Scotland Travels: Falkland & St. Andrews

I ended my last post with hope of a brighter day, and here it is! It's hard to believe that the day before this I was on a boat under this bridge in the wettest, coldest weather in memory! Today we headed north across the Firth of Forth to St. Andrews, a place I was keen to go because its university is where John Napier attended St. Salvatore's College. We stopped at Falkland on the way, since it has a castle that is contemporary with Napier.

The New Forth Road Bridge

First stop - Falkland. This town seems untouched since the 16th century, and part of why this is the case is that it does not have a railway station, and it is not close enough to Edinburgh or Glasgow to be a commuter village. This is another one of those places that would have been very hard for me to get to without someone to drive me, as I had on this visit.

The castle was closed, as many are right now. The next six pictures are of the outside of Falkland Castle.

It was time for a snack, and part of that included and amazingly delicious slice of chocolate orange cake.

So, SO good!

As I mentioned, this village seems almost untouched since the 16th century (or, OK, the early 17th if we consider the plaque below). Many buildings had such plaques praising God and thanking the king.

Many such plaques involve scripture: "Contentment is great riches." (from 1 Timothy 6:6)

And then we were on our way to St. Andrews. I paid particular attention to the countryside, trying to get a sense of what it may have been like in Napier's time.

First site in town - the obligatory pass by the golf course, considered to be where golf was invented - although I did hear a rumor in Edinburgh that it might first have been played on Bruntsfield in Edinburgh. But St. Andrews is hailed around the world as the site of the intention of golf, so I'm not going to argue. Our interests were elsewhere, so we just drove by and snapped a photo.

The university is what drew us here.

The university in general, and St. Salvatore's College in particular is what drew us/me to St. Andrews. Fun fact, not only is this where John Napier began his university education, but it's also where Prince William and Catherine Middleton, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, first met. They were students here together.

Views of the quad -

St. Salvatore's Chapel - which dates to Napier's time -

Just outside the entrance to St. Salvatore's you can see the initials P. H. This is the site where Patrick Hamilton, the first Protestant martyr in Scotland, was burned at the stake in 1528 at the age of 24. (The students consider it bad luck to step on his initials - the curse being that you will fail your exams if you do.)

Our next stop was to be the castle, but since we didn't book ahead, we couldn't get in (one COVID precaution being a restriction on the number of people in a location at a given time). So we headed on to Wardlaw Museum, a museum affiliated with the university. There was a wonderful display involving Napier.

Napier's Bones (aka Napier's Rods), one of John Napier's devices for speeding up calculation, something that was used for centuries. A hundred years after Napier invented them, Sir Isaac Newton was using them, and he recommended them to others as an excellent labor-saving device. I've seen sets of these in many displays, but I've never seen one with a cube-root rod included. This is the triple-width rod on the far right. Napier's Bones can be used to multiple, divide, take square roots and take cube roots, and it has such a simple design - is basically nothing more than a multiplication table that has been split up. While here we had a very interesting encounter with a young lady who worked at the museum. When we first entered we asked her whether there was any Napier information inside. She told us there was and how to find it. She then added that her grandfather had been a maths teacher and had taught her to do her math using Napier's Rods! He had also raised her on stories of Napier's reputation as a sorcerer, and she welcomed us to ask any questions we had once we had finished our time in the museum. What a cool encounter!!!

Atop the museum was a viewing terrace, and so we took some time to look out over the North Sea.

There was also a sun dial on the viewing terrace. The inscription reads: "Neither can the wave that has passed by be recalled nor the hour which has passed return again."

St. Andrews castle is pictured below.

And the next two pictures are of the ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral. It was hard to get the full length of the structure in my photo. It's hard to estimate size (at least for me) from a ruin, but it seems to me that this is similar in size to London's Westminster Abbey.

And then on to the famous St. Andrews Pier -

On certain occasions the students at St. Andrews don their famous red gowns and walk through the town, to the end of the pier and back. I had initially read that this was in memory of a time during the Scottish Reformation when Protestant clergy came by sea to hold services and that the townspeople would walk out to escort them safely into town. I can no longer remember where I read that, nor can I find it again. During our visit what came up most in relation to the tradition of the pier walk is that on January 3, 1800 a ship with 5 men on board was sinking and that news of this came to the students at St. Salvatore's and that one student, 19-year-old John Honey, swam to the boat to save the men who were too tired to be able to save themselves. He swam out and back 5 times, saving each one of the men. John Honey's health was never fully recovered, and he died at the age of 32 due to ongoing health issues (the mast of the ship having broken and having fallen on his chest the last time he swam out). Most of what I read states that the pier walk is in honor of him.

And the end of the pier -

And looking back toward the town (with the cathedral and castle visible) -

Interesting shoreline - cathedral on left - castle on far right -

Back in town we came across Holy Trinity Church, which also has a long history. John Knox first preached here in 1547, and from November 1559 to April 1560 he was minister here. According to the signage out back, "In 1559, his sermon in favour of reforming what he saw as a dissolute and corrupt church organisation caused his congregation to attack other ecclesiastical buildings and the look the Cathedral. His pulpit stood in the church until the late 1700s. It is now in St. Salvator's Chapel in North Street."