Nick Harding discovers four fabulous experiences around the east of Scotland
There’s a lot more happening on Scotland’s east side than you’d think. Take a tour and you can investigate Scotland’s Secret Bunker, taste gin near Glamis Castle, reminisce about the vehicles of yesteryear at the Grampian Transport Museum, and even spend some time behind bars at Peterhead Prison Museum.
That’s quite some 'fab four', but it certainly gives an insight into the variety on offer as you tour the Dundee-Aberdeen area, where there is also a good choice of Club campsites.
Scotland’s Secret Bunker
When travelling up from England, as we were, Scotland’s Secret Bunker makes for an ideal first stop. Luckily it’s not so secret, as it’s well signposted from afar nowadays. There is also an extensive parking area that can accommodate car/caravan outfits and most sizes of motorhomes. What looks like, at ground level, an unassuming farmhouse building (today, the reception and gift shop), hides a vast, sprawling, concrete-encased labyrinth some 100ft below – comprising everything from a radar room to a broadcasting studio, dormitories, and even a chapel. Plus what was the officers’ mess canteen is now a café. Scotland’s Secret Bunker was a fully staffed listening post aiming to pick up any signs of a nuclear attack – from Russia in particular – during World War II and beyond, and an absolute eye-opener to the many surveillance techniques of the day.
The Bothy Experience
Whisky may be Scotland’s favourite spirit, but our touring route was taking us somewhere different, literally spiritually – the Gin Bothy Experience at Glamis (pronounced ‘glahms’). You can buy any of the company’s gins, jams and other local produce at the shop here, and you can also have a full tasting experience at any of the two dedicated rooms, all part of an attractive complex that includes traditional buildings housing local history displays.
This means, like us, you’ll learn that raspberry gin liqueur goes particularly well with mint and lemon soda or prosecco/champagne, or just poured neat over ice cream! Rhubarb gin is great neat on ice, or with an apple garnish. Their award-winning gin ‘Gunshot’, which is also the company’s best-selling product, is deliberately meant to look like a whisky, but with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and spice flavourings and goes particularly well with ginger ale.
Don’t worry if you’re driving and not partaking – you get a wee ‘driver’s pack’ to take away.
Grampian Transport Museum
Driving is very much the theme at our next stop, the Grampian Transport Museum, where you’ll find a Bedford Romany motorhome among the cars, commercial vehicles, motorbikes and pedal cycles, most of which have links to the local area. Vehicles range from a Mack 6x6 snow plough to a Rover SD1, as used by Grampian Police, to an Albion A3 fire engine and an Aberdeen horse-drawn tram.
Peterhead Prison Museum
Most northerly of our quartet of attractions is the Peterhead Prison Museum. Set on the coast looking out onto the North Sea, the former prison was nicknamed both ‘The Hate Factory’ and ‘Alcatraz of Scotland’ and housed some of Scotland’s most notorious criminals.
It closed in 2013 but reopened as a museum just three years later. As you walk around you can see the cells, the laundry, the hospital, the games room and officers’ quarters as they were as well as get a good insight into prison conditions and the regular fights, protests and punishments that took place – for instance, the riots of 1987 where prison officer Jackie Stuart was held hostage on the roof for five days, before being rescued by the SAS.
Amazingly, considering he was beaten and threatened with being set alight, within weeks of his dramatic rescue he was back at work full-time and, even when he retired he came back to help with setting up the museum.
Stay at: Forfar Lochside, Silverbank, Stonehaven Queen Elizabeth Park Club Campsites, Huntly Castle AS
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