Everything you need to know about the UK's first high end Gaelic/English drama

“We spent yesterday stormproofing the house and the croft, making sure the animals had shelter for 86-mile-an-hour winds,” she says, happy that the sheep, cows and chickens are all safe and sound.

It’s a long way from her other base in London where she’s carved a career as an actor in film and TV with shows such as The Innocents, Shetland, The Long Shadow, Far from the Apple Tree and His Dark Materials.

But it’s fitting that she’s back in the Hebrides as she hits the screens once more in the lead role in An t-Eilean (The Island), the UK’s first-ever high-end Gaelic drama series. The Northern noir set in Lewis and Harris is a big budget four-part series from Black Camel Pictures production for BBC ALBA, and BBC iPlayer in association with All3Media International, that puts Groundsell’s native language front and centre by combining Gaelic dialogue with English, and she’s happy to be back on home turf.

Filmed in Harris and Glasgow, the crime drama stars Groundsell as policewoman Kat Crichton, returning home to investigate the murder of the wife of a wealthy local bigwig in their isolated castle, alongside a cast that includes Sagar Radia (Industry), Iain Macrae (Bannan) and Sinéad MacInnes (Outlander).

Groundsell, who is fluent in Gaelic and English switches seamlessly between the two in character and as the drama unfolds, non-Gaelic speakers are kept up to speed with subtitles, a norm nowadays for viewers.

“We’re all watching programmes in multiple languages and are accustomed to subtitles,” says Groundsell, “so non-Gaelic speakers will have no problem keeping up. And it adds to the authenticity to see islanders speaking in their native language. Gaelic is a part of our shared history and culture across all of Scotland, not just up in the Highlands and Islands. I think there is a real uprising of individual and cultural pride and hunger for authenticity and stories that really represent the communities we come from.”

“People are open to hearing about experiences not necessarily their own. I’m interested to know what it’s like to be an indigenous American, what the experience of someone in Japan has been. I think we’re all intrigued by the truth of someone telling their own story and uplifting their own background and culture.”

Groundsell’s character Kat had left Lewis ten years earlier under mysterious circumstances and is reluctant to return but once there, starts to confront her past and get to grips with the present.

“She has a lot of demons she comes face to face with on her return,” says Groundsell, “and starts to unpeel the layers of this very powerful family on the island with whom she has a connection.”

“For me a big part of the show is about the reconciliation that we all have to make with our own history. What really appealed is there’s something in Kat that I understand, a kind of longing for a reconnection with home and a fear of isolation from that community.”

For Groundsell leaving and returning are familiar experiences and ones she thinks the audience will recognise.

“The notion of homecoming is a big thing in Scotland generally, but amongst the Celtic isles, for the Gaels and the people of the Highlands and Islands, the concept of attachment or detachment to and from your homeland has always been a huge issue. For generations we’ve been made up of people who have felt the need to go elsewhere to make a living or a life for themselves and the concept of what homecoming can mean, both positive and negative, I think is a particularly Celtic thing.”

“In Kat’s case she needed to leave to find that power and steel she needs to confront some difficult things in her life.”

Groundsell too left the islands, first for mainland Scotland where she moved with her family as a child, attending a Gaelic speaking secondary school in Glasgow and drama classes at the Citizens Theatre and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland before moving to London at 18 to pursue an acting career.

With more productions filming in Scotland, and outwith the Central Belt, Groundsell sees new vitality in the industry here.

“I lived in the islands until I was eight or nine and then moved to Glasgow, before attempting London,” she says. “At the time it would have been difficult to build a career here and it’s still challenging, but I feel now there is a sense of industry and skill and capacity that is expanding up in the islands and it’s not as difficult to be a creative up here as when I first started to be an actor.”

For Groundsell, now 26, this is the first time she’s been in a show that’s as high profile for Gaelic language and culture so when she first saw the script she knew it was a role she had to take.

“I have not read anything like this Gaelic,” she says. “I hadn’t considered there would be opportunities for me to work in Gaelic in this kind of a way and had resigned myself to not having that element of my life and work connected, so the idea I could do this sort of job on this scale in Gaelic would have been enough in and of itself.

“But also something about Kat really appealed to me, and those elements of leaving and returning and what that means. What it means to feel like an outsider in your own homeland felt really interesting to me, and something I hadn’t necessarily seen before in parts.”

Despite being a Gaelic speaker, Groundsell was unsure where she fitted in.

“I am someone who has spent a lot of time away and I’m not embedded in the Gaelic world here,” she says. “Younger Gaelic speakers, in terms of the language itself, can feel our Gaelic is never really quite good enough but making this was really positive and inspiring to feel that actually the Gaelic world is open to all of us, that we do all have a place in it. That it isn’t and has never been, a closed world and that all of us who care about it, no matter what level we’re at or how deep our familiar connections, have to take up the challenge of living, working, existing and promoting ourselves in Gaelic. Otherwise we’ll all lose it.”

It’s surprising to hear Groundsell saying she didn’t feel competent enough, since she grew up speaking Gaelic and had a native speaker grandmother, but she explains.

“My schooling was all in Gaelic until I was 16 and I’ve not really had much of an opportunity to use it since. The only family member I had who spoke Gaelic was my grandmother who passed away a few years ago, so my outlets have been limited. And I think that was true for a lot of us in the cast, certainly the younger actors. We had different levels of connection and comfort with ourselves as Gaels. But I think this was for all of us, a really positive and affirming experience to feel somehow legitimised by this show, this experience.”

“I think that’s true of all the Celtic nations and it’s probably true of any language that is so tied to a place. It’s finding those connections and yourself within it when you aren’t living in it and steeped in it every single day.”

The island location is integral to An t-Eilean, affecting both plot and atmosphere, providing a stunning backdrop to the action.

“Being there seeps into everything,” she says, “into the acting, the writing, the experience of film making. You can’t not be affected by that landscape and for the type of show we were making it was a perfect backdrop. It carries such drama and depth. There’s a kind of brutality and brooding mystery that was very apt.”

Groundsell’s previous experience on supernatural thriller The Innocents, much of which was filmed in Norway, fed into An t-Eilean.

“There are some aesthetic similarities and can be a sense of isolation in both settings that have interesting results in people’s psychology and the way that society functions. For us on An t-Eilean it added a kind of emotional height and weight to everything. In both, the landscape existed as a character almost in the narrative.”

Big open locations do not however make for anonymity among the community, despite the grand scale of the geography.

“You might think a place where everyone lives so far away from one another would be fairly anonymous, but actually you cannot be anonymous here, which depending on your point of view is either a wonderful thing or a terrible thing. For me it’s always been a really wonderful thing.”

Writers Nicholas Osborne and Patsi Mackenzie translated the An t-Eilean script from English into Gaelic, capturing the meaning rather than just translating the language and for Groundsell the format of speaking two languages embodied her character’s journey.

“It was interesting to work out who Kat is when she speaks English and who she is when she speaks Gaelic. She’s created an English language identity on the mainland, working as a police officer, so when she returns and is using Gaelic, she’s much closer to the person she was when she left.”

Integral as the setting and the language are to the show, if you’re simply a fan of crime drama and love a good murder, An t-Eilean will have you hooked. Groundsell too has form in this genre, having appeared in Grantchester and Shetland, and enjoys it.

“I think crime drama always reveals very interesting things about the human psyche and condition. Even when the focus is very much on the plot and narrative, it exposes some fascinating stuff about the way we function as humans.

“If you’re a fan of crime thrillers you can sign up for that, and also in the experience have, whatever it is… Gaelic history and culture, Nordic history and culture… you can show up for the crime and get this other strand.”

Although this is the closest to home Groundsell has worked, she has filmed around mainland Scotland and was in BBC Scotland’s Shetland, as well as early on in her career working on Iona, a feature film with Douglas Henshall and Ruth Negga, shot on the eponymous island.

“That was my first real job and I thought maybe I’ll just get to go home and be an actor, and then things went a slightly different way. So there’s a nice full circle element to An t-Eilean.”

Groundsell’s parents too are happy she’s been working back in the islands.

“They live and work here and Gaelic is important to them as well even though they’re not speakers of it. My mum’s family are from South Uist and she lived there for a long time and would come back every summer and then my parents moved back and have a croft with Hebridean sheep, cows and chickens. They’re really proud for the islands and the Gaelic world that we’re getting this opportunity.”

Wildly different to An t-Eilean’s Kat, is Groundsell’s next role as Lady Isabella Mackenzie in Seaforth, a short Gaelic folk horror film written and directed by JM MacAulay. Based on an episode from the life of ‘Scotland's Nostradamus’, the Brahan Seer, it is due for release this year. Set in the Outer Hebrides, Groundsell plays the lead and is also producing.

“We’ve finished filming and are about to edit. It’s about the last prophecy of the Brahan Seer, Coinneach Odhar, and the punishment he received for it. It’s a fairly established folk tale, and his famous prophecies include the discovery of oil off the east coast, the spread of the railways across the Highlands, but this part of his story isn’t covered a lot. It’s a Gaelic language, historical, Gothic horror film, and my first time producing. It’s been a real labour of love for all of us and we’re very excited.”

“Lady Isabella Mackenzie was the wife of the Laird and had been somewhat abandoned by her husband so asked Coinneach Odhar to give her some clarity on what had happened, and in the course of this interaction he told her the truth, which it turns out she didn’t want to hear.”

Wearing two hats isn’t a problem for Groundsell who enjoys getting stuck into a project.

“I have a bit of a tendency to think I know best which lends itself to being a producer,” she laughs. “But I had never really pursued it until this project came along at the perfect time and it felt like a really natural fit into producing as well.

“I really loved it. I’ve never been one of those actors who just shows up and does the job and leaves. I worry how the whole thing operates so this was a really satisfying way of being proactive around some of the problem-solving elements involved and having some capacity to have input.”

While everyone involved in An t-Eilean waits to see if another season will be commissioned and Groundsell would be ‘thrilled’ if that were the case, in the meantime she holds to a Gaelic expression, ‘Cha d’thàinig traigh gun muir-làn na deigh’, which she tells me roughly translates as ‘the tide never comes in but that it goes back out again’.

“It’s sort of what goes up must come down, what goes round must come out. It’s a kind of philosophical way of saying, you know there will be ups and downs in life.”

But with the roof of the croft wind and water tight, Groundsell is in a very good place right now, content to see what comes.

An t-Eilean/The Island airs weekly at 9pm from Tuesday (14 January) on BBC ALBA and BBC iPlayer, with ep 2 on iPlayer from 10pm. Coming soon to BBC Four