St Andrews Cathedral, Fife

St Andrews Cathedral, Fife, Scotland

Visited August 2017

There's been a religious building on this site in St Andrews since the 8th century. The Catholic cathedral itself was build in the 12th -14th centuries, but fell into ruin in the 16th century during the Reformation, after John Knox preached in the town against the Roman Catholic faith. The ruins are still magnificent, and free to enter (there's an entrance fee for the museum, which houses an amazing collection of carved stones from the Pictish onwards).

Most of the grounds outside the cathedral are given over to the graveyard, which has been in use for centuries. Most of the graves are from the 18th-19th centuries (the oldest are, of course, now housed in the museum), although a few older ones remain. A survey of the gravestones was carried out in 1978 and a scanned copy of the report can be found here: http://www.tafac.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/TAFAJ-Vol-4-15-St-Andrews-Cathedral-graveyard-survey-Proudfoot-Downham-Nickell.pdf

Among the gravestones are some splendid carvings - look out for what appears to be a skeleton in a hammock - and of course graves of some of golf's great and good of the 19th century.