Eastriggs, near Gretna, Scotland
During the First World War, HM Factory Gretna was briefly the largest munitions factory in the world, employing around 30,000 workers — many of them women, dubbed “Munitionettes” — to produce cordite explosive paste, nicknamed “devil’s porridge” by Arthur Conan Doyle after he visited and wrote about the dangerous, caustic mixture workers handled by hand.
The museum tells a genuinely underrepresented piece of WWI history: industrial home-front labor, and specifically women’s role in it, rather than the trench warfare most WWI museums focus on exclusively.
It sits in a quiet corner of Dumfries and Galloway most visitors drive straight past en route to Edinburgh or Glasgow — worth the detour for a genuinely different angle on a heavily covered period of history.
Sephari’s Discovery Curations collection has history-minded gifts worth browsing after a visit like this.