In 1661 and 1662, Forfar killed its neighbours. Fifty-two people stood accused in the final round of the town's witch trials, and the woman whose name has come to stand for all of them — Helen Guthrie — was burned in a town that then held only about a thousand inhabitants. Today the local council holds memorial services for the victims, and the Meffan Museum on West High Street tells their story alongside Pictish stones and a canoe pulled out of Forfar Loch dating to the 11th century. The witch hunts are not what Forfar is remembered for elsewhere — that distinction belongs to a small pastry filled with steak, onion, and beef suet, known as the Forfar bridie. But the trials are the truer measure of a town that has spent most of its 800 years close to power, sometimes uncomfortably so.
Forfar sits in Strathmore, the long fertile valley that runs between Perth and the foothills of the Cairngorms, with Dundee 13 miles south and Glamis Castle — Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother's family seat, and the birthplace of Princess Margaret in 1930 — just five miles west. The Romans came first, building marching camps at Stracathro and beyond. The Picts followed, then the Kingdom of Scotland. During the First War of Scottish Independence, the English garrisoned Forfar Castle until Philip the Forester of Platane and a small band of friends climbed the walls with ladders one night, killed the garrison, and handed the place to Robert the Bruce. Bruce ordered the castle slighted — pulled down so no enemy could ever use it again — and rewarded Philip. By the Middle Ages, Forfar was already used to high politics. In 1230, on the market cross, a daughter of the leader of the Meic Uilleim — claimants to the Scottish throne descended from King Duncan II — had her brains dashed out while still an infant. The town learned early that royal succession could be settled in blood at its own doorstep.
The textile mills made the modern town. Don and Low — descended from William Don and Company, founded in the late 18th century — grew through mergers with A J Buist and Low Brothers of Dundee until, by the 1980s, the firm was the United Kingdom's largest polypropylene weaver. J & A Craik built linen and jute at the Manor Works from 1863, surviving until 1981. Where Dundee's jute industry collapsed between 1911 and 1951 — from 40 percent of the workforce to under 19 percent — Forfar's actually grew, from 20 percent to 24 percent. The town outlasted the city next door at its own trade. And along the way, the bridie became its calling card: a half-moon-shaped pastry of beef, onion, and suet that the local bakeries still produce by the thousand. There is a recipe in Maw Broon's Cookbook. There is also the better-known story of the "coo o Forfar" — the cow that drank a householder's tub of cooling beer at the doorstep, and was acquitted of theft by a baillie who ruled the drink had been taken as "deoch an doras," a stirrup cup, which it would be a breach of Scots hospitality to charge for.
On 7 March 1941, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth stood on Market Street with General Władysław Sikorski, taking the salute as Polish troops in exile marched past below Forfar Sheriff Court. A metal plaque on the wall there records the visit. The Polish 1st Corps had been stationed in Scotland to defend the east coast against possible German invasion; Forfar was one of their billets. The plaque is small and easy to miss, but it ties this market town in Strathmore to a war fought a thousand miles away by men who, in many cases, would never go home. The Black Watch — Scotland's senior Highland regiment — was granted the Freedom of Forfar in 1956, the same year the honour was extended to the Queen Mother herself. In April 2012, then-Prince Charles took the salute as the Black Watch paraded through Forfar to mark their return from a six-month tour in Afghanistan. Old patterns. New wars. The same High Street.
Forfar Golf Club, founded in 1871, lays claim to the fourth-oldest 18-hole course in the world and the first club whose course was 18 holes from the moment it opened. The original layout was designed by Tom Morris Senior, the patriarch of Scottish golf course architecture, and significantly altered in 1926 to recommendations from five-time Open champion James Braid — whose letter detailing the changes still hangs in the clubhouse. The club has hosted the Scottish PGA Championship twice, in 1932 and 1966. Beyond golf, Forfar Loch carries a sailing club and the remains of those 11th-century canoes; Strathmore Cricket Club has played at Lochside Park since 1873; Forfar Athletic, in the Scottish League Two, plays at Station Park. Joseph Wedderburn, born in Forfar in 1882, made his career building the modern algebra of finite fields. Kathryn Findlay, architect, came from here. So did Eilley Bowers, who emigrated as a teenager after converting to the LDS Church and became, for a brief Nevada moment, one of the richest women in the United States. The town keeps making people who go somewhere.
Forfar: 56.643°N, 2.890°W, in the Strathmore valley of Angus, 13 nm north of Dundee. The town sits just off the A90 dual carriageway, with Forfar Loch — easily visible from the air — on its western edge. Glamis Castle lies 5 nm to the southwest. Best viewed at 2,000–4,000 ft AGL. Nearest airport is Dundee (EGPN), 13 nm south; Aberdeen (EGPD) 40 nm northeast. The broad east-west sweep of Strathmore provides excellent visual navigation along the Sidlaw Hills foothills.