Return to St. Andrews (From Dundee)

Yesterday, I told you I’d probably explain today why I booked three nights in Dundee rather than two or none despite my guidebooks not listing much to see here. “Probably” is about to turn into “will” in the very next sentence. I booked an extra day because I wanted to visit St. Andrews.

Some of the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral
Some of the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral

“Then,” you might ask, “why didn’t you just go to St. Andrews and skip Dundee, dummy?”

I resent the “dummy” part, but that’s a valid question. I did it because getting to St. Andrews from Edinburgh, where I was before Dundee, would have required taking a train and then transferring onto a bus. I’m not sure, but I think it’s a regular urban-type bus. If so, accommodating my luggage might have been a struggle.

Getting from Edinburgh to Dundee, on the other hand, requires just a single intercity train ride. There’s a very frequent city-style bus from Dundee to St. Andrews that takes less than 45 minutes from the stop closest to my hotel in Dundee, and only about 35 minutes return, but to a stop a wee bit farther from my hotel. So visiting St. Andrews from Dundee is an easy day trip. (A drive from Dundee to St. Andrews would be faster, but the bus makes a lot of stops.)

This is not my first visit to St. Andrews on this trip to Scotland. In my premier post from Dundee, I explained that, before Dundee, I’d spent almost a week in Edinburgh with a couple of relatives. I didn’t document that time in this journal because it was family time, not tourism time.

More of the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral

I will, however, reveal one detail of that visit in Edinburgh. We took a day bus tour that included St. Andrews and two Fife fishing villages, I hadn’t planned on that tour when I booked my hotels and trains for this trip, so I thought today would be my first time in St. Andrews.

I thoroughly enjoyed St. Andrews during the first visit, despite it raining then. Our time there was too short. The bus tour allotted us only two and a half hours in St. Andrews. And that was at lunchtime. So we spent some of the time in a restaurant. (One must set priorities, mustn’t one?) Consequently, we didn’t see all there is to see in St. Andrews.

That, combined with the fact that I couldn’t find much else to do in Dundee, convinced me to go back to St. Andrews despite already having been there recently.

St. Andrews Cathedral

A small part of the cemetery surrounding St. Andrews Cathedral
A small part of the cemetery surrounding St. Andrews Cathedral

After debarking from the bus in St. Andrews, I ambled to St. Andrew’s Cathedral along some of the town’s delightful streets. We had been to the cathedral on that previous visit, but it’s romantically haunting and wanted to return.

For those who haven’t viewed it for themselves and haven’t seen pictures of it or heard about it, “cathedral” gives the wrong impression. It’s not one of those soaring old European cathedrals with grand, historical, and/or exquisite interiors. Which is not to say it never had such an interior. But today it has no interior at all. It’s ruins.

Large sections of the end walls are still intact, but there’s just a portion of one side wall standing. And, of course, there is no ceiling. It would truly be a mystical place if it had a ceiling with such sparse walls.

Based on the height of the end walls, the distance between them, and the mostly single-stone-high outline of the missing walls, I imagine St. Andrews Cathedral was a large, soaring edifice in its day. But I’m not competent at visualizing anything with such scant evidence. So I’m not sure.

A graveyard surrounds the cathedral ruins. I looked a some of the gravestones. Most of the ones I saw dated from the 19th century. But a few of the inscriptions I viewed were too eroded for me to read. They might be older. And there were some memorial stones (not always marking a grave) from the 20th and 21st centuries.

A portion of the St. Andrews coast as seen from close to the cathedral, with the fort in the background
A portion of the St. Andrews coast as seen from close to the cathedral, with the fort in the background

The first time I was at St. Andrews Cathedral a drizzle fell upon us. This morning was dry, but the sky was still gloomyThen again, gloom might be the ideal atmosphere for such a place. It would probably lose its haunting romance on a brilliantly sunny day. However, that observation might just be me trying to rationalize an appreciation of a dreary day because I have no power to alter it.

There is a small museum and a tower at the St. Andrews Cathedral that visitors can go into and climb for a fee. That is to say, they can do so when those structures aren’t closed for maintenance, as they were today and a few days ago during my first visit.

I feel quite guilty. I’m sure they closed the tower and museum only because I was there. I’m deeply sorry that my relatives had to suffer for my presence.

St. Andrews Castle

The front of St. Andrews Castle as see from the outside
The front of St. Andrews Castle as see from the outside

The walk from St. Andrew’s Cathedral to St. Andrews Castle is along a sidewalk atop a short cliff beside the rugged coast. The tide must have been out because grey-brown, ridged rocks by the shore were not submerged, but they had still-wet aquatic flora affixed to them.

Like the cathedral, the castle is ruins. There is a fee to go in, £8 for old codgers or £10 for normal adults. I don’t think you have to be a codger to get the concession rate, just old, but codgerhood probably helps.

That admission fee includes a small museum in a more modern building near the castle and an audio guide for use when walking around what would be the interior of the castle if the roof and walls were still there. Some portions of the walls still exist, but not a lot. And there’s no roof.

A view of a portion of the St. Andrews Castle wall ruins as seen from inside
A view of a portion of the St. Andrews Castle wall ruins as seen from inside

The museum provides brief information about the history of the castle. A castle was built on that site between 1189 and 1202, but it was razed in 1337 after being seized back and forth by England and Scotland a few times.

St. Andrews Castle was rebuilt in 1400, but it was severely damaged from 1546 to 1547 during a siege on it. It was rebuilt in the 1550s. That’s the St. Andrews Castle that doesn’t stand on the site today other than in ruins.

The audio guide provides several individually selectable, short segments. All of them, except the introduction and farewell segments, are allegedly narrated by a real-life 16th-century earl, James Hamilton, the second Earl of Arran. There were also some very brief cameo parts spoken by alleged contemporaries of the earl who also inhabited the castle.

I don’t know. I’m skeptical. I don’t think there were recording devices in the 16th century capable of capturing the high-quality audio provided by the audio guide. I think the narrator and his contemporaries were imposters.

Some of the St. Andrews coast as seen from in the castle
Some of the St. Andrews coast as seen from in the castle

Be that as it may, the Earl of Arran, or whoever he was, provided historical context for the castle of his era and told anecdotes about his life and the lives of others of his time, including his father, the first Earl of Arran.

Being built beside the sea, the castle also affords great views of the St. Andrews coast. It was well worth the visit to St. Andrews Castle, even if it wasn’t the real Earl of Arran.

After leaving the castle, I wandered around charming St. Andrews a bit before grabbing lunch. I stayed in the town for a while in the afternoon to do some more stuff there. Stay tuned for that.


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