Kirkcaldy’s whalers now grow legendary, and strangers beholding her shipping to-day, may take for a northern joke that this ranks as the third Scottish port of entry; but the fact is that a whole string of Fife harbours are officially knotted together under its name, as all North America was once tacked on to the manor of Greenwich, and every British child born at sea belongs to the parish of Stepney. The coast-line here is thick-set with little towns of business and pleasure, grimy coal ports and odorous fishing havens, alternating with bathing beaches and golf-links in the openings of the low cliffs. At the western edge has now been taken in the old burgh Culross, pronounced in a manner that may strike strangers as curious. Not far from the Forth Bridge is the prettiest of Edinburgh seaside resorts, Aberdour, with its own ruins to show, and the remains of an abbey on Inchcolm that shuts in its bay, and behind it Lord Moray’s mansion of Donibristle, part of which stands a charred shell, burned down and rebuilt three times till its owner accepted what seemed a decree of fate. Opposite Edinburgh, Burntisland’s prosaic features make a setting for the castle of Rossend, with its romantic scandal about Queen Mary and Chastelard. Beyond Kirkcaldy come Leven and Largo, trying to grow together about the statue of Alexander Selkirk; and Largo House was home of a more ancient Fifeshire mariner, Andrew Wood, his “Yellow Frigate” a sore thorn in England’s side, as commemorated by a novel of James Grant, who wrote so many once-so-popular romances of war. Fife coast towns have a way of sorting themselves in couples. At the corner of the bay overlooked by Largo Law, Elie and Earlsferry flourish together as a family bathing place, behind which, at the pronunciation of Kilconquhar the uninitiated may take a thousand guesses in vain. Then we have Anstruther and Crail on Fifeness, that sharp point of the East Neuk of Fife. Round this, at the mouth of the Eden, we come to St. Andrews, “gem of the province.”
Everybody has heard of St. Andrews, but only those who have seen it understand its peculiar rank among seaside resorts. It is distinguished by a certain quiet air, like some high-born spinster’s, accustomed to command respect, whose heirlooms of lace and jewellery put her above any need of following the fashions. Her parvenu rivals must lay themselves out to attract, must make the best of their advantages, must ogle and flirt, and strain themselves to profit by the vogue of public favour. St. Andrews does not display so much as an esplanade, standing secure upon her sober dignity, a little dashed, indeed, of Saturday afternoons by excursions from Dundee. Other sea-side places may be said to flourish, but the word seems inappropriate in the case of this resort, that yet thrives sedately, as how should she not with so many strings to her bow? First of all she is a venerable University city, whose Mrs. Bouncers ought to make a good thing of it with the students and the sea-bathing visitors playing “Box and Cox” for them through the winter session and the summer season. Then she is a Scottish Clifton or Brighton of schools, recommended by the singular healthiness of the place. Unless in the smart new quarter near the railway station, the dignified bearing of an ancient town carries it over the flighty manners of a watering-place. The only pier is a thing of use, where the wholesome smell of seaweed mingles with a strong fishy flavour. No gilded pagoda of a bandstand profanes the “Scores,” that cliff road which your Margates would have made into a formal promenade. A few bathing machines on the sands alone hint at one side of the town’s character. In one of the rocky coves of the cliff is a Ladies’ bathing place, which I can praise only by report. But the Step Rock, with its recent enclosure to catch the tide, is now more than ever the best swimming place on the East Coast.
What first strikes one in St. Andrews is its union of regularity and picturesqueness, and of a cheerful well-to-do present with relics of a romantic past. Its airy thoroughfares, with their plain solidity of modern Scottish architecture, form an effective setting for bits of antiquity, such as the ivy-clad fragment of Blackfriars’ Chapel, and the Abbey wall, beneath which no professor cares to walk, lest then should be fulfilled a prophecy that it is one day to fall upon the wisest head in St. Andrews. The architectural treasures of this historic cathedral city would alone be enough to make it a place of pilgrimage. “You have here,” says Carlyle, “the essence of all the antiquity of Scotland in good and clean condition.” Southron strangers will hardly understand how these fragments of ecclesiasticism have become a nursery of Protestant sentiment. A generation ago it was stated that but one solitary Romanist could be found in the little city. Generations of Scottish children, like myself, have been shown that gloomy dungeon at the bottom of which once pined the victims of Giant Pope, a sight to fill us with shuddering horror and hate of persecuting times; but we were not told how Protestants could persecute, too, while they knew not yet of what spirit they were. What shades of grim romance haunt these crumbling walls, what memories of Knox and Beaton, what dreams of the old Stuart days! I never realised the power of their associations till one evening, on the Scores, there sat down beside me two French tourists who had somehow strayed into St. Andrews, and their light talk of boulevards, theatres, and such like, seemed sacrilegious under the shadow of the Martyrs’ Memorial.
I have an acquaintance with St. Andrews going back more than half a century. My introduction to club life was at the club here, then a cottage of two or three rooms, into which I was invited under charge of my nurse, and treated to the refreshment of gingerbread snaps by a member who seemed to me little short of a patriarch. In the scenery of my childhood, nothing stands out more clearly and cheerfully than those sandy green links dotted with red jackets and red flags, not to speak of the red balls with which enthusiasts bid defiance to snow and ice. Nay, another among my earliest reminiscences is of seeing the multitudinous seas themselves incarnadined, when, for once, the golfers allowed their attention to be drawn from their own hazards. A cry had been raised that a lady was drowning; then every group of red jackets within hearing forgot their balls, flung down their clubs, raced across the links, dashed into the waves, and struggled emulously to the rescue. I think a caddie, after all, was the fortunate youth who had the glory of achieving such an adventure.
Since those days, when feather balls cost half-a-crown and few profane foreigners had penetrated its mysteries, the Golf Club has been transformed in a style becoming the chief temple of this Benares, hard by a more modest “howff” for the “professionals” who are its Brahmins, where little “caddies” swarm like the monkeys of an Indian sanctuary. For golf is the idol of a cult that draws here many pilgrims from far lands, now that, in the international commerce of amusement, while barelegged little Macs take kindly to cricket, the time-honoured Caledonian game spreads fast and far over England, over the world, indeed, for on dusty Indian maidans good Scotsmen can be seen trying to play the rounds of Zion in that strange land, and under the very Pyramids a golf course is laid out, where the dust of Pharaohs may serve as a tee, or a mummy pit prove the most provoking of bunkers. In the home of its birth this pastime flourishes more than ever. Parties are given for golf along with tea and tennis; schools begin to lay out their golf ground as well as their football field; and at St. Andrews we have the Ladies’ Links, where many a masculine heart has been gently spooned or putted into the hole of matrimony. Fair damsels may even be seen lifting and driving in a “foursome,” an innovation frowned at by some old stagers, who hardly care to talk about the game till it is ended, and then can talk of nothing else. “Tee, veniente die, tee, decedente—!” is the song of St. Andrews, which asks for no more absorbing joy than a round in the morning and a round in the evening. In the eyes of inveterate golfers, all prospects are poor beside those links that make the Mecca, the Monte Carlo, the Epsom of the royal game, so one is free to give up the surrounding country as not much contributing to the attractions of the place, many of whose visitors hardly care to stir beyond their beloved arena, unless for a Sunday afternoon walk along the shore as far as that curious freak of the elements known as the Spindle Rock.