Top-secret RAF station for sale: derelict Scottish site instrumental in the D-Day landings has planning permission to be converted into 26,000sq ft house

An abandoned military outpost precariously perched on one of the most dramatic scenic coastlines in the UK is for sale with potential to turn it into a spectacular modern home.

Gin Head, in North Berwick was founded as an Admiralty signals base in 1943 before being used as a research facility but it has been abandoned since the mid-Nineties.

The now-ruined building is on the market for £3.5 million and has been given planning permission to convert it into a brand new living space.

The property, in North Berwick, was once the top-secret home to scientists working on ways to disrupt German radar systems communicating between warships and U-boats during the Second World War.

Built on a five-acre site, its work included masterminding aluminium drops from RAF aircraft to jam German radar signals in an operation called “The Window”.

Most importantly, the boffins developed technology that tricked the German High Command into believing that the Allies were going to invade Calais, not Normandy, on D-Day, June 6, 1944, thus saving thousands of lives.

The site was built to withstand bombing, but the Germans never realised that work so devastating to their wartime efforts was going on there so it was spared attack.

The station was decommissioned in the Fifties, but continued as a research post until the Nineties when it was abandoned and the buildings, though still standing, are quite derelict.

An anonymous buyer commissioned Italian architects Lazzarini Pickering Architetti to design a 10-bedroom, 26,000sq ft home comprising two vast villas linked by covered walkways and for which planning permission has been granted.

The new design is described as an awe-inspiring building of grand spaces, expansive staircases, magnificent reception rooms, massive skylights over a huge swimming pool and enormous sheets of glass overlooking internal courtyards.

Once complete, the house will offer spectacular views of the ruined 14th-century Tantallon castle, 300 yards away across the North Sea, once the seat of the Douglas Earls of Angus, one of the most powerful families in Scotland.

Besieged by King James IV in 1491, James V in 1528, during the First Bishops' War in 1639, and Oliver Cromwell's invasion of Scotland in 1651, it’s not surprising that the castle suffered severe damage over the centuries.

Bass Rock island, just over a mile away, is a World Nature Reserve bird sanctuary and is home to 150,000 gannets, the largest island colony on the planet. Naturalists have called it one of the wildlife wonders of the world.

Inland, the spectacular views continue with the 600ft North Berwick Law, an extinct volcano more famous for its huge whale’s jawbone, which stood on the site from 1709 until a replica was installed in 2008.

North Berwick station offers regular services to King’s Cross, via Edinburgh, that take about five hours and 20 minutes.

Edinburgh is just 30 miles away, from where flights to London airports take around an hour.

Gin Head is for sale with a guide price of £3.5million through Domus Nova.