St. Andrews: The Haunted Town

For five centuries, St. Andrews has been a place of ruins. Approach the town from what way you will, the look of a skeleton meets you. The vast gaunt gables of the broken cathedral are the bones of a dead world; St. Rule’s Tower, shorn of its steeple, looks dourly toward the hollow wreck of the castle. Nothing but a small boat can enter the medieval harbour, choked with silt, and the high old houses that face upon the curving stone pier are tenantless. Yet though the old authority, spiritual and temporal, that ruled this city has been cast down, and the old ways of livelihood are extinct, life has never ceased to stir in the three streets that converge upon the stone corse of the cathedral and the innumerable human bones that crowd the graveyard round it. Whether you come by boat, or over the braes from Crail, or round Scoonie Hill from Largo, or by rail across the links that stretch along the shore to the Eden estuary, you see against the sky two other ancient Fife towers, still whole: the heavy square shape of Holy Trinity, the parish kirk, and the soaring strength of St. Salvator’s, surmounting the chapel of the oldest university in Scotland.