Dundee and Angus

Things to do in Dundee and Angus

Twelve things, starting on the waterfront and working out into Angus. Everything below was checked on the operators' own sites in August 2026. Two notes: Verdant Works closes on Mondays and Tuesdays through the winter, and the Angus museums are free but keep short seasonal hours, so check the day of the week as well as the month.

1. V&A Dundee

The building alone is worth the trip: a cliff of layered concrete stepping out over the Tay, and the first Victoria and Albert museum anywhere outside London. Inside, the Scottish Design Galleries tell the story of design in Scotland from Pictish silver to video games, and the centrepiece is the Oak Room, Charles Rennie Mackintosh's tearoom interior reassembled here after decades in storage. Entry is free.

Practical: Open daily 10am to 5pm, free admission, with paid tickets for some exhibitions. The current headline show, Catwalk: The Art of the Fashion Show, runs until 17 January 2027 at £7 to £16 with £2 off for booking ahead, and members and children go free. 1 Riverside Esplanade, DD1 4EZ, a two-minute walk from the railway station. Checked August 2026.

2. Discovery Point and RRS Discovery

Moored in the dock beside the V&A, the ship Captain Scott took to Antarctica on the British National Antarctic Expedition of 1901 to 1904, built in Dundee and brought home in 1986. You go aboard and down into the mess deck and the wardroom, which is where the scale of what they did becomes real. The visitor centre alongside tells the expedition story and holds the Hope Cross, made in 1922 by Shackleton's Quest crewmates.

Practical: Open daily 9am to 5pm from 1 April to 31 October and 10am to 4pm from 1 November to 31 March, closed 24 to 26 and 31 December and 1 and 2 January. Adult off-peak £14, adult unlimited £17, child (5 to 16) from £8, family from £36, carers free. The Explore More joint ticket with Verdant Works is £26 adult and £10 child, which saves a pound against two off-peak passes and about six against two unlimited ones. Endurance in 3D, letting you see Shackleton's wreck up close, runs until 1 November 2026. Checked August 2026.

3. Verdant Works

A restored jute mill in the Blackness district, and the best industrial museum in Scotland. Dundee ran on jute: at its height the city processed most of the world's supply, and the mills employed tens of thousands of women. The machinery still runs, and the exhibition is built around the mill workers' own accounts rather than the mill owners'.

Practical: Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 11am to 5pm from 1 April to 31 October; from 1 November it is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, opening Wednesday to Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 11am to 5pm. Off-peak pass £13, unlimited £15, carers free, and the joint Explore More ticket with Discovery Point is the better buy if you are doing both. Weaving Our Story, marking 30 years since the museum opened, runs to 6 September 2026. Checked August 2026.

4. The McManus

Dundee's art gallery and museum, in a Gothic Revival pile on Albert Square, and free. It covers the city's history, natural history and art, and it is the kind of civic museum that a place builds when it is confident about itself.

Practical: Open Monday to Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 12.30pm to 4.30pm, last entry 15 minutes before closing, open every day except 24 to 26 December and 1 and 2 January. Free. Full wheelchair access to all public areas with a lift to all floors, wheelchairs available to borrow at reception, and two accessible parking bays at the rear. Checked August 2026.

5. Dundee Law

The hill in the middle of the city, 572 feet, with an observation point at the top that on a clear day gives you nearly 45 miles across the Tay to Fife, west to Perthshire and north to the Sidlaws. It is not a volcanic plug, whatever most guides say: Dundee City Council's own description is a volcanic sill, an underground sideways flow of lava forced through weaker rock 400 million years ago and left standing when the ice took the softer stuff away. There is a war memorial on the summit and a 300-metre railway tunnel from the 1820s driven through the eastern flank.

Practical: Free and open always, with recently refurbished paths and steps up the whole site. Our guide to the best views in Dundee has the other vantage points. Checked August 2026.

6. The waterfront, the Science Centre and the design city

Dundee is the UK's first UNESCO City of Design, and the waterfront is where that is being spent: a £1.6 billion, 240-hectare regeneration that has finished nine sites with four more under construction and five plots still empty, which is worth saying plainly rather than pretending it is done. Along it you get the V&A, Discovery, the station, and Dundee Science Centre at the Greenmarket, which is the hands-on option for children.

Practical: The Science Centre's exhibition zone is open daily 10am to 4pm with the last session starting at 1.30pm and visits allowing two and a half hours on the floor; the café and shop open from 9am. Book ahead. Prices are not published outside the booking system, so check when you book. Dundee Rep on Tay Square is the city's producing theatre and shares a building with Scottish Dance Theatre. Checked August 2026.

7. Broughty Ferry

Four miles east along the coast, and effectively Dundee's seaside: a Victorian suburb of villas and independent shops with a long sandy beach and a castle standing in the water at the end of it. Broughty Castle is one of Scotland's best preserved coastal fortresses, and the museum inside covers its role in coastal defence through both world wars along with the Orchar collection of Victorian Scottish art.

Practical: Broughty Castle Museum is free, open Wednesday to Saturday 10am to 4pm and Sunday 12.30pm to 4pm from April to 25 October, closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and closed entirely from 26 October to March. Last entry 15 minutes before closing. Checked August 2026.

8. Glamis Castle

Twelve miles north in Angus, the childhood home of the Queen Mother, the birthplace of Princess Margaret, and the setting Shakespeare gave Macbeth. It has more than 600 years of documented history and it looks exactly as a Scottish castle is supposed to look, which is not an accident: the turrets and the pink stone have been drawing visitors for two centuries.

Practical: The 2026 season reopens on 20 March, daily 10am to 5pm with last entry at 4.30pm. The castle tour is guided and runs on general admission rather than a booked slot: turn up between 10am and 4.15pm, check in at the Head of Stairs for the next tour, and note the last one leaves at 4.30pm. Tours take about 50 minutes. Castle tour with gardens and grounds £19.50 adult, £17 senior, £11 child (5 to 16), under-5s free, family £65; gardens and grounds only £9.50 adult. Between 25 June and 1 September 2026 those drop to £17.06, £14.88, £9.62 and £56.87 under the summer VAT scheme, so expect them back at the full rate after that. Parking is included in any pre-booked ticket. Checked August 2026.

9. Arbroath Abbey and the smokies

The red sandstone abbey where, in 1320, the Declaration of Arbroath was drawn up and sent to the Pope asserting Scottish independence, in language that still gets quoted. What survives is substantial, though at the moment you see it from the grounds: the west front, the south transept with its round window, and the abbot's house. In the town below, the Arbroath smokie is a haddock hot-smoked over hardwood in a barrel, and it holds Protected Geographical Indication status, so a smokie made anywhere else is not one.

Practical: Open daily 10am to 4.30pm from 1 April to 30 September, daily 10am to 4pm from 1 October to 5 January, and Wednesday to Sunday only, 10am to 4pm, from 6 January to 31 March, with a lunch closure from 12.30pm to 1.30pm and last entry 45 minutes before closing; closes at 2pm on 24 December and shuts on 25 and 26 December and 1 and 2 January. Adult £5.50, concession £4.50, child (7 to 15) £3.30, members free. Historic Environment Scotland states there is currently no visitor access to internal spaces of the abbey, the upper level of the visitor centre is closed, and the New Scriptorium opens only for events and workshops, so the grounds are what you get. There are only six parking spaces, so use the town car parks; the abbey is half a mile from Arbroath station. Checked August 2026.

10. The Signal Tower Museum and Seaton Cliffs

At the harbour end of Arbroath, the Signal Tower was built in 1813 as the shore station for the Bell Rock Lighthouse, eleven miles out at sea and the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world. It served the lighthouse until 1955 and became a museum in 1974, and it is free. Walk it off afterwards on the Seaton Cliffs, a Scottish Wildlife Trust reserve of red sandstone stacks, arches and nesting seabirds starting at the end of the promenade.

Practical: The museum is free, open Wednesday to Monday 10.30am to 4pm from 1 April to 31 October and Friday to Monday in winter, last admission 30 minutes before closing. The cliffs are 1.25 miles from the centre of Arbroath, reached on the footpath from Victoria Park esplanade. Every ANGUSalive museum is free, including the Meffan at Forfar and Montrose Museum. Checked August 2026.

11. The Angus coast

Between Arbroath and Montrose the coast is red cliff and empty sand, and almost nobody is on it. Lunan Bay is two miles of beach with a ruined castle above it and is one of the best in eastern Scotland. Auchmithie is the cliff-top village where the smokie was actually invented before the trade moved to Arbroath. And Montrose Basin is a tidal lagoon that fills every autumn with tens of thousands of pink-footed geese arriving from Iceland, with a Scottish Wildlife Trust visitor centre looking straight over it.

12. Kirriemuir and the Angus glens

Behind Forfar, five glens run north into the Cairngorms and they are the emptiest approach to those mountains there is. Glen Clova and Glen Doll are the best known, with Corrie Fee a national nature reserve of glacial corrie and rare alpine plants at the head of the glen. The gateway town is Kirriemuir, where J M Barrie was born in a weaver's cottage on Brechin Road, now in the care of the National Trust for Scotland, with a camera obscura above the town that he paid for. There is also a statue of Bon Scott of AC/DC in the square, which tells you something about Kirriemuir.

Where to eat

Broughty Ferry has the best of it. Forgan's is the busy, noisy, reliable one, Collinsons is where you go for a proper dinner, The Bell Tree covers the relaxed end and Bruach looks out over the Tay. In the city, Porters and The Flame Tree are both solid choices. Beyond those, Dundee's West End around Perth Road has the independents, the waterfront has the newer places, and in Angus you should eat a smokie in Arbroath, ideally straight out of the barrel at the harbour. If you run a place to eat in Dundee or Angus and want to be found here, get in touch.

Getting there and around

Dundee is easy. Trains run from Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth and Aberdeen, and the station is beside the V&A, which is about as convenient as Scottish railway geography gets. The A90 runs past the city north to Aberdeen and south to Perth, the Tay Road Bridge brings you up from Fife, and the Tay Rail Bridge carries the trains over the estuary on the line that replaced the one that fell down in 1879.

Within the city you will not need a car. The waterfront attractions are within ten minutes of each other, the McManus is five minutes further, and Broughty Ferry is a short train or bus ride. Angus is a different matter: Arbroath and Montrose are on the main line, but Glamis, the coast at Lunan Bay and the glens all want a car.

Drive times are approximate and for normal traffic.

When to visit

The city works all year, which is unusual in Scotland and comes down to how much of it is indoors and free. The V&A, the McManus and Discovery Point are open every day bar the festive closures, and a wet January afternoon in Dundee is a perfectly good afternoon. What does change is Angus: Broughty Castle closes from 26 October to March, Verdant Works drops Mondays and Tuesdays from November, Glamis shuts the castle at the end of October, and the Signal Tower goes down to four days a week.

May to September is when the coast and the glens are worth the drive, with the seabirds on the Seaton Cliffs in early summer and the beaches usable. October and November bring the pink-footed geese onto Montrose Basin in their tens of thousands, which is one of the great wildlife spectacles in eastern Scotland and happens exactly when everything else has shut.

Day trips and nearby

Fife and St Andrews is half an hour over the Tay Road Bridge, which makes the Old Course, the cathedral and the East Neuk villages an easy day. Perth and Perthshire is 25 minutes west for Scone Palace and the Hermitage. Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire is an hour and a quarter north up the A90, with Dunnottar on the way. And the Angus glens run straight into the Cairngorms at their heads, which makes Glen Clova the back door into the national park and one very few visitors use.