[Miscellaneous] The Fife coastal path

Last weekend it was miraculously relatively sunny up here in St Andrews, so I decided to tackle an item on my bucket list that I've been planning for a long time. My housemate, John, his academic son, Alex, and I walked the Fife Coastal Path from St Andrews to Anstruther. Naturally, we stopped for fish and chips at the end.

Trekking across one of the small but beautiful beaches along the path. (Credit: David Brown)

The Fife coastal path is 117 miles of public footpath that (mostly) follows the coastline from the Tay estuary, at Dundee, to the Forth estuary, at North Queensferry. Trekking to Anstruther is one of the things to do during your time in St Andrews, and I'd heard a lot about how pretty it was from my friends. They weren't wrong.

We left at 8:00am, as we had to avoid the high tide later in the morning. John and Alex have both walked the path before, and knew that there were several sections where traversing the beach is required, which is obviously quite difficult if the tide is in! In the end it took us 8.5 hours to travel the 18 or so miles, which included a 45 minute stop for a picnic lunch at Kingsbarns golf club, and another 45 minute stop for afternoon tea at a beautiful little tea room in Crail. Not bad going really.

East Sands beach in the early morning. (Credit: David Brown)

The scenery ranged from desolate to supremely manicured golf courses, but was always nice to look at. The weather stayed fry for most of the journey, except for a pretty miserable half an hour or so as we approached Crail, but the effects of the heavy rain over the preceding weeks  were very obvious. It for particularly muddy between Crail and Anstruther, a leg of the journey which also produced a stand-off between Alex, brandishing his walking stick, and a herd of cows that were blocking the path. It turns out that John is a little bit scared of cows...

All in all it was a day well spent, and I'm glad that I've now done it. It reminded me how much I enjoy hiking, and I'm now thinking about trying some of the other stretches of the coastal path.