Walking the Fife Pilgrim Way
Six Days to St Andrews
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. 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 for new post alerts. Please contact me if you have any questions or are curious about sources since I have not included footnotes here.
Read the full introduction
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.
