The StarRock Shop

The Star Rock Shop has been selling sweets from the same corner of Kirriemuir since 1833, which makes it, by most reckonings, the oldest sweet shop in Scotland. It was founded by David Ferguson, a Brechin stonemason who lost his sight in an accident and turned to confectionery, and the star rock he made — a soft, pulled sugar stick — is still made to his recipe nearly two centuries later. The recipe is a genuine secret, passed by hand from one owner to the next; when Liz Crossley-Davies took the shop on in 2018 she was taught it as part of the deal, the same way every owner before her had been. That is the whole point of the place — not nostalgia for its own sake, but an unbroken line of people unwilling to be the one who let a hundred-and-ninety-year-old recipe die. Small, old, and still making the thing it was founded to make.