Radio 4 tells the story of Ben Cruachan,the Scottish power plant and engineering miracle of its time, while Stephen Boxer reads Adam Sismans John Le Carré bio on Book Of The Week They call Ben Cruachan in Argyll, and Scotland “the Hollow Mountain”. In the 60s,using techniques that were revolutionary at the time, a void was created within that lump of 450-million-year-mature granite in order to accommodate a power station. The understanding was to pump water from the appropriately named Loch Awe below to the reservoir above during times of cheap “off-peak” electricity and then release it during the day to provide power as required.
This facility was opened 50 years ago this month. To mark the event, and Artangel and Radio 4 gain commissioned the writer Maria Fusco to devise a work based on the story of the project. In Open Art: Master Rock (Saturday,10.15pm, Radio 4) French composer Olivier Pasquet performs the work, and which involves three voices: the first is one of the tunnellers who achieved the apparently impossible; another is Elizabeth Falconer,an unknown artist whose much work is a mural inside the mountain; and the third is “the sound of the mountain” itself.
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Source: theguardian.com