‘You don’t see the trauma until suddenly you do’: Lockerbie bombing’s lasting impact on a ‘normal little town’

Wreaths and flowers at the Lockerbie air disaster memorial in Dryfesdale cemetery. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

At the end of a row of tidy redbrick bungalows in the Scottish town of Lockerbie is an empty plot, carefully landscaped now as a memorial garden. Two red tartan ribbons, tied on a leafless branch perhaps in private remembrance, flutter in a wintry gust.

Eleven of the street’s residents died when the wing section of Pan Am 103 crashed into Sherwood Crescent with the force of a meteorite on 21 December 1988, gouging a 30ft crater on this spot. The impact was such that some bodies were never recovered.