St Abbs & Eyemouth

Most people dive this coast from the shore. You park above St Abbs harbour, kit up beside the car, walk down and enter off the slipway, then swim out and drop into the gullies with no boat involved at all. Parking and access arrangements at the harbour have changed more than once, so it is worth checking locally before you load the car. Boat days are usually half-days: a hard boat or RIB out of Eyemouth runs two dives on the offshore reefs, with the skipper picking the ground by wind direction as much as by anything else.

The terrain is unusually well defined. Narrow gullies run seaward from the shore, cut with undercut walls, boulder chokes and the odd swim-through arch, and kelp covers every surface shallow enough to hold it. Inshore that makes navigation simple: follow a gully out and reverse it on the way back. The offshore carrs are a different dive — isolated reefs standing off the seabed, more exposed, with enough water movement across them to keep the growth thick and the fish holding on the up-current side.

The reserve rests on a code of conduct rather than a bylaw. Divers, skippers and local boats have worked to it since the 1980s, and the effect shows in how many large, slow-growing animals are still sitting where you find them, unbothered by the traffic. Spring brings lumpsuckers inshore, the males settling onto a clutch of eggs and guarding it for weeks. The shallow gullies stay worth diving after dark, so club groups run night dives straight off the harbour.

It suits UK club divers, photographers and anyone building cold-water hours, because shore access makes the diving cheap and repeatable and the sheltered gullies forgive a rusty first dive of the year. What it is not is dependable. This coast faces north and east, and swell from those quarters shuts it outright, so trips get planned on a forecast and abandoned on one. Arriving with flexible dates matters more than picking any particular week between April and October.