I first heard about St. Andrews when researching study abroad options when I was a student at Baylor. The pictures in the study abroad advertisement were a dream. They showed romantic coastlines, enchanting castles, mysterious skies, and a beautiful university campus. I knew I’d be paying this place a visit one day. So, for the second day trip from our home base of Dundee (see our first day trip here), we took the bus out to St. Andrews and spent the afternoon in this lovely town full of history, golf, and scholarship.
In our usual fashion, we spent the first hour walking around and getting a feel for the area as we hunted down our next meal. We found a great casual burger place (which I talk about below), and then we slowly made our way to our first attraction of the day, St. Andrews Castle. The ruins that remain at the castle site have been there since around the year 1200, and it has a stunning location right by the sea.
Well, apparently we shouldn’t have walked so slowly to the castle. We knew places in Europe closed early during the winter due to the off-season, but we didn’t realize that meant a 4pm closing time in St. Andrews. Of course, this was also one of the few places I didn’t research much ahead of time. We arrived at the ticket office around 3:15, just fifteen minutes before last entry was allowed. We still had forty-five minutes to look at the castle, so we bought a ticket and dove right into the introductory exhibit.
The exhibit provided a really solid background on the castle’s history, and it contained some of the more important parts of the ruins that could no longer be maintained outdoors.
The ruins itself were beautiful! You will hear me say this a lot in my Europe posts, but there is something very special about walking around ruins where people walked and important events happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago. You can still see the kitchen, dungeon, and the underground siege tunnel!
This is the tunnel underneath the castle that you can crawl through. One side of these tunnels was created by attackers in the mid-1500s, and the other side was created by the castle’s defense to intercept the attackers. Daniel went through the tunnel, but I was not comfortable crawling through such a small space!
The view of the sea from the castle isn’t too shabby either. 🙂
Unfortunately, the 4pm closing time meant we weren’t able to go inside the walls of the St. Andrews Cathedral, but we were able to catch a glimpse through the gates and the holes in the stone walls.
As you can tell in the picture below, it was VERY cold that day by the water, but it was so peaceful and beautiful.
After our walk by the sea, we walked through the University of St. Andrews. It’s a beautiful campus, as I’m sure you can imagine, but it was dark at that point, so I couldn’t get many good pictures. I did manage to capture a beautiful stained class window though!
Food
The burger place we tried in St. Andrews is called Blackhorn. It was difficult for us to find a low-priced meal option in St. Andrews, so I thought I’d draw attention to this one. It wasn’t fast food prices by any means, but it was the most reasonably priced place we could find, and it was still fantastic! We shared a chopped salad and an order of sweet potato fries, Daniel ordered a hot dog, and I got a cheeseburger. And we may or may not have split a lemon milkshake afterward…. The restaurant has a fun vibe that mostly catered to students, but there were plenty of adults enjoying lunch there as well.
{Our time in St. Andrews was part of a 2.5 month trip across Western Europe. Click here to check out all of my posts from this adventure!}
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