After years of neglect, we're reviving a forgotten Scottish resort

Telegraph

28-04-2025

If you find yourself on Scotland's west coast on a fine sunny day, take the ferry over the glittering Firth of Clyde to Dunoon. In a part of the country crammed with gripping sea lochs and bays, the 20-minute crossing is one of Britain's most underrated, with a wide-angle view of the Cowal Peninsula's thick forests, glens, low hills and towns you're enticed to run away to. And in the coming years, there'll be more reasons to do just that than ever – even if the outlook will have forever changed.
Within the next year, ground will be broken on Britain's newest year-round adventure destination, with a six-person cable car, visitor centre, panoramic mountain cafe, bike trails, Alpine coaster and zip line billed as Europe's most thrilling. Right now, the Argyll town is down on its luck, suffering from decades of a lack of investment. In the coming years, so it goes, it'll carry an air of renewed pride. Ask the locals and the buzzwords are 'reset' and 'revival'. Renaissance, even.
The idea for the multi-million-pound development was born eight years ago when community-based charity the Dunoon Project set about masterminding an ambitious scheme to put the town back on the map. 'The question we posed was: 'Why would you come here?'' said chairman Brendon Wallace, when I visited for a preview of the proposed site. 'The town has been crying out for investment for years, so we decided to think big.'
How big? Alongside the near-3km cable car and extra thrill of an adventure centre, the project is proposing a 50-bed hotel, base-station restaurant, outdoor-gear stores, climbing areas, bike shops and an equipment-hire centre. The hope, Wallace said, is to replicate the success of other destinations like Zip World at Penrhyn Quarry in Wales and the Peak District's Heights of Abraham. Already, 150,000 visitors are forecast to visit in the first year of opening, from spring 2028.
Dunoon has been an out-of-pocket place for as long as I've known it, even if it is history-soaked. In the town's mid-18th century heyday, Glaswegians sailed 'doon the watter' in Clyde steamers for holidays in Argyll and Ayrshire. Villas and wooden piers were built, hotels and boarding houses boomed. The result was Dunoon's unlikely flowering as a fashionable, Victorian-era resort.
But by the Sixties, competition from package holidays brought the Costa del Clyde era to a swift end. Billy Connolly, then of The Humblebums, even recorded the tongue-in-cheek ditty Why Don't They Come Back to Dunoon? in 1969. Then, something unexpected took hold.
At the height of the Cold War, and for three controversial decades, the United States Navy strategically used the sheltering waters of the Firth of Clyde's Holy Loch as a ballistic missile submarine base. Hundreds of officers and their families took up residence in Dunoon. Then, following the Soviet Union's collapse, the base closed in 1992 and, according to many locals, it never recovered. I grew up across the Clyde and even I remember the fallout.
'Ever since the Sixties, Dunoon has been on the slide – the Americans simply helped cushion our decline,' said former Dunoon hotelier Gavin Dick, now the Dunoon Project's voluntary director and manager of nearby Inveraray Jail. 'So, this is us as a community coming together, saying: 'There's no egg from a golden goose'. Anyone can see our high street is tired.'
All the same, locals will tell you Corlarach Forest and Black Craig, Dunoon's moor-topped mini Everest, are the most beautiful places to go, with a feeling of real escape. Fittingly, this is where the cable car and adventure resort will be developed and, as I climbed from the foot of Kilbride Hill, it was easy to see their point. The natural balcony above the Clyde and the island folds of Rothesay, Cumbrae and Arran beyond sparkled. To the east, the denuded hills of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs swaggered. The panorama felt like a closely-guarded secret. Bikers of all abilities will surely stop, braking to take it all in.
Interest in the project has also been triggered by the role of the Nevis Range as chief collaborator and co-partner. Already, the tourism operator's gondola transports some 250,000 visitors a year up Aonach Mòr outside Fort William and it has helped establish a mountain biking community to rival any in Britain. Indeed, later this month it is hosting the IXS European Cup, followed in July by the UK's National Downhill Championships.
While the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup isn't returning for the first time in 20 years, the sense is that Dunoon and Fort William can combine to offer a rare, multi-stop itinerary of enduro, cross-country and downhill biking. Four-time World Champion of the sport, Greg Minnaar, from South Africa, is also onboard to design the steepest, most technical descents.
'We live and breathe gondolas and mountain biking and we'd been looking for another project for a while,' Chris O'Brien, Nevis Range's managing director, told me prior to my site tour. 'This is the one with the most potential and the geography lends itself to that – the location is unbeatable. Our idea is to transform it into an attraction blending downhill madness with tracks that are suitable for all families and abilities.'
As far as I could see, accessibility and the infrastructure's green credentials are a part of this potential. With Dunoon accessible by train and ferry from Glasgow within around 90 minutes, there's no need to travel by car, and the gondola base station is to be built a short stroll from Dunoon Pier. The priority is to use the two ferry lines, Western Ferries and CalMac, to draw visitors into the overlooked town, rather than see the vessels continue to lure locals out.
Down at the harbour, I stopped at The Boat House cafe, encountering co-owners Helen and Wilson Blair. They moved to Dunoon 45 years ago and have seen the town's fortunes ebb and flow, all to the soundtrack of crying gulls and crashing waves. 'Dunoon has always been second best, but on a clear day it can be as lovely as any coastal town,' said Helen. 'There's long been a feeling we've needed something to reinvigorate the community,' Wilson added. 'Hopefully this is the spark.'
Along the esplanade, below the ruins of Dunoon Castle, I sat on the pebbled beach, taking in the lapping Clyde, watching paddle boarders and drinking in the full sea-to-summit spectacle. I boarded the ferry home, then looked back enviously towards the rippling hills. For a new adventure, in a forgotten part of Scotland, you couldn't ask for much more than this.