The Birthplace of Golf

Well, if you know anything about the history of golf, you'll know just by reading the title that I visited St. Andrews this weekend.

What a day! Schuyler, Karrin, Taylor, and myself (from left to right), got on a bus at 9:40am - we missed the 8:40 bus bus by one minute - and were at St. Andrews a bit before noon. The place itself is a rather small town (don't think city) and was the first royal 'burgh' in all of Scotland. It also holds the fame of being, allegedly, the part of the coast where the ship carrying St. Andrew's bones from Greece ran ashore in its flight from the Mediterranean. Thus its name. The burgh now contains the ruins of a massive cathedral which is mostly overgrown and used as a graveyard, the ruins of a castle, a great golf course, and long swathes of misty shoreline that stretch out on either end in long, dramatic curves. As I've said before, it's so rainy here that every inch of dirt is covered in some kind of greenery, and much of the hillside along the coast is covered in this wonderful windswept kind of tall grass. The normal grass isn't what we;re used to in the States, either - more of a naturally short, scrubby kind. Good for putting on, I'm sure.

The town itself is basically a trio of streets that begin set apart but slowly converge as they near the cathedral, dotted with cafes, shops, and flats. If you head the opposite direction from the cathedral, towards the golf course, a lot of pro shops start popping up everywhere. The cathedral itself was very interesting. We stopped there first. Only the front, back, and part of a side of the main hall still remain, so that the entire structure kind of looks like a broken bed frame with no mattress. At points along the ground within the ruins plaques lay, telling what would have stood there in the past (pulpit, nave, rooms, &c). It's pretty strange to saunter around a place where hundreds of people came together over the course of hundreds of years to pray, when all that remains is ruined. Large circular stone formations that stop just above ankle height were placed here and there, probably where great pillars had once stretched to the vaulted stone ceiling, and every so often I would see a long, low wall running fifty yards in one direction, with none of its original structure remaining besides. It felt very 'Tintern Abbey.'

After the cathedral grounds we moved on along a walkway by the shore that continued into a long sea-wall that formed the third wall of what once have must been a harbor. It's where the picture of us is taken above. The scenery was very natural there - long grassy coast arching away into the foggy distance. We met some people who go to Notre Dame in the States studying in London and chatted, then moved on. A lot of Americans in St. Andrews, studying and visiting both. The entire place feels very old, older in some respects than Edinburgh does to me. It also felt very 'Local Hero,' if anyone's seen that movie (I know you have, Pops).

From the pier we walked along the coast to the castle, where we walked around the ruins and took some pictures. The castle was mostly gone, but some large parts remained at the gate and towers. At some point the castle had been besieged and mined under by enemies attempting to blow up the walls from underneath with gunpowder, but a counter-mine was dug out by men from within the walls and the effort thwarted. The mine is still open today and we took a walk/crawl through it. Very creepy, in a way. Apparently John Knox, whose home I've seen in Edinburgh, lived at the castle for a time during the siege, and was sent to his death when the castle was conquered.

We followed our castle tour with some late lunch, and then took the golf course by storm, literally. I had made a promise to a friend, Mike Cascio, before leaving F&M that I would take a picture on the historic Swilken Bridge wearing our fraternity's letters, and now, come all this way, I wasn't about to pass it by! Lucky for me, the brodge is only about seventy feet from the sidewalk on the 18th hole, so it wasn't very hard to find. It wasn't exactly open for tours, either. So I looked around and saw two guys playing through, and thought "hm...if I were them, would I mind someone running on to the course like a madman to take a bridge on the bridge that pretty much lies in the middle of the course?" So I instantly thought "nah" and hopped the stone wall with a friend, sprinting madly across the lawn to the bridge, where my companion snapped a few pictures of me. So now what do I have in common with Jack Nicklaus? I think the answer is obvious: aside from great style, we've both gone one-leg-up on the Swilken Bridge. Got a little Captain in you, Jack?

We walked across the course (via pathway this time) and went over to a long beach that seemed to go on forever until it got swallowed up by the mist. As we walked on and on it didn't even seem like we were moving ahead, with identical ocean to our right and identical dune to our left. At one point I looked back at the town just after the sun had dipped away and it really was a sight, above the water, tower rising up above the dark city, tiny lights made blurry by the fog. Looked like the cover to a Dickens novel or something.

After a while we turned back to head home, and that night I was so tired that I decided not to go out after all. So I watched the rest of American Gangster - "That's a $25,000 al paca rug! You blot that s**t, you don't rub a stain out of a $25,000 al paca rug" - and went to bed.

Today was productive overall, as well. Despite waking up at noon, I managed to write two thousand words about Robert Campin's three-panel Merode Altarpiece. It was a pretty strange experience, as I'm used to writing almost entirely for English classes. Usually I would feel wrong if I was not backing up everything I wrote with a quote or two from the text I was working with. My professor however, just told me that I should use two quotes maximum, and just reference other scholarship in footnotes without actual quotation if I needed to. I'm still curious as to how my essay gets graded, so we'll see if there's a latent art historian in me.

Right: St. Andrews castle above the beach.

I was only so proactive today (the essay isn't due for two and a half weeks) because I have four essays due in March, and three of them within the first eight or nine days. After they are past (and hopefully passed, as well) I'll only have to worry about my two exams in May, after my spring break! I'm enjoying my classes for the most part. The art history can get a bit dry. Tomorrow we're covering R.L. Stevenson in lecture, so I'm down for that.

It's Six Nations time here in Europe, which probably means nothing to 97% of Americans reading this. Six Nations is the international rugby tournament between Italy, France, Ireland, Wales, England, and Scotland. Scotland's field is right in Edinburgh, so I may go to see the Scotland-Ireland match.