The ruins of Inchcolm Abbey, the most complete set of monastic buildings to survive in Scotland, stand on a small island in the Forth reached by boat from South Queensferry. David I founded the abbey after his brother King Alexander I was stranded here in a storm in 1123; it has a church, cloister, chapter house and refectory still standing round a grassy square, built up over roughly four centuries, and it survived the Reformation better than most Scottish abbeys, probably because an island was harder for reforming mobs to reach and wreck than a mainland town.
Grey seals haul out on the rocks nearby, and puffins and fulmars nest on the cliffs in early summer. Guns went up on the island in both world wars too, to defend the naval base at Rosyth and the Forth Bridge, and a tunnel dug by Royal Engineers in 1916 still runs under the hill at the eastern end, linking them to their magazine.
