We drove 1.5 hours out to Fife today, in order to visit the ruins of Saint Andrews cathedral and castle. We walked and drove past Saint Andrews University and the famous Saint Andrews Links.
To get to the castle and cathedral we walked through the university, which was neat! The Saint Andrews cathedral ruins were massive. To imagine these were built by hand in the medieval ages is just mind boggling. Look at how small we are in these pictures! The cathedral was built in the shape of a cross, and once originally housed the relics of Saint Andrew. Saint Margaret (remember Saint Margaret’s chapel in Edinburgh castle? Same lady!) commissioned a ferry system in order for pilgrims to get to the relics of Saint Andrew. This cathedral was the seat of the Catholic Church in Scotland during that time, before that it was on the isle of Iona.
In the ruins off to the left is the tower of Saint Rude. It’s folklore that he brought the relics to Scotland but historians agree it was mostly likely Saint Augustine. So the tower was built before the cathedral.
The castle of Saint Andrews was not as big as the cathedral but right on the North Sea. It is famous for the murder of cardinal Beaton. Boy, the bottle neck dungeon was something out of a nightmare! We so enjoyed felling the North Sea and throwing rocks in the water. It was a windy but beautiful day.
St. Andrews also has one of the rare Scottish Dominican friary ruins destroyed during the Reformation, but I didn’t get a picture of it sadly.
Again, we were charmed by the lovely historical Scotland institution staff. They were very kind and loved the baby.
On our way out we drove past the uber famous St. Andrews links- the birthplace of golf! Chris was very pleased but probably not as pleased as he was to check out al the cars on the drive up. The kids were champs in the car, listening to audiobooks the whole drive and Cosima slept some of the time. We packed our lunch per usual. We didn’t have to do much walking today- just 3 miles.