Arbroath
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-> Dundee and Angus
-> Angus coast
-> Arbroath
Since it was settled in the twelfth century, local fishermen have been landing their catches at ARBROATH, situated on the Angus coast where it starts to curve in from the North Sea towards the Firth of Tay, about fifteen miles northeast of Dundee. The town's most famous product is the Arbroath smokie - line-caught haddock, smoke-cured over smouldering oak chips, and still made here in a number of family-run smokehouses tucked in around the harbour. One of the most approachable and atmospheric is M&M Spink's tiny whitewashed premises at 10 Marketgate; chef and cookery writer Rick Stein described the fish here, warm from the smoke, as "a world-class delicacy".
By the late eighteenth century, chiefly due to its harbour, Arbroath had become a trading and manufacturing centre, famed for boot-making and sail-making (the Cutty Sark's sails were made here). The town's real glory days, however, came much earlier in the thirteenth century with the completion in 1233 of Arbroath Abbey (April-Sept daily 9.30am-6.30pm; Oct-March Mon-Wed & Sat 9.30am-4.30pm, Thurs 9.30am-12.30pm, Sun 2-4.30pm; HS; £2.50), whose rose-pink sandstone ruins, described by Dr Johnson as "fragments of magnificence", stand on Abbey Street. Founded in 1178 but not granted abbey status until 1285, it was the scene of one of the most significant events in Scotland's history when, on April 6, 1320, a group of Scottish barons drew up the Declaration of Arbroath, asking the Pope to reverse his excommunication of Robert the Bruce and recognize him as king of a Scottish nation independent from England. The wonderfully resonant language of the document still makes for a stirring expression of Scottish nationhood: "For so long as one hundred of us remain alive, we will never in any degree be subject to the dominion of the English, since it is not for glory, riches or honour that we do fight, but for freedom alone, which no honest man loses but with his life." It was duly despatched to Pope John XXII in Avignon, who in 1324 agreed to Robert's claim. A new visitors' centre at the Abbey Street entrance offers some in-depth background on these events and other aspects of the history of the building.
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