Fife Pilgrim Way – commissioned research (2016)
From 2015, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Fife Cultural Trust sought to develop a Fife Pilgrim Way, to form part of the Fife Coastal Path network managed by Fife Coast and Countryside Trust. Following the model of other recent heritage walking and cycing routes such as Cuthbert’s Way in Northumberland, Fife’s Pilgrim Way would retrace the historic route and saintly cult associations forged during the early to late middle ages. For Fife, this would have a natural focus around the regional and national cults of St Serf (d.583) at Culross, Queen/St Margaret (d.1093) at Dunfermline Abbey, and the apostle St Andrew in Scotland’s leading ecclesaistical burgh and Augustinian cathedral priory at St Andrews.
As part of the historical research to underpin necessary decisions about historical content and route for the Pilgrim Way, Stirling’s Dr Tom Turpie was commissioned to undertake an initial scoping report exploring all cult and church associations along this coastal route westwards. His ground-breaking thesis on Scottish cult development in the later middle ages had already led in turn to:
- his contributing to a Stirling-St Andrews collaborative database (2011-), The Corpus of Scottish Medieval Parish Churches, including detailing the physical and spiritual history and material remains of churches within the diocese of St Andrews. See also this resource’s separate entry for Dunfermline Abbey
- a number of seminal articles and a monograph, Kind Neighbours: Scottish Saints and Society in the Later Middle Ages (Brill: Leiden, 2015).
To download Dr Turpie’s 2016 report for the Pilgrim Way project, detailing not only veneration of these great holy figures throughout Fife but also a vibrant network of smaller local cults, relics and churches, click here:
Fife Pilgrim Way: Report Detailing Historical References to Pilgrimage and the Cult of the Saints in Fife (2016, 119pp.)
The Fife Pilgrim Way opened to the public in July 2019 offering over 60 miles of paths and cycle-ways with historic interpretation panels along its length, supported by podcast audio-guides and digital resources.