Bert FowlieFamily Butcher

Strichen is a village of a few hundred people in the flat farmland behind Fraserburgh, and it has a butcher good enough to have been named the best in Scotland three years running. Bert Fowlie opened the shop in 1955; his son Hebbie took it on in 1982, and now a fourth generation — grandchildren Donna, Gavin and Aaron — works the counter. They took Scottish Butcher's Shop of the Year in 2017, 2018 and 2019, and hold a World Championship Diamond for, of all things, a macaroni pie — the north-east's own oddity, done better than anyone else's. That a village this size sustains a butcher this good says something true about rural Aberdeenshire: that the trade runs deep here, and that a family willing to keep at it for seventy years can build something a city would envy. Worth the drive off the Fraserburgh road.