We spent last night at Rufflets, a small hotel outside of Saint Andrews much beloved of professional golfers who come to play at the famous "Old Course" in the city. It's house in an old mansion just outside of town.
Our room is in one of the two towers. If you look carefully at the picture, you can see John in the window.
The interior of the hotel, where I should have taken more pictures, was perfect. But the grounds definitely showed the effects of the summer drought. The grass had turned brown and many of the perennials looked like they should be on horticultural life support. But the overall layout in different rooms, separated by walls or hedges, was still rather elegant.
After we had breakfast and checked out, we headed into Saint Andrews. As the guidebooks had warned, it was not easy to find a parking place. But after driving around a couple times I finally scored a spot and we set off to explore the old town on foot. It is a charming old university city, even on a cold gray day. As usual, John was better prepared for the weather than I was.
Our first stop was the remains of the old cathedral. While in some places in Scotland churches and abbeys were spared the vicious iconoclasm of John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, the great cathedral, the largest in Scotland, was sacked and burned by a mob and then allowed to completely fall into ruin. Very little is left now except a few walls.
Most of the stones of the building were taken away and reused as building material around the town. The empty site was then used as a graveyard.
Most of the graves date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Many of the people commemorated died quite young, and the graves are filled with lachrymose sentiments about the shortness of life and the hope of a better one in heaven. But There was one more modern one I found with a distinctly secular theme.
John and I left the cathedral to explore some of the campus of the university. Saint Andrews is, I believe, the oldest of the Scottish universities and for a long time was its most prestigious. In recent years, though, many Scottish students have preferred the livelier atmosphere of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and Saint Andrews had to work hard to attract students. It quite effectively marketed itself to American kids who wanted to have the experience of being at a British university. And then after Prince William went to Saint Andrews and met Kate Middleton there, well suddenly admission to Saint Andrews became very selective indeed.
John and I found a small museum devoted to the history of the of the university. We initially planned to just politely pretend to look at the exhibits so it was not too obvious we were really there to just use the bathroom. But we actually found the museum quite interesting and spent a fair amount of time there. Saint Andrews is famous for the red gowns that the undergraduates wear. This, it turns out, was initially about making sure that tavern keepers knew who was a student and would refuse to sell them alcohol. I rather doubt that was all that successful a strategy.
From the roof of the museum you can look across the water towards the gold course, traditionally considered the place where golf was invented. It looked like just a flat, bare field to me.
We walked back to the car. Along the way, we passed by Saint Salvator's College, the oldest of the residential colleges there.
From Saint Andrews we drove about an hour to Edinburgh. We have an early plane tomorrow for London, so I decided we would just stay at the airport Hilton. It is hardly Rufflets, but all I want is to get to the airport on time tomorrow. I did not want to drive into Edinburgh, so I left the car at the hotel and we took an Uber into the city to have dinner. I picked an interesting restaurant from one of the guidebooks, and discovered after we had been dropped off that it had not survived the draconian Scottish COVID lockdowns. We took another Uber over to Princes Street. In the gardens there, we saw a lovely floral display to commemorate the Jubilee.
Much less charming by far were the piles of trash everywhere. There is currently a garbage strike is Edinburgh and some other Scottish cities. The filth and stench in places were almost overwhelming. Even apart from that, I began to unfavorably compare Edinburgh to Glasgow. In Scotland's second city, it seemed like they had scrubbed every building of the layers of centuries of coal smoke. It glistened, at least in the nice sections where we were. But all the buildings in the historic center of Edinburgh were still coated with black soot which reinforced the sense of dirtiness.
Anyhow, tomorrow we are off to London!
