From the dune-backed path they looked as if they were panning for gold: two figures crouched on the shoreline, a large sieve between them. But the clue was in the name of the beach. Ruby Bay, round the headland from picturesque Elie harbour, yields tiny red garnets for those prepared to look hard enough. These “Elie rubies” are actually fragments of the gemstone pyrope once embedded in outcrops of volcanic rock.
We don’t often associate Scotland with volcanoes, but go back 450 million years and it was a hotbed of activity that has shaped today’s landscape. Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh is an extinct volcano. North of the city, the Fife coast is a geologist’s paradise of volcanic rock formations, and the Sidlaw Hills are the remains of once towering mountains of fire.
Most visitors to Scotland arrive in Edinburgh and go north for the dramatic scenery of the Highlands, or east to the beaches around North Berwick. But a short train ride across the mighty Forth Bridge reveals a less-trodden area, the grandly named Kingdom of Fife, a peninsula sandwiched between the Firth of Forth and the River Tay, with its golden sand dunes, deserted beaches, picturesque fishing villages and wildflowers that are a legacy of this once rich volcanic soil.
Walking the Fife Coastal Path is a triumph of slow, sustainable travel. The 117-mile trail, which opened in 2003, runs from North Queensferry by the Forth bridges to Newport-on-Tay, where a path crosses to Dundee. It is signed with low and high-tide routes and waymarked with a wavy blue, yellow and green logo representing the sea, shore and hills.
We covered a 50-mile stretch from the resort of Burntisland to St Andrews over four days, staying in cosy Fife hotels, boutique inns and guesthouses along the way. From the comfortable Kingswood Hotel — suitably Scottish with its tweed chairs and whisky-barrel picture frames — we strolled along Burntisland’s award-winning beach to Kinghorn Bay, site of an impressive volcanic pillow stack.
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When volcanoes erupted here into the sea millions of years ago, the reaction between the hot lava and cold seawater formed pillow-shaped rocks that stacked on top of each other in bizarre formations. The most eye-catching of these is the Rock and Spindle east of St Andrews, where a column of volcanic ash radiates spokes of jointed basalt, formed as molten rock solidified to resemble a spinning wheel.
Fishing rather than spinning is the main industry around here, evident in the myriad colourful buoys that mark the lobster pots out at sea. This was mining country too and, until just after the Second World War, Kirkcaldy was the world’s linoleum capital, with six factories. Only one remains, but an exhibition in the Kirkcaldy Museum and Gallery is worth a detour from the path.
After leaving Leven (pronounced leavin’ — how satisfying), where we spent our second night, we followed the path alongside one of many golf courses to reach Kincraig Neck. This is perhaps the most spectacular of the old volcanoes, with its great columns of jointed basalt rock (think Fingal’s Cave on Staffa or the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland).
Except at very low tide, these hexagonal structures are accessible only via the Elie chain walk. You can cling to this series of chains, attached to near-vertical rock faces, as you edge your way round the headland. It’s not for the faint-hearted (and there is an alternative clifftop path), but if you have a head for heights, the route takes you into an almost lunar landscape, strewn with jagged volcanic rock formations and shadowy caves. One, a gaping mouth in the wall, is named after Macduff, the Thane of Fife, who, legend has it, hid here as he fled from Macbeth before fishermen ferried him to safety.
In the harbour at Crail, the Lobster Hut serves fresh shellfish cooked while you wait. The coast from here to Elie is packed with pretty fishing villages: Lower Largo, the birthplace in 1676 of Alexander Selkirk, who inspired Robinson Crusoe; St Monans, where lava flows helped to create a natural seawater pool; Pittenweem; and Anstruther, with its rows of pastel houses.
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Out at sea, many small islands dot the Firth of Forth, but the highlight is the Isle of May, home to the remains of a 12th-century monastery and one of Stevenson’s lighthouses. A nature reserve, its volcanic cliffs are home to guillemots, shags, kittiwakes and hundreds of puffins.
A boat trip from Anstruther harbour will take you out to the island, but plenty of flora and fauna can be seen from the shore. We weren’t lucky enough to spot the seals that are a regular feature of this stretch of coast, but we did see a school of dolphins leaping through the water near Largo Bay, plenty of redshanks, eider ducks and even a lone sea eagle hovering over the cliffs.
Our final day’s walking took us along the coast from Crail on what was once the seabed. When the ice melted 11,500 years ago, the land, which had been pushed down by its weight, began to rise. In certain parts of the world this has led to falling, rather than rising, sea levels, and the raised beach above the path to Fife Ness shows the effect of this isostatic rebound in Scotland. The Caiplie sea caves now standing high and dry around the coast near Crail are another example, their arches carved by the ocean thousands of years ago.
From Leuchars station, near historic St Andrews, we took the train back to Edinburgh, which was thronging with visitors after lockdown. Despite its proximity, Fife’s tranquil coastal path felt a million miles from this busy capital — and several million years from its turbulent geological past.
Lizzie Enfield was a guest of visitscotland.com and Macs Adventure, which has a coastal path trip with five nights’ B&B from £475pp, including maps and luggage transfers
