Blinded by the Haar

Uncovering Fife’s hinterland behind our sandstone mist

The very mention of the North Sea’s cold fog, which creeps silently onto Scotland’s east coast, summons a sublime presence: a ‘haar.’ The ‘sea fret’ of East Anglia,the ‘roke’ of Yorkshire, and ‘Karl the Fog’ of San Francisco humorously reflect their localities' cultural inclinations: empiricism, provincial myth-making, and an ironic urban quirkiness. In this light, the tactile power of ‘haar’ inadvertently satisfies an aestheticising view of Scotland that seduces many — largely American — students.

The word’s acoustic texture hints at its total sensory impression. Any passer-by stands aghast as the early autumn sun transforms into a blinding white cocoon, leaving them walking through a luminous blankness. As the haze narrows the view, St Andrews’ scholastically Gothic and endemically Scottish beauty, ironically, only comes into sharper focus. The fog settles on the North Street cobblestones once scorched by the pyre of Patrick Hamilton. Our sandstone-faced, fog-bathed town may be all there is, and all there has ever been. 

The haar often dissipates before reaching inland Fife. Driving along the A91 into town can plunge motorists into a mist, baptising them in the transcendent atmosphere. The bubble isn't translucent, but a ghost-white shroud. This meteorological divide validates a historic difference between St Andrews and Fife. Flights across the continent during reading week mimic an inverted form of the town’s foundational myth: St Regulus was ordered by an angel to take Apostle Andrew’s remains “to the ends of the earth” from Patras in Greece, and was shipwrecked on the town’s rocky shores. St Andrews has always looked outwards to the sea, away from the Fife hinterland under its nose.

As an exiled Londoner, I stubbornly resist the town's aesthetic intoxication. Anything succeeding on Pinterest must be met with suspicion. The ‘ancient’ character that feeds into the town’s insular fog shroud is largely a calculated invention; the entire place was aesthetically reinvented during a nineteenth-century civic revival. To make my quiet superciliousness material, I decided to dispel the haze by seeing a film in the council’s administrative capital: Glenrothes.

Awaiting its arrival, five or six buses passed towards Dundee without turning into our supposed county. Aboard the 24, I stepped onto the set of Fawlty Towers: an automated voice droned a warning to "please apply handbrake," while the driver fought a losing battle with his broken cab door.

Unsurprisingly, the Glenrothes I eventually encountered could not be more dissimilar to our home: a post-Second World War new town built to house coal miners. If the haar captures St Andrews’ surface texture, the symbolic impression here was smog. The bus station's placating piano music score failed to dissuade a congregation of puffer-jacketed teenagers. Momentarily, I felt London had come to me.

Sandwiched between a Club 3000 Bingo and a Tardis-like Indian restaurant sat The Kino Cinema. An imitation Art Deco entrance led me to an attendant selling £4.99 tickets, a deal unique to “MEGA SAVE MONDAYS.” Screen 2 was surprisingly busy with middle-aged locals. They filled the theatre's twin leather seats in couples, leaving me with an impressively spacious double-seat to myself. Any lingering delusions about my status as a quasi-anthropologist vanished the exact moment Olivia Colman began tenderly caressing a prosthetic wicker man, to the great amusement of the surrounding couples.

The independent Kino Cinema was renovated after a twelve-year closure; its website frames it as "owned and run by locals who share a passion for cinema." Sat in its warm, shared space, my outsider status felt striking, odd, and entirely self-inflicted.

On a less eventful bus journey home, I returned to the haar’s kind embrace. The difference between St Andrews and the rest of Fife undeniably exists; the haar has settled for a millennium. Navigating the fog, and escaping it when the plush corporatism of T-Squared could do with a community-run remedy, requires acknowledging its perennial presence.

Illustration by Eve Fishman