Cathedrals and Golf Courses – Mapping the Historic Burgh of St Andrews

By Dr Bess Rhodes

Today, the Scottish seaside town of St Andrews is famous as the home of golf. Since at least the sixteenth century, residents have played on the links beside the burgh. Yet its story is far richer and more complex than the development and regulation of Scotland’s greatest sporting export.

In the early Middle Ages, the settlement (then known as Kilrymont) was a significant religious centre and a focus for pilgrimage, attracting visitors from as far away as Ireland to venerate relics associated with Jesus’s disciple Andrew. During the medieval period, the town emerged as Scotland’s religious capital and became dominated by a vast cathedral constructed between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. Its ecclesiastical importance also helped establish Scotland’s first university, founded by Bishop Henry Wardlaw in the early fifteenth century.

The sixteenth century brought profound change. In 1559, local citizens rejected Catholicism, drove out the archbishop, sacked the cathedral and established one of Scotland’s earliest Protestant communities. The upheavals of the Reformation left a lasting imprint on both the townscape and local economy.

Geddy, John, fl. 1571-1594. S Andre sive Andreapolis Scotiae Universitas Metropolitana - 1580

For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the burgh experienced decline, with significant areas becoming ruinous. However, the nineteenth century saw a period of reinvention as it developed into a coastal resort. Education and tourism became central to economic life, while fishing and industries such as spinning and golf-ball making (both for local use and export) also remained important.

The new historical map aims to reveal these layers of change in an accessible and engaging way. The project is led by Professor Margaret Connolly and a team of historians at the University of St Andrews, with significant support from local community organisations.

This will be only the second Historic Towns Trust map to depict a Scottish settlement. That feels particularly appropriate given the town’s long cartographic tradition: the earliest surviving map dates from around 1580, and successive generations have continued to record and reinterpret its landscape.

It is hoped that the Historic Towns Trust map will encourage a new generation to reflect on the complex evolution of this remarkable coastal community and consider how historic and modern geographies continue to shape one another.