The oddly shaped ‘inch’ is surely the strangest of the Firth of Forth islands. Its abbey (the Abbey of the Inch of Saint Columba) was out of gratitude to a hermit who had offered him shelter during a stormy passage on the Forth. It consists...
The coast road north from Edinburgh to Saint Andrews and Tayside is for part of its route a series of links between small medieval fishing villages of similar appearance: St Monance, Pittenweem, Anstruther and, the most north-easterly, Crail. James VI called these royal burghs the...
In Walter Scott’s novel Rob Roy, Andrew Fairservice, the loquacious gardener, refers to the kingdom of Fife as ‘just like a great combined city – Sae mony royal boroughs yoken on end to end… Kirkcaldy, the sell o’t, is langer than ony town in England.’...
Words in stone network round the crown of the abbey tower read ‘King Robert the Bruce’. Here, before the high altar, the great hero of the medieval Wars of Independence is buried. Dunfermline’s Benedictine abbey dates from the 12th century but lettering such as that...
The importance of St Andrews in medieval Scottish history can be gauged from the rise and fall of its cathedral, the oldest in Scotland; it was begun in 1161 by Bishop Arnold, consecrated in the presence of Robert the Bruce in 1318, and effectively finished...