Name: Can the Vikings reconnect Glasgow? - for BBC Radio Scotland by Cameron Angus-Mackay
Duration: 4 min 6 s
Description: Can the Vikings help reconnect Glasgow? A team of archaeologists and volunteers are excavating a corner of Govan Old churchyard. The community digs aim to unearth the 1500-year-old site and celebrate a new bridge over the Clyde. Cameron Angus-Mackay reports.

Can the Vikings help reconnect Glasgow? A team of archaeologists and volunteers are excavating a corner of Govan Old churchyard. The community digs aim to unearth the 1500-year-old site and celebrate a new bridge over the Clyde. Cameron Angus-Mackay reports.

Can the Vikings reconnect Glasgow? - for BBC Radio Scotland

Sacred Harp pioneer and former punk frontman, Tim Eriksen, takes us into the hair-raising sound of shape note singing – an American choral tradition experiencing a resurgence across the US and in Europe. All people and all faiths are welcome. As a new edition of the songbook approaches publication, Tim explores why this music is drawing more singers and how it’s managing to remain inclusive despite increasing political polarisation in the wider culture.

Sacred Harp is sung a-cappella in four-part harmony - a non-performative music where everyone takes a turn to lead and groups gather anywhere from churches to community centers and pubs. Songs were first published in a book of psalms in Georgia in 1844 and in 2025 a new edition will publish a record number of compositions submitted by sacred harp singers from all over the world.

For Tim Eriksen this is devotional music, but it will mean different things to different people - what’s special about it is the way it ‘transcends differences.’ Sociologist Laura Clawson tells us how the forbearers of the music stipulated that religion, and politics should not come into the ‘hollow square.’ Historically the Sacred Harp community has continued to sing and build bonds through chapters of political polarisation in the US. But how have recent political divides affected the community and how can it continue to remain an inclusive space?

First broadcast 25th April 2025, BBC World Service
Producer: Sarah Cuddon
Additional recording: Ben James

Our Sacred Harp

As their 30th birthday approaches, Saba Husain (they/them) receives an unexpected and life changing box. It contains ‘the life’ of their mum; never before seen diaries, love letters, poems, photos of a person who died when Saba was born, 29 years earlier.

With no note or message, it must have been sent by Saba’s father - but why now? Why not before? And what should Saba do with these incredibly intimate pieces of their mother? Saba starts to investigate, asking; how do you get to know your mum - from scratch - through a box of her things?

Mum in a Box follows Saba on the twists and turns of the often unacknowledged experience of a motherless child, piecing together a person through the things they’ve left behind and the revelations that unfold. We join Saba as they work through this totally uncurated box of both overwhelming and underwhelming surprises, travelling through space and time as they try to reach a mother that they never got to meet.

First broadcast on 27th April 2025, BBC Radio 4
Producer: Christina Hardinge
Co-creator: Saba Husain
Sound Design & Music composition: Noémie Ducimetière

Mum in a Box

Scotland’s ultimate road trip…
The North Coast 500 showcases stunning scenery around the Highlands, but the tourism campaign hasn’t been without issues. Cameron speaks to people who live and work around the route 10 years since it launched.

10 years of the North Coast 500 - for BBC Radio Scotland

Satellite technology is being fitted to six Scotrail trains in the north Highlands in a bid to boost WI-FI connectivity. The six-month pilot means passengers will be able to play games and access a range of applications. Cameron Angus-Mackay reports.

Scotrail satellite technology - for BBC Radio Scotland

Drawn to a family legend about his German-Jewish family’s dramatic escape from Nazi Germany in 1936, the writer Joe Dunthorne accidentally discovers a far more disturbing history.

A conversation with his granny, who spent her childhood brushing her teeth with the radioactive toothpaste her father Siegfried manufactured, leads Joe to finally read his great-grandfather's nearly 2000-page long unpublished memoir. Hidden on page 1692 he finds an unsettling confession.

Written and presented by Joe Dunthorne, (based on his book Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance)
Produced by Eleanor McDowall
Music by Jeremy Warmsley
Mixing engineer, Mike Woolley
Story consultant, Sarah Geis
Executive producer, Alan Hall
First broadcast 7th May 2025, BBC Radio 4

Half-Life: Daughter of Radium 1/8

When you look at the moon, what do you see?

Producer and artist Siddharth Khajuria encounters competing human imaginations for the moon. Starting with some of the earliest lunar maps, he works with moonlight to illuminate thornier questions about our own behaviour on earth. What motivates the desire to etch a name into the landscape?

The humanity woven through our modern map of the moon – Seas of Tranquility and Crises, Lakes of Death and Dreams, an Ocean of Storms – is the work of a 17th century Italian priest, Giovanni Battista Riccioli. Siddharth meets Riccioli’s poetic mapmaking in the context of a heated European race to name the moon’s many craters, mountains, valleys and maria.

From these celestial cartographers etching names into the first detailed lunar maps, to the Cold War era Apollo missions and commercially-fuelled landings that lie ahead of us, the story of humanity’s relationship with the moon is one of a growing intimacy.

Featuring astronomer and lunar biographer David Whitehouse, librarian at the Edinburgh Royal Observatory Karen Moran, space lawyer Frans von der Dunk, and a late night, torch-lit conversation between Siddharth and his eldest son.

Photograph: Siddharth Khajuria

First broadcast 11th May 2025, BBC Radio 4
Music composed and performed by Phil Smith
Produced by Eleanor McDowall and Siddharth Khajuria

A Map of the Moon

Dangers lurk beneath the soil, in the town where Joe's great-grandfather worked.

First broadcast 14th May 2025, BBC Radio 4
Written and presented by Joe Dunthorne
Produced by Eleanor McDowall
Music by Jeremy Warmsley
Mixing engineer, Mike Woolley
Story consultant, Sarah Geis
Executive producer, Alan Hall

Half-Life: The Quiet Town By The River 2/8

Joe's research into his great-grandfather's work takes him to Ammendorf, south of Berlin - one of the key sites of Nazi Germany's chemical weapons production.

Written and presented by Joe Dunthorne
Produced by Eleanor McDowall
Ammendorf recordings by Marta Medvešek
Music by Jeremy Warmsley
Mixing engineer, Mike Woolley
Story consultant, Sarah Geis
Executive producer, Alan Hall

Can the Vikings reconnect Glasgow? - for BBC Radio Scotland

Cameron Angus-Mackay

Related tracks