Open Secret
Far from its days as a hidden nuclear command post, this Cold War bunker is a top tourist draw
FROM the outside, it looks like any of the other unassuming farms scattered across the East Neuk. But then, that’s the whole point. For 30 metres (100 feet) beneath the farmhouse at Troywood, near Anstruther, is the Cold War bunker where Scotland’s top brass would have run what was left of the country in the event of a nuclear war.
It contained everything officials and military chiefs believed they needed in order to safeguard and provide for the surviving civilian population.
Incredibly, it was still operational until the early 1990s, when the end of the Cold War rendered it obsolete.
In the three decades since it was decommissioned, it has been transformed from one of the Fife countryside’s best-kept secrets to one of Scotland’s most popular – and unusual – tourist attractions.
Before it was reborn as Scotland’s Secret Bunker
– now a Visitscotland four-star museum – the site was known to a select few as RAF Troywood.
It was constructed in the early 1950s in response to the very real threat of a nuclear war with the USSR.
Initially it operated as a radar station and listening post, one of a chain of so-called Rotor stations which sprang up along the coastline after the Second World War.
These were built to a standard plan with an entrance “bungalow” above, although Troywood was given a number of distinct touches to help it blend in with its East Neuk surroundings, including the red roof tiles common to the surrounding fishing villages.
The station’s original purpose was to detect Russian bombers and alert RAF crews to intercept them.
Its location, on a low hill overlooking the gentle slope of farmland towards the North Sea, gave it the perfect vantage point.
By the end of the 1950s it was no longer needed as a listening station and it briefly became a headquarters for the regional civil defence corps, who were again focused on the response to a potential nuclear strike.
“For those who lived through the Cold War, been” it’s an insight into what might have
Its function stepped up a gear in the 1970s when it was designated a regional nuclear command control centre and the bunker was expanded to the size of two football pitches, one on top of the other.
Had the bomb dropped, ministers of state, the health secretary, members of the emergency services, MPS, council officials and senior figures in the military would all have come here to live and work.
Beneath “the farmhouse” and lying beyond the three-tonne, hermetically-sealed blast-proof door, leading on to a 45-metre (150 feet) long tunnel, there were six dormitories, with space for 300 people, plus the secretary of state’s own suite and separate living quarters for senior staff.
In addition to the command centre, radar room and armoury, it boasted a chapel, which had its own resident clergy throughout the Cold War.
There was even a broadcasting studio, where BBC staff would have transmitted emergency broadcasts.
It’s thought the bunker residents would have had sufficient provisions – a tasty feast of Spam, beans and Smash – to survive underground for several months.
Nowadays, two cinemas show archive footage from Hiroshima, in Japan, and a CND room details efforts by the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to rid Scotland of the Trident missile system.
But much of the museum is as the RAF left it in the 1990s and its former uses are brought back to life through a collection of displays – featuring weapons, original documents and military vehicles.
It’s a fascinating, if at times sobering, experience for visitors of all ages. And for those who lived through the Cold War and the threat of nuclear devastation, it provides a chilling insight into what might have been. Wheelchairs are available on each floor, though there are no lifts – visitors will have to be able to manage the 16 stairs between the reception area and the entrance to the bunker itself.