The Gunholes

The Gunholes sit just outside Dunbar as a proper slice of Scottish coastal defence history - basically a series of gun emplacements carved into the clifftop, dating back to when the English and Scots were constantly bickering over this bit of coastline. It's not glamorous. There are no visitor facilities, no interpretation boards, no gift shop. What you get instead is the raw thing itself: holes in the rock where cannons once stood, commanding views out over the North Sea that explain immediately why anyone would bother putting guns here in the first place.

The walk to reach them takes about fifteen minutes from the car park at Dunbar harbour, and honestly it's the walk that makes it worthwhile. The coastal path proper is lovely, with red sandstone cliffs and rough grassland, and kids often find the whole exploring-old-fortifications thing more interesting than yet another manicured heritage site. If you're staying at Belhaven Bay Caravan Park just down the coast, it's an easy leg-stretch that won't eat your afternoon.

Worth going out of your way for? Probably not in isolation. But if you're in Dunbar anyway - and there are worse towns to base yourself in - it's a solid twenty-minute diversion that actually teaches you something about the landscape without any fuss. Go on a clear day when you can actually see something from those gun positions. In the rain and mist, it's just damp rocks.