St Andrews History 

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Legend has it that St Rule (or Regulus) was taking St. Andrew’s relics from Greece to the western edge of the world, where he intended to build a city in honour of the first ever disciple, when he was shipwrecked and washed up in what we now know as St. Andrew’s Bay.

He built a shrine to the saint on what became the site of the cathedral and in so doing gave the Scottish people their patron saint and the country its ecclesiastical centre. St. Andrew was crucified on an ‘X’ shaped cross and this is represented in the Scottish flag.

• In 1410 the university was founded with the creation of St. Andrew’s College, forty years later St. Salvator’s was formed and in 1537 St. Mary’s came into being. The dominance of the university over the town grew after the reformation, when the hierarchical system common to the Catholic faith was abolished and St. Andrews lost its significance as an ecclesiastical centre.