminently slappable. Ugly, boxy, unappetising. But get out on the water and everything changes.

Granton, as well as being part of Welsh’s literary territory, is home to the Forth pilots, the master mariners who are employed to bring the ships that visit the Forth from all over the world to safe harbour, whether that be Leith or Rosyth or, further up river, Grangemouth.

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Captain Robert Keir

There are 26 pilots in all working 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, five men (they are all men at the moment) to a shift.

“All of us have been in the merchant navy,” explains Captain Robert Keir as we sit onboard the Pilot Vessel Tiger cutting out from berth into the estuary on the way to transfer pilots between the various ships that dot the estuary. “We’ve all been at sea for 15 years.”

What they all bring to this job is local knowledge. “You almost need to be able to walk along the riverbed in your mind,” Keir explains. “I think you have to have a certain character. You need to enjoy a high pressure environment. This can be a tough job at times with the weather and tides so yeah all of us who do it we enjoy it.”

Their clients range from Exon, BP and Ineos to cruise liners. There’s one in the Firth today, the Star Pride, waiting to land passengers in time for the Tattoo.

In the last few years the Forth pilots have also been involved in piloting material for the Queensferry Crossing out into the river and guiding the new aircraft carrier the HMS Queen Elizabeth out of dock in Rosyth and then through the bridges.

“The carrier had to come over the sill of the port entrance on high tide,” recalls Keir, “but it was too high to go under the bridge. So it had to go out and anchor until a low. It also had its mast folded over on a hinge. That was a lot of planning.” Indeed. There were three pilots assigned to the project for five years in the planning.

“The carrier has its own Facebook page and it showed it going into Portsmouth last week. And the headline said: ‘Carrier squeezes into Portsmouth.’ And you could have fitted four wide through the entrance. That’s nothing. We had a foot either side.”

Keir has lived a life on the water. He was brought up in Arbroath and went to sea at the age of 16. “I had never been outside Scotland until I flew down to London for my Shell Centre for my interview as a cadet and I was 16 when I arrived in Japan on Christmas Eve on a gas tanker for Shell.”

Later he joined Cunard and worked the cruise liners ending up on the QE2 where he met his wife. Now he’s settled in Dollar and working on the river.

“When you get married and have a family going away to sea for five months is not great,” he admits. And anyway, guiding a ship into port is the fun part of being a mariner.

“When you get to the port it’s all happening. We get the best bit of every voyage.”

The Tiger, built in 2000, is one of three pilot vessels. Its top speed is 24 knots but it sticks to 18. Right now we are taking another pilot Ken Fraser out to a gas tanker Rijnborg which he will then pilot into berth at Grangemouth.

This body of water is the pilot’s place of work and they have seen huge improvements in it over the last few decades. The Forth, Fraser says, is “a lot better now than it was 30, 40 years ago. Then, it was pretty grey. You could get a lot of effluent from ships or effluent from the refinery.

“I used to sail up to Grangemouth on chemical tankers 40 years ago and you never saw any seals. The past 25 years they’ve improved the pollution output from Grangemouth. And the ships have improved. They don’t pump anything into the sea.”

Sometimes the pilots spot dolphins and whales are regular visitors. “We will go past a catamaran buoy,” explains Keir. “There is usually three or four seals sitting on top of that sunbathing.

Today is clear and calm. When the pilot reaches the gas tanker and sails around to the lee side of the ship away from the wind. As the Tiger edges closer to the Rijnborg towering above us, you can see the water sluicing between the vessels. This is where injury is most likely, Keir tells me, where limbs and bodies can get trapped. But today the Tiger nudges against the gas tanker with the slightest of dunts. More of a kiss than a punch.

Pilots have to climb nine metres of rope up the side of the ship (more than nine metres is illegal, but they may have to transfer to a gangway to complete their journey). It looks a challenge but Fraser suggests getting on board a submarine is actually more difficult.

“The boat can’t run alongside the submarines because of the shape of the sub’s hull, so you have to ask the sub to go in reverse a lot of the time because when they’re going ahead it drags the bow of the submarine down.

“But the pilot boat generally has to T-Bone the side and then you’ll leap off and there are no railings. You hope that they will catch you.”

With that Fraser is off and up the ladder and onto the gangway in a matter of seconds. Once he waves down to us the Tiger is off to pick up another pilot, Fred Whitaker, from one ship, the Essex which has just come out of the gas terminal from Mossmorran and take him straight away to another, the Kontich, which is going to take its berth.

We are now five miles and more from the docks and out here you get a sense of what a huge expanse of water this is. Is it still a river? “We work on the river,” confirms Keir. “We call it the river.”

But it is connected to the world. Keir shows me an app on his phone called Marine Traffic, displaying all the ships that are currently afloat around the British Isles. He zeroes in on the Forth. “I’m trying to find us,” he says.

We look at all the dots on the digital map. So many ships, I say. “Everything that comes into this country for trade comes in via one of the ports,” Keir reminds me. “The massive container ships come from the Far East, they all go to Rotterdam Antwerp and then the feeder ships take the cargo for Scotland from China these go back and forward every week.”

We move on water, we are kept afloat by water. This is a world of water.

The Tiger makes for port. I am left thinking back to Loch Ard where this journey began, that trickle of water bumping and barging over the stones towards Aberfoyle. That seems a world away from this huge estuary I am floating on now. And yet it’s all part of the same story. Or part of the many stories that flow down this river to the sea.

A new bridge has now opened. Another story begins. Someone, somewhere will be writing it even now.

Ben Chatwin’s next album Staccato Signals will be out early next year on Village Green Recordings.