St Andrews

Deciding where to stay in St Andrews comes down to one question: how much of your time will be spent on the golf courses, and how much in the town? The two are only ten minutes apart on foot, but the difference in atmosphere, and in price, is considerable.

The Scores is the address most visitors picture. This clifftop terrace above the castle holds a run of large Victorian houses, most now hotels, and the better rooms look over the bay towards the Angus coast. It is quiet at night, five minutes from both the cathedral and the first tee, and priced accordingly. The Old Course end of town, around Golf Place and Pilmour Links, is more expensive again for the simple reason that you can see the eighteenth green from some windows; if golf is the point of the trip, the premium is easy to justify, and if it is not, you are paying for a view you may not use.

For a first visit, or any trip without a car, basing yourself on or just behind the three central streets makes the most sense. Everything worth walking to is genuinely walkable, the restaurants and pubs are on the doorstep, and you can leave the car for the whole weekend. The compromise is that rooms in converted townhouses are often small, and weekend nights carry some street noise.

The best value tends to sit slightly west of the centre, in the guest houses and B&Bs around Murray Park, Kinburn and Hepburn Gardens. These are family-run for the most part, breakfast is usually a highlight rather than an afterthought, parking is far less of a struggle, and the walk into town is under ten minutes. Groups and anyone staying a week should also look at the self-catering townhouses in the same streets, which work out considerably cheaper per head than several hotel rooms.

Book early for the Dunhill Links week or an Open year, when the town sells out months ahead and rates roughly double. Midweek nights between November and March are the best value on this coast.

Most of the main sights sit within the old town and can be reached on foot, though a couple of the best days out are a short drive inland or down the coast.

• The Old Course — the most written-about links in golf, in continuous play since the fifteenth century. You do not need a tee time to appreciate it: the course is public land, the Swilcan Bridge and the eighteenth green are free to walk to, and on Sundays, when play stops, the whole thing becomes a public park.
• St Andrews Cathedral — once the largest church in Scotland and the seat of the medieval Scottish church, reduced to gable ends and a long spine of broken arcading after the Reformation. Climb St Rule's Tower alongside it for the best overview of the three streets and the coastline.
• St Andrews Castle — a clifftop ruin with two unusual survivals: the bottle dungeon cut down into solid rock, and the mine and counter-mine, a pair of siege tunnels from the 1540s that you can still crawl through.
• West Sands — the beach used for the opening sequence of Chariots of Fire, backed by dunes and the Eden estuary nature reserve. Long enough for a proper walk in any weather, and popular with kite-buggy and land-yacht crews when the wind is up.
• The University of St Andrews — founded in 1413 and the oldest in Scotland. St Salvator's Quadrangle on North Street is the set-piece, complete with the cobbled initials PH marking the spot where the student martyr Patrick Hamilton was burned in 1528.
• The R&A World Golf Museum — sensibly sized and genuinely interesting even to non-golfers, tracing the game from feathery balls to the modern professional tour, with a roof terrace looking straight down the first fairway.
• Craigtoun Country Park — two miles inland, a former estate garden with a boating lake, miniature railway and the Dutch Village folly on its island. The best rainy-afternoon-in-reserve option for anyone travelling with children.
• The Fife Coastal Path — the long-distance route passes through town. Head south from East Sands and you are on the cliffs above Kinkell Ness within twenty minutes, and at Kingsbarns and Crail within a good day's walking.

Fife eats well, and much of what appears on St Andrews menus is landed or grown within a few miles. Seafood comes ashore at Pittenweem and Anstruther, so crab, langoustine and hand-dived scallops are usually the thing to order; beef and lamb come off the farms inland, and the soft fruit in summer is excellent. Anster, a crumbly hard cheese made at Falside near Anstruther, turns up on cheeseboards all over town.

For a proper dinner, The Seafood Ristorante occupies a glass box on the Bruce Embankment with the sea directly below, while The Adamson on South Street does modern brasserie cooking in a former bank. The Vine Leaf is the long-standing local favourite for a quieter evening, and Forgan's on Market Street handles the informal end with Scottish sharing plates and, later on, ceilidhs. Six miles inland, The Peat Inn is the area's Michelin-starred destination and worth booking well ahead.

By day, Fisher & Donaldson on Church Street is an institution for its fudge doughnut, and Jannettas Gelateria on South Street has been making ice cream in the town for well over a century. Mitchell's Deli is the place to assemble a picnic before heading for West Sands. For drinking, Luvians has an unusually deep whisky range, and the distilleries at Kingsbarns, a few miles down the coast, and Eden Mill nearby both run tours and tastings. A monthly farmers' market brings Fife growers and producers onto Market Street, and is the easiest way to taste your way around the region in an hour.

Camping around St Andrews means camping on the Fife coastal plain: gentle, well-drained farmland running down to low cliffs and long beaches, with almost no serious hills to contend with. The terrain is easy on both pitching and walking, and most parks sit on level, grassy ground a mile or two out of town. What you gain in convenience you give up in wildness; these are established holiday parks, not remote pitches.

Weather is the thing to plan around. Fife's east coast is among the driest parts of Scotland, which is good news for canvas, but it is also exposed to whatever the North Sea sends in. Wind is a likelier problem than rain, so pick a pitch with hedge or dune shelter and peg down properly. The haar can settle overnight and burn off by mid-morning, leaving everything damp, so a spare set of dry clothes earns its space.

Under the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, wild camping is legal across most unenclosed land in Scotland, provided you follow the Scottish Outdoor Access Code: small groups, one or two nights in one spot, well away from houses and roads, no fires where there is any risk, and everything carried out again. In practice the land immediately around St Andrews is enclosed farmland, golf course or nature reserve, none of which is suitable, and the beaches and dunes are heavily used and often subject to local restrictions. If you want to wild camp, walk south along the Fife Coastal Path towards Kingsbarns and Fife Ness and find open ground well beyond the town, or head inland to the Lomond Hills.

The season runs roughly from March to October, and most parks shut for the winter. May, June and September are the pick of it: long daylight, settled conditions, and none of the July and August pressure on pitches. Book ahead for weekends from mid-June to late August, and for the Dunhill Links week in autumn, when even the campsites fill. Midges are far less of an issue here than on the west coast, but pack repellent for still evenings inland.