Get a Bike and Explore Fife!

A fife-biking elegy

We live in a strange little world, we St Andreans. Nearly all of us come from disparate parts of the British Isles or the globe, and somehow ended up somewhere between Edinburgh, Dundee, the Old Course, and the North Sea.

In our chosen exile, we have stumbled upon a wonderful little Fifan town, slightly overrun by golf paraphernalia shops but altogether quite charmingly preserved. The lucky ones get to live in turn-of-the-century whinstone houses (the local stone, a very useful fact); we all shop at Tesco, and, when funds run low, at Aldi; we plunge into the quaint joys of Yorkshire tea; and eventually end up wearing Barbours, going on rainy beachside walks in wellies purchased after losing a toe to trench foot. In sum, the Brits consolidate their lifestyle and the foreigners adopt it.

However, it is not without some alarm that I realised how little most St Andreans actually know the Kingdom of Fife. For many, the furthest they dare roam is the Leuchars train station on their way to Edinburgh, not to mention the Sallies and Regs dwellers who have never set their eyes upon the distant Shangri-La of DRA.

And what a shame! How lucky we are all to live for a few years in the wonderfully named Kingdom of Fife and its rolling hills, secret beaches, and hamlets. Few people will ever have the privilege, so I beg of you to make the most of it.

Fife is littered with hidden gems: Crail, Anstruther, Dumferline – the de facto capital of Scotland for much of the late Middle Ages, FYI – Ceres, Elie, and Dunino to name a few. For all of us non-Fifers, we have only a few years to marvel at the beauties of our little Scottish peninsula.

To discover the glorious 512 square miles of Fife, there exists, of course, the genuinely fantastic bus system linking St Andrews to seemingly everything, which the great-sesame-Young-Scot-card will give you free access to. But here I speak with a good deal of experience: you will never know, understand, or appreciate a place as well as one which you have biked through.

When you pedal your way from one town to the other, you truly understand the constitutive mesh of the place. I admit that you’ll see quite a few fields, but you will also discover some picturesque manor houses, many fat cows, and some apple trees whose apples no one is counting. You can take your time and take detours, sit alone and listen to the sounds of the undergrowth when that last hill was admittedly a bit ambitious, or stumble upon a hidden little church as I did in Dunino just last Wednesday. There is just something about hopping on your bike on a weekday and rushing to a quiet little town with no purpose which going to the Spoons in Edinburgh will never quite match.

Wherever you are in St Andrews, you are less than a 30-minute bike ride from Dunino, 40 from Kingsbarns, half an hour out from the gracefully-named village of Blebo Craigs, and if you’re more ambitious, Anstruther, Ceres, or Elie are maybe an hour out. The beauty of biking is that, whatever your skill level,  you can do it. If you have been overambitious, hills can be walked up and returns made by bus — there is no shame if you are not ashamed. I ask you, truly: Is discovering something new, getting some fresh air, and some exercise not a better use of your fleeting time in Fife than tiring your finger out flipping from one TikTok to another?

So do listen to me, or, rather, do as I say. Get a bike if you don’t already have one, and the next time you see a shred of sunlight through the clouds, pop on your helmet, go forth, and see for yourself how lucky you are to have landed in this wonderful kingdom we call home.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons