This week marks the 70^th anniversary of one of the most famous - and infamous events in Strathaven's 20^th century history.

On 10^th May 1941, at 11.09pm, Nazi Stellvertreter or Deputy Reich Fuehrer Rudolf Hess crash landed his Messerchmidt BF110 on Scottish soil at Floors Farm, Eaglesham writes Bob Currie.

According to the flight plan which Hess later drew for his captors, he was actually flying towards Dungavel Lodge, Strathaven then the country seat of Scotland's premier Duke of Hamilton. As Commanding Officer at RAF Turnhouse, Edinburgh the Duke maintained a personal airfield at Dungavel Lodge.

Immediately upon capture Hess claimed to know the Duke of Hamilton and to have a message of some importance for him that rang all kinds of alarm bells in the mind of the British officer of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders sent from Giffnock to Eaglesham to guard the prisoner.

Hess told him that he had seen the Duke at the Berlin Olympics five years before and that they were mutual friends. Hess was duly transferred to Maryhill barracks in Glasgow for interrogation. He was subsequently incarcerated in the Tower of London and after the war faced his accusers in a trial for war crimes staged at Nuremberg where he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Berlin prison of Spandau where he died

The accepted view of the flight as a desperate lone mission to broker a peace deal with the British has always been viewed with suspicion, and the official explanation seen as ongoing political spin. The Duke of Hamilton is central to the Hess story. "What do you tell your wife," the Duke asked Churchill in May 1941, "if a prostitute throws her arms around your neck?" the prostitute of the Hess affair never quite left him, and despite Churchill's attempts, both in the House of Commons and the Press, to exonerate him, rumours never quite disappeared that Hamilton had been responsible for Hess's arrival.

After the passage of 70 years rumour and innuendo lingers on. For despite numerous investigative reports in books and journals to get to the real truth of the matter the story of the Hess landing continues to intrigue political historians.