The ‘radioactive’ and award-winning Scots town minutes away from Edinburgh

It’s finally the summer holidays in Scotland, and although the weather is not great, at least it is still warm. Day trips north of the border are a good and cheap way to keep the kids happy, or for tourists they can explore a hidden part of the country.

Dalgety Bay in Fife is just nine miles away from Edinburgh, meaning it will take you mere minutes to travel there if driving from the capital, or there are regular trains from the train station as well. And it has a weird history of being the most “radioactive” town in the entire United Kingdom.

It has also won repeated awards for being one of the Best Kept Small Towns, with residents there getting to enjoy a beautiful coastline and also a huge amount of green space. It is a relatively new settlement, dating from the 1960s and was the first private enterprise new town.

There are a number of historically important buildings including St Bridget’s, a distinctive former parish church, as well as several notable towers and mansions. The most unique are the romantic old castle of Fordell and Donibristie which is the former seat of the Earls of Moray and has a old ballad written about it.

READ MORE: The ‘hidden’ Edinburgh tourist attraction that’s just been named the best in Britain

In 1592, James Stewart, 2nd Earl of Moray, was murdered on the seashore by his rival George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly, with this incident remembered in the popular song The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray. It used to be a base for the Royal Air Force and was the site of a major aircraft repair yard.

Much of the industrial estate on the north of the town is built on the runway of the airfield, with small sections of it still visible. The tennis courts are based on the concrete floor of a hanger where aircraft used to be repaired.

It was the links to the planes which caused a radioactive hotspot in Fife, which took more than three decades to fix. The stretch of coastline at Dalgety Bay has been contaminated with radium from scrapped World War Two aircraft, which meant that people were banned from accessing it between 2011 and 2023.

The radioactive particles were believed to have come from radium-coated glow-in-dark components in World War Two aircraft that were incinerated and dumped on the bay, with thousands of them being found there since 1990. They only pose a low risk to public health.

Prof Paul Dale, unit manager of Sepa’s radioactive substances team, said : “The completion of this work is significant for Dalgety Bay and for Scotland’s environment. Sepa have been clear in our requirements that remediation would be done once, and it would be done right – providing a permanent and positive resolution for the communities who lived with the environmental legacy of Second World War radium contamination for several decades. ”

Dalgety Bay is a commuter town, with many of the residents working in Edinburgh and travelling to and from the city, with house prices relatively normal in the town compared to the capital.

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