Discover St Andrews

Cathedral ruins, an ancient university and the Home of Golf

St Andrews stands on a headland on the Fife coast, facing the North Sea across St Andrews Bay. It grew up as Scotland's religious capital, its cathedral founded in 1160 and once the largest church in the country, until the 1559 Reformation left the building the roofless ruin visitors walk through today, free of charge, alongside the older St Rule's Tower and the ruined bishops' castle a short walk along The Scores. The University of St Andrews, founded 1410 to 1413, is Scotland's oldest and the third oldest in the English-speaking world, and it shapes the town as much as its history does: roughly a third of the population is staff or students in term time, and traditions such as the red-gowned Pier Walk and the dawn May Dip in the North Sea are genuinely still practised, not staged for visitors.

The other reason St Andrews is known worldwide sits at the western edge of the same small town. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, founded in 1754, governed the rules of golf globally until 2004, and the Old Course, bought by the town itself in 1894, remains the sport's most recognisable ground and the most frequent host of the Open Championship, which returns to St Andrews in July 2027. None of that history requires a golf club in hand to enjoy; the 1st and 18th fairways run along a public street, and the town's other sights, the harbour, the University museum, and West Sands beach toward the Eden Estuary, fill out a visit that goes well beyond either the ruins or the links alone.