Windswept, crumbling, covered in graves—the ruins of St. Andrew’s Cathedral lie on the coast of Scotland next to the small university town of the same name.
During the High Middle Ages, St. Andrew’s Cathedral stood as the beating heart of the Scottish church. It was dedicated to and housed the relics of Scotland’s patron, St. Andrew. The site had been a place of worship since the 700s, but the main edifice was built between 1160 and 1318. The cathedral did not stand on its own; older and newer buildings clustered around the cathedral walls, forming a bustling center of ecclesiastical life. This spiritual hub of Scotland had several monasteries and even Scotland’s first university, but St. Andrew’s was best known as a pilgrimage site. From all across Scotland and western Europe, people would make their way to venerate the relics of St. Andrew.
All this came to a screeching halt with the advent of the Reformation in Scotland. John Knox, founder of the Calvinist Church of Scotland, preached a fiery sermon in 1559 in which he incited a mob to ransack the cathedral. The structure never recovered and soon became a source of building materials for the town. The area continued to be used as a graveyard by the locals, and so the space around the ruins is chock full of a centuries-long accumulation of tombstones.
Visitors to the former cathedral are now greeted by the few remaining parts of the once largest building in Scotland. Only a crumbling western entrance, parts of the eastern towers, and a side wall continue to stand. While this alone gives the modern-day pilgrim some sense of what the church once would have looked like, preservationists have helpfully placed makers around the site which indicate what once stood there.
Once through the entryway, markers of where the columns once stood guide each visitor to understand the width of the structure. Next to the columns there are markers indicating the many side altars that the cathedral boasted. Continuing forward, the spot where the roof hung provides a chance to pause and investigate some of the original tiling of the cathedral. Beyond this comes the crossing and the site of the high altar, only the platform of which remains. Past the altar platform, a small plaque marks what was once the destination for so many pilgrims, the shrine to St. Andrew. Nothing remains of this once sumptuous shrine, as its contents were looted during the Reformation.
No visit to St. Andrew’s is complete without a trip up St. Rule’s Tower. This 100-foot-tall tower is a convenient way to take in the entirety of the ruins in one gaze. It provides the perfect opportunity to try and reconstruct in one’s mind an image of the grand Medieval complex. However, the vision quickly blows away with a few blasts of the harsh sea breeze, and only a few plaques and ruined walls remain as a testament to the danger of presuming that anything lasts forever.
St. Andrew’s offers a lesson to anyone who puts his trust in those fleeting material things: beautiful buildings, strong institutions, widespread popularity, and all the other things that promise everything is fine. The pre-Reformation church in Scotland had all these things, but Catholicism was driven to the margins of Scottish society and did not recover in any meaningful way until the 19th century.
There are, however, some signs of hope. As surely as Easter Sunday follows Good Friday, devotion returns to places from which it was banished. The pilgrimage routes from all over Scotland have seen revitalization, especially in the last decade. Several organizations, including The Way of St. Andrew and The Confraternity of St. Ninian, organize pilgrimages to the ruined cathedral. Several large-scale Masses have been said in the ruins over the past few years at the culmination of pilgrimages. Catholics in Scotland and beyond can derive hope from the sight of pilgrims once again trekking to the ruins of the old cathedral.
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