Adventures in Aberdeen: Oh the heights and Depths: St. Andrews Part 1

Ok, welcome to the marathon blog. No, not the blog about Kelli's marathon, but a blog that is so long it is virtually a marathon. This is part 1 of our several part series on blogging through our trip to St. Andrews.

First, let me just say that we had a blast in St. Andrews. What a great city. It made me think I should have applied here for my Ph.D! Anyway, Kelli and I got up early and took the 7:55 train to St. Andrews, which got us in around 9:30. From there, we walked around the city a bit, and found ourselves at St. Andrews castle.

Here are some pics of the castle.

As you can see, the castle is in ruins, the majority of it destroyed long ago, and it sits right on the coast. Among the many interesting aspects of the castle is that it has a bottle dungeon, which we didn't post pictures of, which looks like a well in a tiny little dungeon that goes down about 10 yards before it opens up into a cave. Evidently they would lower religious prisoners (heretics) down into the cave until they lost their minds. Nice. Word on the streets is that there is only two of these in all of Europe, but you'll never guess where the other one is.

Anyway, the Reformer John Knox was actually taken captive from here at one point, which is interesting if you are into that sort of thing.

But what was the most interesting part of this castle was a system of caverns that exist beneath it. At one point in its history, they discovered that an army was trying to burrow underneath the castle walls to attack them. So they started digging their own caverns trying to intercept them, which they did - but only after two "dead end" tunnels. Evidently they were navigating by the sound of digging, which couldn't have been easy. So Kelli and I went down there.

So the mines were a couple of feet tall, getting more and more narrow as you go down.

And then suddenly there is just a small hole in the ground with a ladder that you have to climb down.

And then at the end, you find yourself somewhere under the street looking up through a small manhole cover.

Kind of crazy.

After we went to the castle, we walked down the coast a little ways to the cathedral. The cathedral is now in ruins, which is tragic, since it must have been magnificent. The ruins and the graveyard were pretty awesome in and of themselves, but it would have been incredible to see it when it was whole. Here are some pictures of the ruins.

Amongst the ruins, there was this big tower. As the story was told to us, this tower was built on next to the cathedral so that someone could watch out for Vikings. The cathedral was founded 1160, at the end of the time when the Vikings were conquering everything, and so it was a necessary element to any town, particularly on the coast like St. Andrews.

The tower (pictured above) is called St. Rule's Tower, and if you climb to the top (where you can see basically everything), you walk up 168 steps - which we did.