ISBN: 0 300 09673 9
Fife's most famous buildings include Dunfermline Abbey, with its sturdy Norman nave; St
Andrews cathedral, the focus of the old University town on the North Sea coast; the foursquare
post-Reformation kirk at Burntisland; the palace of Falkland, where James V became Britain's
first patron of Renaissance architecture on the grand scale; and the little royal burghs along the
coastal fringe, each with its harbour and its strings of vernacular houses presided over by the kirk
and tollbooth. Cupar, at the centre of Fife's long peninsula, is the seat of local government and
one of the most charming and prosperous of Scottish towns. Less well known are Fife's tower
houses like Scotstarvit, the old seaboard castles of St Andrews and Ravenscraig, the picturesque
Balgonie Castle and the throughly domesticated Kellie Castle. Of Fife's churches one of the
most beautiful is Dairsie; and three centuries of inventive design in burial monuments come to
an unexpected climax in a work by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the MacDuff cemetery, East
Wemyss.
