Twenty years ago he was a post-punk percussionist, suffused with anger, furiously beating his drums in support of the miners and other victims of Thatcherism. Today, his originality untamed but matured, he lights up mountains, turns valleys into spiritual pilgrimages, and is one of the hottest figures on the Scottish arts scene.

Angus Farquhar, the man famous for extraordinary multi-sensory events such as Grand Central, The Secret Sign, The Path and the Beltane Fire Festival, is something of a maverick. A man, perhaps, it is dangerous to put labels on, just in case he were to take those labels and ignite them into a stupendous pyre. He is someone of whom the Scottish arts establishment is wary, if not jealous: consciously resentful of his ability to make money; subconsciously envious of his ability to dream up things outwith their imagination. And then make them happen.

In 2004, the mountains of Skye (Angus loves high places; is drawn to them like a moth to a flame) will be the canvas for his next outbreak of wizardry. He promises ''a journey into the night'' for thousands of members of the public, aided by extravagant lighting displays, the use of soul-stirring sound and shadows. Walking boots will be essential.

The site is not yet finalised; the details of the experience, one suspects, are still cooking in the back of Farquhar's brain. Yet already his organisation, NVA, has received its first substantial chunk of funding, in (pounds) 97,000 from the lottery in the form of Nesta, the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts.

Turning mountains into mysterious works of art does not come cheap, but it would be a foolish person who would bet against this latest project, as yet unnamed, being a rave success. In 2000 Farquhar turned a part of Glen Lyon into The Path, an evening in which sherpas from Nepal and Tibet led audiences for a two-hour walk among light and sound. Only 5000 tickets were available; by the end of the performances 10,000 could have been sold, so great was the interest.

For those lucky 5000, the sensation of space, freedom, beauty, and mystery is not easily forgotten. Farquhar is still amazed by people's reaction to the hills, and believes it articulates something which we cannot express. ''The land has an amazing pull. If you are born in a country with high places, this is in your soul. A lot of this knowledge hasn't been passed on into mainstream Scottish culture, but still exists in a kind of folk memory. It's about a sense of people and place, about articulating deeply held beliefs and feelings.''

Perhaps, ultimately, the appeal lies in finding peace. The contradiction of this does not escape the man who spent the 1980s being as noisy and in-yer-face as it is possible to be. His band, Test Department, was a group of angry young men, avowedly anti-Thatcher, who drummed for the miners, the printworkers at Wapping, and the ambulancemen. His genteel widowed mother, it is said, would put on dark glasses as she left her Edinburgh home to buy copies of NME with him on the front; and apologise to friends for his use of the f-word in concert.

''It was absolutely relentless, industrial percussion,'' says Farquhar, now 40. ''We did tours

in eastern Europe, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the like. I was listening to some tapes of a concert the other day and the intensity of the music was amazing. I guess I got it out of my system.''

He was born in Ellon, Aberdeenshire, and grew up on the gracious outskirts of Edinburgh. Seven generations of the Farquhar family had been at sea: Angus was the first son to stay on land. His father, who served in submarines during the war, worked in design and conservation. He died of a brain tumour when Angus was 16, a schoolboy at Edinburgh Academy.

''It was horrific,'' he says. ''The sense of loss in the family was massive. My late teenage life was fairly disrupted and disruptive. I was a bit lost. Mum and I are very similar in some ways; we fought tooth and nail. My mother's father was a brigadier in the Argylls; that's the forceful side of the family. The

Farquhar side is very gentle. I think I'm a mixture of the fiery and the laidback.''

He relished the amazing punk era in Edinburgh during the late 1970s: the Ramones, the Clash, the Rezillos. ''The energy was fantastic. It was the making of a generation. We were privileged to be there. That DIY

aesthetic is still the thing that NVA works by, though, ironically, now we are almost establishment. Our independence is still the reason we are quite successful.''

Farquhar did a degree in English and drama at Goldsmiths College, London, but it seems Test Department was his real tertiary education, shaping him for the unusual career to come. ''The thing was we rejected the rock scene. Other bands did the same venues, offered the same passive experience. We tried to set up our own venues, primarily industrial sites. We played Bankside before it became Tate Modern; we played in railway tunnels, railway stations,

factories. We set up something

special to give people a unique

experience.

''Because I was the only one who had been to university I was the one shoved into a suit, handed a briefcase, and told to go and persuade them to lend us their railway station, or whatever. I learned some negotiating skills.''

In 1989 he left the band and came back to Scotland, by his own admission skilled at working with and developing ideas with people ''who would never normally have worked with people like me''. He was a fixer. Therein lie the roots of wizardry. Inspired by the public folk festivals in Europe that he had witnessed touring with Test Department, he decided to try and relight the spark of folk energy in Scotland. He linked up with Hamish Henderson and started the Beltane Fire Festival from scratch. His boast is that it now attracts 10,000 people a year and has 200 people running it.

More complex and ambitious events followed, including a Celtic extravaganza of drums, sound, and light on Glasgow Green. By 1992 Test Department Productions had morphed into NVA and Farquhar's imagination was pushing as many boundaries as it came across. The Arts Council did not always approve. ''They gave us a lot of knockbacks in the first two or three years; but because we had done it ourselves for so long we coped.'' He still does.

For a while he tried art over the internet, splicing together live musical performances from three continents to create a Virtual World Orchestra. By 1997 he made a shift towards natural locations, using the land as part of his sensory art. When he did he was astonished by the strongly positive reaction from the public.

The Secret Sign was a mysterious twilight trek down Finnich Glen, a river gorge near Drymen. That gave the impetus for The Path, in Glen Lyon. Part of the appeal for the unreformed radical was taking audiences into more risky environments. Which brings a man with deeply unsafe instincts to the question of safety.

''I believe Britain is a deeply over-regulated country,'' he says. ''It is endemic. There are rafts and rafts of laws made every year, but never any repealed. That's the problem of never having a revolution - this layering and layering of the law over centuries. We're lucky in that we mostly have very safe lives. At the same time organising events we have to be realistic.''

So one of NVA's three key staff deals with health and safety regulations, providing a counterfoil to Farquhar as creative director. He says the great challenge with events such as the forthcoming one in Skye is to allow the audience to find their own creative experience, to take possession of the show. ''It becomes their history,'' he says. Central to the success of the event is a lack of crowds, a feeling of solitude. ''The safety regulations are fine, really. You do want it to be safe, but with the rawness of the experience. There is a difference between rawness and danger. Having the Everest sherpas there - people who can deal with situations 50 times more risky -

was a way of dealing with the notion of fear.''

Prior to The Path, he went to Nepal with the mountaineer Doug Scott, a visit he found ''utterly inspirational''. Mountains figure strongly in his domestic life as well. He is pulled by a liking for sport he calls obsessive. He runs or plays tennis every day. Whenever he can he heads for the Scottish Munroes, although, since he and his wife, Cardie, a special education teacher, had twin daughters five months ago these things are less easy.

Even the babies' names reflect high places: Ava Meru (A Tibetan peak) and Calla Suilven (a Munro). ''They can use Ava and Calla at school, save them getting teased,'' he says. He married Cardie - ''a wonderful, patient woman'' not long ago: a humanist wedding on a farm, though they had been together for 10 years.

Last January, Farquhar won a

Creative Scotland Award, enabling him to research pilgrimage places anywhere in the world. Already he has walked part of the Santiago de Compostello route; later he hopes to go to follow some ancient Islamic paths.

Before the event on Skye happens, however, there is another big project in Glasgow - The Hidden Gardens, an ambitious marriage of art and horticulture on a 5000 square metre site next to the Tramway Theatre. Farquhar has managed to conjure up (pounds) 1m worth of funding from the National Lottery Artists in Public Places Scheme, Glasgow City Council, and 25 other public and private funds.

He knows the selling power of an emotive title and mysticism. He has woven so many layers of meaning around the gardens they have taken on the resonance of a sacred space. ''In Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism, the idea of a garden has been a major metaphor for Paradise. It is powerful imagery, this yearning for something better,'' he says.

Through his work, he will continue to express that yearning; to articulate the unsaid pull of the soil. The experience of that sense of place, he says, does not happen enough in Scotland. Anyone can feel it, he says, as long as they are sensitive and do not trample, and for that reason gets angry at anti-English sentiment. He reserves his real scorn, however, for any big landlord who dares to say he owns a mountain. ''What ego can say: 'I own a mountain'? When we are on earth for only 70 years or so, when we are but a blip in history,'' he says. You sense that spiritual ownership of the hills, as offered by Farquhar, is a rather more pure, radical, and permanent thing.