The Senses of St Andrews

Our town through sights and seasons

As you wander through the streets of St Andrews, the soundscape winds and shifts with you, never stagnant for more than a step or two. This ‘sleepy’ town is more tumultuous than it immediately appears. 

Flapping winds, shrieking seagulls, and the crescendo of crashing waves across three beaches are all constant throughout the year. The yells of students increase tenfold on the last Monday of October, echoed in parallel on the first day of May as the students break the shiny, sealed surface of East Sands with unanimous delight (or terror). Sound (and sometimes the eerie lack thereof) scores our St Andrews experience. Join me on my journey through the sounds of the seasons in this sunny seaside town:

Spring 

As I write, I think somewhat sceptically of snowdrops opening and the leggy stems of weeds shooting up, but Spring is on its way. As the sun finally starts to peek its nose through the muffling stage curtains of winter in northeast Scotland, the sound of amped guitars and local singers starts to infiltrate the streets, distracting students in the library and rousing sleepy pub-goers in the Keys. 

A new sonic experience, however, was the buskers I came across one doorway down from Spoiled Life last week: two young men, a guitar and a microphone. So far, ordinary. The low dirge that then filled the street was novel in length and pitch, heightened by the trance-like stance of the singer. Cutting through the gossip of willow leaves brushing against one another from the gardens opposite these buskers, the droning hollowed out the avenue-like street, filling space that ordinarily only car engines briefly disrupt. It was, to my ear, only a little less melodious than the covers of Olivia Dean that perforate Market Street’s corners throughout the Candlemas semester. 

Summer

The nectar-sweet nattering of starlings can be heard far down on West Sands from early spring to late summer. These babbling birds are almost impossible to spot, but on a clear day, they rush louder than the wind, miles above golfers’ heads. While childrens’ eyes are glued upwards to the thrashing and winding of their kites in the summer winds, handled surreptitiously by parents and grandparents, the starlings remain out of sight, and instead make their presence known perhaps more metaphysically than the vengeful, inescapable, seagulls in Fife. 

Autumn

A classic in what my American friends call ‘fall’ is the crunch of leaves underfoot alongside the Kinessburn. What Mother Nature can symphonise, however, is far superior. Compared with the North Sea, the undulating rhythms of the Kinessburn are a little tamer, but no less rich in the harmonies of rolling water. Poems about rivers are filled with “rushing,” “sluicing,” “surging,” and “flushing,” all words which encompass what it is like to be near the shh-ing sounds of a river. The word Kinessburn captures, too, this rush of consonants. Background music to many a romantic, or perhaps, breakup walk, the Kinessburn’s cyclical flow is a comforting reminder of regeneration — a truly wholesome sound. 

Winter 

A St Andrews local once remarked to me that she can often smell the return of the students’ nefarious habits before she sees them, but I think the striking sensory difference is in the stark lack of sound in the normally cacophonic echo chamber we call home. Broken only by haunting choral renditions of hymns in the cloisters and the regularity of twelve long beats at midnight and midday, a deep silence overtakes the town during the winter months. With the students gone from mid-December to late January and the golf courses closed intermittently until March, the darkest months are cloaked in a veil of stillness, which, if you happen to catch it, is meditatively soothing. 

It is song, then, that defines St Andrews — the microphoned students of Spring, the pipers of August’s Lammas Fair, the swallows’ last melodies before they flee the north, and the hymnal silence of December and January. These buskers, whether human or natural, are not asking for pennies nor pounds (if you ignore the throat-singers’ open guitar case), but joining the euphony of voices, notes, and sound that categorise this clamorous town.

Illustration by Aimee Robbins