Walking the Fife Pilgrim Way
My name is Elizabeth Austin. My husband, Russell Austin, and I walked the sixty-four miles of the Fife Pilgrim Way in June 2025 from North Queensferry to St Andrews, Scotland, to mark our 50th wedding anniversary. We fell in love in St Andrews as students at the university in 1973-1974 so St Andrews is a special place for us. My posts share the day-by-day story of our walk along with digressions on our fifty years together. Love, marriage, advancing age, history (lots of history) and place all figure in the story. The posts will be added regularly until we reach the end of our pilgrimage in St Andrews. If you would like to follow the story in future posts, please subscribe at no cost to my newsletter. Please contact me if you have any questions or are curious about sources since I have not included footnotes here.
I met Russell in London in September 1973. One week before we both arrived at Stansted Airport on a charter flight from California, bombs exploded in London’s Sloane Square and in Oxford Street. Two days before Sloane Square and Oxford Street, bomb blasts rocked London’s King’s Cross and Euston rail stations. No explosions go off at our meeting but it changes the course of our lives.
The University of California Education Abroad Program (EAP) gets a lot of the credit for our momentous meeting. We were two of thirteen students selected by EAP to attend the University of St Andrews in Scotland for the 1973-1974 academic year. We were in London for a week-long orientation program prior to beginning our studies at the oldest university in Scotland in a small town on the North Sea famous for golf.
At the December 2014 fundraiser for the University of St Andrews in New York, Prince William (then the Duke of Cambridge) told us and the rest of the audience gathered in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that students left the university in one of two states: alcoholic or married. William added, “Fortunately for Catherine and me we ended up married.”
Fortunately for Russell and me, we too ended up married and are celebrating our fiftieth anniversary by walking the sixty-four mile Fife Pilgrim Way from North Queensferry to St Andrews.
Day One (June 1): North Queensferry to Dunfermline (11.5 miles)
“I think we’re going the wrong way.”
Only minutes before, our taxi had eased down a narrow, twisty road and deposited us at the North Queensferry start of the Fife Pilgrim Way (FPW). The large FPW signboard near the Forth Bridge confirmed that we were in the right place and informed us that we were among countless pilgrims over hundreds of years who started the journey to St Andrews in North Queensferry.
We hefted our backpacks, fastened the strap clips, and began to walk like the thousands of pilgrims before us. Within a few hundred feet, I saw the first FPW sign posted on a tall pole. Reassured by the azure blue waymarker that displayed a pilgrim badge and a yellow directional arrow, I obediently turned right following the sign’s arrow and charged up a hill. I am a fast walker especially starting out and was ahead of Russell. He was confident I knew where I was going and followed me up the hill.
Near the top of the hill, we passed the North Queensferry train station. We were not supposed to be passing the train station. We were supposed to be walking along the coast where part of the FPW shares the route with the Fife Coastal Path.
We conferred. We looked at the instructions on the page that I had torn from the Rucksack Readers guide to the Fife Pilgrim Way. I said, “We have to go back down the hill.” Down we went and were chagrined to realize that we had walked right past a clearly marked turn. Somehow, in my eagerness to get going and not expecting another turn so soon, I missed the obvious sign and circular FPW plaque embedded in the ground.
I laughed and said, “Well, just like Martin Sheen in ‘The Way’.” One of our favorite movies, ‘The Way’ takes the character played by Martin Sheen on the famous Camino de Santiago, a 500-mile pilgrimage route from St Jean Pied de Port in France to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Sheen begins his pilgrimage by walking in the wrong direction.
