Almondbank is a village in

Perth and Kinross Perth and Kinross ( sco, Pairth an Kinross; gd, Peairt agus Ceann Rois) is one of the 32 council areas of Scotland and a Lieutenancy Area. It borders onto the Aberdeenshire, Angus, Argyll and Bute, Clackmannanshire, Dundee, Fife, Highland and S ...

, Scotland, about northwest of

Perth Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia. It is the fourth most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of 2.1 million (80% of the state) living in Greater Perth in 2020. Perth is ...

. With the building of Royal Naval Aircraft Workshops, Almondbank grew significantly during and after the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

RNAS Almondbank

The establishment of Royal Naval Aircraft Workshops commenced in 1940. The station, a

stone frigate A stone frigate is a naval establishment on land. "Stone frigate" is an informal term that has its origin in Britain's Royal Navy after its use of Diamond Rock, an island off Martinique, as a ' sloop of war' to harass the French in 1803–04 ...

, was employed as a

RNAS The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) was the air arm of the Royal Navy, under the direction of the Admiralty's Air Department, and existed formally from 1 July 1914 to 1 April 1918, when it was merged with the British Army's Royal Flying Corps t ...

Aircraft Repair Yard and Stores Depot. The workshops had their own small railway branch line which was linked to the now-closed

Almondbank railway station Almondbank railway station served the village of Almondbank, in the Scottish county of Perth and Kinross. History Opened on 1 January 1858 by the Perth, Almond Valley and Methven Railway, later absorbed by the Caledonian Railway, it became p ...

StandardAero Facility

The

Defence Aviation Repair Agency The Defence Aviation Repair Agency, better known as DARA, was an executive agency of the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, responsible for the maintenance and repair of Royal Air Force, Army and the Royal Navy's aircraft. It became part of the ...

(DARA) site at Almondbank was a major employer in the community for many years providing essential support to the British Armed Forces. The Decision by the UK government in early 2008 to take the site (and its counterpart at Fleetlands,

Gosport Gosport ( ) is a town and non-metropolitan borough on the south coast of Hampshire, South East England. At the 2011 Census, its population was 82,662. Gosport is situated on a peninsula on the western side of Portsmouth Harbour, opposite t ...

) out of direct MOD control by doing a conditional sell-off to Canadian firm

Vector Aerospace Vector most often refers to: *Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction *Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematic ...

was a controversial one and there were concerns about the future of the site. In 2011, Vector Aerospace was taken over by

Eurocopter Airbus Helicopters SAS (formerly Eurocopter Group) is the helicopter manufacturing division of Airbus. It is the largest in the industry in terms of revenues and turbine helicopter deliveries. Its head office is located at Marseille Provence Ai ...

(now

Airbus Airbus SE (; ; ; ) is a European Multinational corporation, multinational aerospace corporation. Airbus designs, manufactures and sells civil and military aerospace manufacturer, aerospace products worldwide and manufactures aircraft througho ...

) who operated the Almondbank site for seven years. In 2018,

StandardAero StandardAero is a maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) provider based in Scottsdale, Arizona, US. The company is not related to Standard Aircraft Corporation, which was formed in 1916 and ceased operations in 1931 as New Standard Aircraft Com ...

Aviation Holdings, Inc. and

SE announced that they have finalized the acquisition by StandardAero of Vector Aerospace Holding SAS from Airbus.

School, church and community

The village of Almondbank is often seen as including the attached hamlets of Pitcairngreen and Lochty, and the wider area is sometimes called Almondvalley. There is one school serving the area, Pitcairn Primary, which opened in 1939 and replaced older schools. The school is located in the northernmost housing development of the village, sometimes referred to as Bridgeton, even although there is no signage in recognition of this and the area remains part of Almondbank itself (as opposed to Pitcairngreen and Lochty). Next to the school lies the only shop in the village and directly opposite this is the church, which is known as Almondbank/Tibbermore (St Serf's). Another area of the village is known as College Mill, which borders the River Almond, the river that gives the village its name and a housing development constructed in the 1990s at the southern end of the village was known for many years as "Bett Homes", named after the site developers. This area encompasses Admiralty Wood and MacKenzie Drive, the majority of houses in the latter being 'affordable homes'. Around the same time these houses were being built, a much smaller development in the Lochty area was built by the local construction firm, GS Brown. Almondbank is close to another Perthshire village, Methven.

References

{{authority control Villages in Perth and Kinross Sites of Special Scientific Interest in Scotland