Culross

Walk up from the Forth shore into Culross and three centuries fall away. This little royal burgh is the most complete surviving example of a Scottish town of the 1600s: cobbled wynds climbing between white-harled, red-pantiled houses, a mercat cross that has watched over the square for four hundred years, and at the centre the extraordinary ochre-coloured palace built in 1597 by the coal and salt magnate Sir George Bruce, its recreated period garden terraced behind. The National Trust for Scotland has spent decades quietly preserving it all, and film crews — Outlander most famously — keep arriving because nowhere else looks like this anymore.

A whole 17th-century town preserved intact, palace and all — one of the most editorially arresting villages in Britain and far less visited than its English equivalents.

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