A collection my favourite moments from seven special months in St Andrews & the Scottish Highlands. And, as it turns out, I’ll soon be returning there…

Summer in Scotland, home in St Andrews, brought so much colour and joy in 2023 – a chance to restore and refresh before embarking on my next adventure (my current job working full-time in an international boarding school). St Andrews has so much to offer for such a small town. Below, you’ll find a collection of my favourite moments and mini-adventures, from picnics to graduation parties to wild swimming in the North Sea (all of which I’d recommend).

It may seem like a paradox to post these memories now, six months after leaving the town for good, it had seemed. But, the breaking news is that in September 2024 I’ll be returning to St Andrews in an even more exciting capacity – I’ve been accepted for a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences there! I’ll be researching climate-changing volcanic eruptions with supervisor Dr Will Hutchison as part of the St Andrews Volcanic Eruptions and Impacts Group (StA-VEI – volcano fanatics will get the pun), and I’m so excited to get started. It’s been a long time coming, but more on this later…

For now, let’s head back to Summer in Scotland 2023 🙂

Picnics and dinner parties with Veronica and friends

First off, St Andrews is party town – dinner party town. Some of my fondest times include hanging out with Veronica, a final year PhD student in Biology with excellent culinary skills, and we would often have little dinner parties together. (I wonder if our time together, subconsciously, had me thinking: PhD.) Of course, it wasn’t always just us. We had a great circle of friends through Canmore (more on that later), so there would sometimes be several of us, for any occasion at all! Wine and cheese night on a Wednesday, why not?!

St Andrews being at the edge of the country, we would also love taking little adventures around Fife – to castles and big houses and up to Cambo Park, which was great for picnics. Emilija, from Lithuania, would also join us when she wasn’t working too hard at her master’s.

One time, Veronica and I both managed to crash a wedding in town, but we weren’t invited to the afterparty so, naturally we came back and had our own.

Lunching at the Old Course

As well as dinner parties, as many will know, St Andrews is a major destination for the world’s golfers. Now, I couldn’t care less about golf, but when it comes to food, The Old Course sets a good spread. (I hope my old workplace, the ‘other’ golf hotel, the Rusacks, doesn’t mind my saying!) When time allowed, my priestly uncle and I would head across for lunch, and we’d sit by the window of the old man Scottish bar thing looking out over the golf course. The green, the sea, the sand.

Canmore, source of all my joy

But onto Canmore, the student chaplaincy just around the corner from the golf course overlooking the sea, right on The Scores. Apart from being integral to the parish of St James, Canmore hosted many of the events and lovely gatherings of the Catholic Society, like on Pancake Day, after graduations, Easter Sunday, and just about every other Sunday of the university calendar. It is here that I made most of my friends and, outside of the regular parties, learned to appreciate the simple joys in life, and not have to go seeking them all the time.

That was a huge revelation for me, as when I first arrived to St Andrews I was still, despite my exhaustion and illness, I was still pursuing overactivity. Canmore changed all of that, but slowly, in a gradual and evolving way. It turns out I was lacking a lot of prayer, peace, stillness and connection in my quest for ‘the next step’. Truthfully, I believe it was the days spent in and around Canmore – especially long summer days with not much to do besides have long conversations over mugs of tea, or kick a football round the garden, or clear the junk from the garage – that helped me rediscover the childlike joy and freedom of ‘play’ that we are losing, societally, to overwork, isolation, confinement and ‘social’ media.

Things don’t have to be complicated, or expensive, to be fun. I am definitely seeing that in my job in school at the moment, looking after boarding students. Joining in with what they enjoy has brought me such joy, and when I am not working, the freedom simply to go for a run in the park or pick up a pencil and draw is just so simple that it is easy to neglect. In our hustle culture, these simple pleasures are often forgotten. Everything has a pricetag, is either addictive, or otherwise purely self-oriented.

I am really grateful, then, to have dwelt in Canmore and to have refound these simple joys: time with friends, doing nothing at all, sitting on the lawn (when sunny), and just learning to appreciate every moment that comes along. And I am very much looking forward to returning in September…

Graduation parties, tea parties, and more parties

As I said, St Andrews appears to be party town. While present for the end of the summer semester, I was fortunate to attend many friends’ graduation parties, a number of tea parties, and also to work at the University graduation week and Alumni Weekend (I used to work at the Alumni Office). Canmore also held its own graduation party in the church garden on a fairytale summer evening.

Bracing sea dips and monastery trips

From embracing the North Sea to a visit down to a monastery, the summer just kept getting better. St Andrews could sometimes feel quite small (the town centre is just three streets), but a quick jolt out of town or along the beach soon fixed that!

Veronica, Eden and I enjoyed a summer evening swim on the West Sands – the wide coastal strip behind the golf course. It’s a shallow beach, so you can wade out pretty far. And having been swimming in the sea since April, and especially on May morning, it wasn’t too cold.

With the choir, a group of us also enjoyed a visit down to Dunfermline Abbey in commeration of St Margaret of Scotland, who is buried there. Hence the photo of the vested clergymen.

Highland road tripping

It wouldn’t be summer in Scotland without a run up to the Highlands. Having recently acquired my dream wheels – say hello to Clarice Cooper – I took a short self road trip up to Fort William and the Harry Potter-esque Highland region.

I probably spent too much time driving around and not enough time soaking up the mountain air. However, I did find great pleasure in wading barefoot through sand and seaweed on beached fjords – the Silver Sands of Morar on the west coast. A little visit to Glenfinnan Viaduct (on the journey to Hogwarts) also brought joy.

Palace wanderings, wild beach combings

Finally, I’ll end with an ode to slow meandering around old places and palaces; the magic of old and majestic things, and all the wildness of Scotland’s fringes.

Homecoming

Scotland is a country of beauty and mystery, grand and hidden. It is my heritage and my home, birthplace and destination. I think Anna sums it up nicely for me in this lil’ Frozen 2 outtake:

I am ever so grateful to have spent such a transformative period of my life here in 2023, the doors that it opened, and I can’t wait for more later in 2024.

Forever,