The smoke rises from a barrel sealed with wet jute sacking at the foot of the town. Inside, on hooks, hang pairs of haddock that have been salted overnight and dried in the salt-laden air. After about an hour over hardwood chips, they will come out golden brown and warm and tasting like nothing else on earth. They are called Arbroath smokies, and since 2004 they have been a Protected Geographical Indication: by EU law, no smokie made outside an eight-kilometre radius of the Arbroath Town House can carry the name. This is a town that takes its small things seriously - the smokies, the abbey ruins on the High Street, the harbour wall - and lets the bigger things take care of themselves.
The technique came originally from Auchmithie, a clifftop village three miles north with a poor harbour, where it had probably arrived centuries before from Scandinavia. In the 1890s the smokers gave up on Auchmithie's difficult landings and moved to Arbroath proper. They settled in the harbour area still known as Fit o' the Toon - the foot of the town - where the trade became a cottage industry of small smokehouses. Walk the lanes around the harbour and you can read the signs that say when the next batch will be ready. Eat a smokie within minutes of it coming out of the barrel, with a knob of butter and brown bread, and you will understand why an entire town's identity hangs on smoked fish.
The other thing Arbroath is famous for happened here on the 6th of April 1320. Robert the Bruce had won at Bannockburn six years earlier, but the Pope had excommunicated him. Scotland's nobility gathered at Arbroath Abbey and drafted a letter, in Latin, addressed to Pope John XXII in Avignon. The most quoted passage still sounds like a thrown gauntlet: "as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule." The document was sent south, the original eventually lost. One contemporary copy survives, held in the care of the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. A modern copy is held in Arbroath Abbey itself. In the years that followed, the Pope, then France, then grudgingly England, accepted Scotland's independence.
On the 12th of September 1885, Arbroath Football Club hosted Aberdeen Bon Accord in the first round of the Scottish Cup. By the final whistle the score was 36-0, with another five goals disallowed. It remains the world record for the highest score in a senior football match. In another tie that same day, Dundee Harp beat Aberdeen Rovers 35-0. Arbroath, riding the wave, went on to beat Forfar Athletic 9-1 and Dundee East End 7-1 before losing to Hibernian in the fourth round. The club still plays at Gayfield Park, the stadium tucked so close to the sea that the high tide line is five metres from the pitch. In storms the spray comes over. The team is known as the Red Lichties, after the lamp that once burned in the harbour.
Northeast of the harbour, King's Drive runs along the coast until it dead-ends at a car park. From there a path climbs the clifftops, past the sea stack known as the Deil's Heid, four miles to Auchmithie. The sandstone here is layered red and grey, sculpted by the North Sea into stacks and arches. In the other direction, Western Cemetery hides one of Arbroath's most curious buildings: a Victorian mortuary chapel built from 1875 in an extravagant collision of architectural styles. It is open only one Saturday afternoon a month in summer. The mock-medieval "castle" up on the rise to the east is not a castle at all. It is a disused water tower from 1885, abandoned in 1905 when something better came along. Arbroath is full of such things: old jobs in stone, doing new ones.
Arbroath lies at 56.56°N, 2.59°W on the North Sea coast of Angus, 16 miles northeast of Dundee. From the air at 2,000-4,000 ft AGL, look for the harbour at the south end of town, the red sandstone abbey ruins inland at the head of High Street, and the railway line running parallel to the coast. Gayfield Park is the football stadium right on the seafront. Nearest airports: Dundee (EGPN) 14 nm southwest; Leuchars (EGQL) 18 nm southwest; Aberdeen (EGPD) 35 nm northeast. The A92 dual carriageway runs along the coast linking Arbroath to Dundee.