A perfect weekend in St Andrews

Three medieval streets, two beaches, one very famous golf course and a ruined cathedral at the end of the road. How to spend Friday night to Sunday afternoon in Scotland’s small, grand seaside town — whether or not you have brought your clubs.

St Andrews is smaller than its reputation. The whole of it — the university, the cathedral, the castle, the three old streets and the golf — fits inside a mile, and you can walk from the first tee of the Old Course to the cathedral gate in a quarter of an hour, passing on the way most of the places worth eating in. That is the great luxury of a weekend here. There is no itinerary to manage and no car to move. You arrive, you put the bags down, and the town does the rest.

What follows is not a list of everything. It is one good weekend, the one we would give a friend who had never been, built around the two things the town does better than anywhere: a walk to the sea at either end of the day, and a long lunch in between.

Friday

EVENING · ARRIVE, AND GO STRAIGHT TO THE WATER

Come by train if you can. The line ends at Leuchars, ten minutes away by taxi, and the overnight sleeper from London puts you on the platform at breakfast time with the whole of Friday in hand; the day trains from Edinburgh take an hour, along the coast, and are among the prettiest in Britain. Drop the bags wherever you are staying — the Old Course Hotel if this is the trip of a lifetime, Rufflets on the edge of town if you want ten acres of garden and a quieter night, one of the townhouse hotels on the Scores if you want to fall out of the door into the middle of things.

Then walk. Whatever the hour, the first thing to do in St Andrews is to walk down to the West Sands with the golf course on your right and the sea in front of you, and turn round at the water’s edge to look back at the town — the clubhouse, the spires, the whole grey silhouette of the place. Two miles of beach, and on a September evening there might be four people on it.

Dinner on the first night should be easy and Scottish. Forgan’s, in an old golf-club factory off Market Street, does that: langoustines, a proper steak, a room full of people who are pleased to be there, and, later on, a ceilidh band if it is that sort of Friday. Book. Afterwards, the Jigger Inn by the seventeenth hole for a nightcap by the fire, or, if the night is fine, back along the Scores under the castle to bed.

Saturday

MORNING · THE CATHEDRAL END

Start at the far end of the town and work back. St Andrews Cathedral was, until the Reformation tore it down, the largest church in Scotland, and what is left — the east gable, the great west door, a wall of arches against the sky — is still the most dramatic thing on this coast. The grounds are free, and early on a Saturday you will have them to yourself. Climb St Rule’s Tower, the square Norman keep beside it: 156 steps, and at the top the whole of the weekend is laid out below you, from the harbour to the Links. Old Tom Morris, who made the Old Course what it is, is buried in the far corner of the graveyard, and golfers leave balls on his stone.

From the cathedral it is five minutes along the cliff to the castle, with its bottle dungeon and the mine and counter-mine dug during the siege of 1546, which you can still crawl through. Then coffee. The town runs on it. Mitchell’s on Market Street for the full breakfast if you skipped it; Northpoint on North Street for the café where two undergraduates called William and Catherine used to meet, which the town is quietly proud of; Taste, if you want to be out again in five minutes.

LATE MORNING · THE THREE STREETS

North Street, Market Street and South Street run parallel from the cathedral to the West Port, and the town’s whole life happens on them and in the closes between. Give it two hours. St Salvator’s quad and its chapel, where the university has taught since 1413. The Wardlaw Museum for the university’s odder treasures. The independent shops on Market Street and the Saturday farmers’ market on the first weekend of the month. Fisher & Donaldson for the fudge doughnut, which is a local institution and not to be argued with. And, whatever the weather, Jannettas on South Street, the gelateria that has been on the same site since 1908 and now makes more than a hundred flavours; the queue on a sunny day is part of the experience.

AFTERNOON · OUT OF TOWN, OR INTO THE WATER

You have a choice. The East Neuk of Fife starts twenty minutes down the coast: a string of fishing villages — Crail, Anstruther, Pittenweem, Elie — with red pantiled roofs, working harbours and, in Anstruther, the fish and chips that every guide to Scotland mentions and which are, as it happens, as good as they say. Kingsbarns distillery and Balgove Larder’s steak barn are on the way if lunch is the priority. Half a day is enough, and it is best done by car or with a driver.

Or stay, and go the other way: along the East Sands and up the coastal path toward Kinkell, with the town shrinking behind you and the Isle of May out to sea; or into the Kohler Waters Spa at the Old Course Hotel, which takes day guests, for a hydrotherapy pool and an hour in the rooftop hot tub with the North Sea in front of you. Non-golfers who have been dragged here tend to discover this on the Saturday afternoon and stop complaining.

EVENING · THE GOOD DINNER

Saturday is the night to spend money. The Seafood Ristorante sits in a glass box on the Scores with the waves under the window, and does exactly what its name suggests with what the East Neuk boats bring in. The Road Hole Restaurant at the Old Course Hotel has three rosettes and the best dining-room view in Fife, the course and the sea going dark as the main courses arrive. Little Italy on Logies Lane is the town’s worst-kept secret for a table that is loud, warm and always full. Book all three a week ahead in summer. Afterwards, a whisky in the Road Hole Bar, where the list runs to nearly three hundred bottles and the barmen will steer you kindly.

“You arrive, you put the bags down, and the town does the rest.”

Sunday

MORNING · WALK THE OLD COURSE

This is the reason to make it a Sunday. The Old Course closes to golf every Sunday — it has for centuries, so that the town can use it — and for one day a week the most famous fairways in the game become a public park. Walk in from the first tee, cross the Swilcan Bridge, stand on the Road Hole and look back at the hotel that the golfers hit over, and keep going out toward the Eden estuary if the weather holds. You will pass families with dogs, students with hangovers, and Americans having a slightly religious experience. It costs nothing and it is, by some distance, the best thing to do in St Andrews.

Do it early, then breakfast at the café in the R&A World Golf Museum across from the first tee, whose upstairs windows look straight down the course, and give the museum itself an hour: the oldest clubs in existence, the featherie balls, the story of the game told well since its rebuild in 2021.

AFTERNOON · LUNCH, AND ONE LAST LOOK

Sunday lunch is a serious business here. Rufflets does the country-house version, with the walled garden to walk in afterwards; the Adamson on South Street does the town version, with a cocktail list. Either way, leave time. Then, before the taxi to Leuchars, walk once more to the end of the pier at the harbour, below the cathedral, where the students in their red gowns process on a Sunday after chapel, and where the whole town — cliff, ruin, spire and sea — arranges itself behind you for the last photograph.

If you have a third day

Play golf, obviously; the Links Trust runs seven courses and the ballot for the Old Course is easier to win than people think in the shoulder months. Or drive an hour north to Glamis and the Angus glens, or an hour south to Edinburgh, or simply do Saturday again more slowly, with the Botanic Garden and the woodland walk along the Lade Braes added in. Nobody has ever regretted a third night.