Top criminologist David Wilson loved his big birthday trip to Alcatraz

Channel 5 Killer Psychopaths presenter reveals his top holiday destinations.

I love coastlines and I’m sure a lot of that was because my childhood holidays were at the Scottish seaside.

They’d either be in Ayrshire or in the north of Scotland, particularly around Kinlochbervie. Unlike today there was so much freedom about childhood.

My parents were farmers and they’d basically open the doors during school holidays and tell me and my three big sisters to come back when we were hungry.

If people come and visit me now, there are two places I always take them.

One is Cambridge, which I have a real soft spot for as I spent a lot of my student life there. And the other is New Lanark. We farmed very close to there and it makes me very proud to come from that part of the world.

It’s a World Heritage Site and I just think that it’s an extraordinary place.

One of the things I find fascinating is that a lot of the political philosophy that dominated early Victorian Britain and even the United States emerged out of New Lanark.

My first big foreign destination was when I was the St Andrews Scholar of New York. I still regard the place with great affection and it has my favourite museum of all time in the Frick.

But I’ve got to admit that because of my line of work, my poor wife Anne has had to get used to a lot of our holidays involving visiting jails.

In fact, that even included our honeymoon!

We were in Thailand and went along to a prison in Phuket. And when we moved on to Hong Kong we visited the historic Stanley Prison.

More recently, on my 50th birthday, we went to San Francisco which of course meant a trip out to Alcatraz.

And when we were in Sydney we went to the Barracks where prisoners from the UK transported to Botany Bay would have first come ashore.

So, there have been a lot of penal vacationing or what Anne has come to know as “dark tourism”.

Nowadays if we need to escape to recharge the batteries, Anne and I go to a cottage we have in Brittany.

But we’re currently looking for a place in Wigtown which would take us right back to that childhood love of the coastline.

Scot David Wilson is one of Britain’s top criminologists. Brought up on a farm near Lanark, David went on to be a prison governor before moving into his current profession.

He’s Professor of Criminology at Birmingham City University and he has worked with a number of high-profile offenders, including Scots serial killer Dennis Nilsen. David is much in demand for TV work and he’s presenting Killer Psychopaths on Channel 5.