[3] One-half mile (800 metres) east lies the site of the former Royal Dundee Liff Hospital, now given over to private housing.

Just to the west of Liff Churchyard, on a 90-foot-high (27-metre) promontory[8] formed by the confluence of two burns, are the remains called Hurly Hawkin, now on private property.

This story originates with John of Fordun and Walter Bower who in Scotichronicon (1440–47) tell how Alexander I was given the lands of 'Lyff and Invergowry' at his baptism and began to build a palace 'at Lyff' after he became king.

[c] However, a ten-year archaeological investigation beginning in 1958 showed beyond doubt that the structures at Hurly Hawkin are far older than the time of Alexander.

[10] Early chroniclers and historians, including Boece, Holinshed, and George Buchanan, relate the story of a battle between Alpin, King of the Scots and Brudus, leader of the Picts.

The accounts are memorable because of a stratagem Brudus is said to have used, disguising camp followers and women as soldiers, mounting them on pack horses, and revealing them at a crucial phase of the battle to deceive his opponents into thinking they were facing a strengthened force.

The history of the adjacent parish of Fowlis shows that some land holdings in the area were as small as 13 or 14 acres (5.3 or 5.7 hectares).

Even in the remembrance of those now living have sixty-houses [sic] been pulled down, and their occupants forced to seek refuge in towns, a form of proceeding now happily at an end.

Rotation of crops was then on a seven-year cycle: oats; fallow; wheat; turnip and potatoes; barley; and two years of grass.

At this time there were a farrier and blacksmith, a joiner, wheelwright and undertaker, a cobbler and shoemaker, a stonemason, a publican, at least two shopkeepers, a doctor, medical, nursing and administrative staff at the nearby hospital, the minister and the schoolmasters, as well as all the farmworkers.

Mains electricity arrived just after the Second World War but the need to collect water in buckets from nearby wells and springs continued until 1961.

Thomas Constable, Minister of Liff from 1785 to 1817, wrote: The appearance of the surface [of the landscape] is in general highly pleasing.

[32] A little west of Liff at Balruddery, fragments of fossil fish and a huge 'lobster' (early Devonian eurypterid; around 410 m years ago) have been collected.

Liff village, however, was removed from Angus and incorporated into the City of Dundee by the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973.

Nearer to Liff is an unmanned rail halt, Invergowrie, on the Glasgow Queen Street to Dundee line.

[40] The school was moved to Liff around 1828 and the building of that date, designed by David Neave,[41] stands at the crossroads next to the schoolmaster's house.

With its sculpture of a horseman drinking from a curved horn and riding a weary horse uphill, this may have marked the grave of a Norseman of some distinction buried on the site of a Roman camp called Cater Milly, the old name of Bullion Farm[50] to the south-east of Liff near Invergowrie.

The Liff Church bell bears this inscription round the shoulder: IAN BVRGER HVIS HEEFT MY GEGOTEN ’96, i.e. 'Jan Burgerhuis has cast me, [15]96'.

[g] The church has an oak baptismal font with a brass plaque bearing the names of the nine men and one woman from Liff who died in the Second World War.

Also in the churchyard is the Watt-Webster Memorial (1809)[53] commemorating two local families, the Watts of Logie (now part of Dundee) and the Websters of Balruddery (west of Liff).

Outside the church, cut into the stone of the tower about 2 ft (60 cm) from the ground, is a bench mark formerly used by the Ordnance Survey when mapping heights above sea level.

One or other of these older churches had a lintel stone bearing the inscription 'The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob'.

McKean and Walker call it 'an excellent example of Scottish architecture in transition', noting its principal pedimented rectangular block flanked by ogee-capped stair-towers.

[62] In 1918 the Gray Estate was broken up and the house was sold to James Ogilvie, a Dundee mill owner, who occupied it until his death in 1936.

During the Second World War it was made available by James Ogilvie's son to house boys and girls evacuated from the Dundee Orphanage.

[63] Thereafter it was bought by Smedley's, a canned food company, who used part of it as a storage barn for soft fruit farming and the servant quarters as accommodation for workers.

[63] The Westgreen Asylum was a large mental health facility which moved to new premises, designed by the architects Edward and Robertson, in Liff in 1882.

Built in Scots eighteenth-century classical style and with a pedimented gable and an oculus, The Dower House[68] was begun in the 1750s as the intended residence of the dowager Lady Gray, who died before it was completed.

Children travelling to schools such as Harris Academy in Dundee would walk via Denhead of Gray to the station to catch a train into the city.

'Meg O'Lyff Or The Hags O' Hurly Hawkin' is a ballad of 292 lines in the style and metre of Robert Burns's 'Tam O'Shanter' written by an unknown local poet, perhaps around 1860.