Saints, Shrines & Pilgrimage

• St Andrews was the national shrine. Its claimed relics of St Andrew made it Scotland's leading pilgrimage centre. Its cathedral, consecrated in 1318, was the largest church in medieval Scotland.
• Whithorn claims the earliest Christian roots. The eighth-century writer Bede associated St Ninian's church, Candida Casa ("the White House"), with Whithorn. It is one of the earliest Christian sites in Scotland.
• Iona's fame was European. Columba founded his monastery on Iona in 563, and it became a centre of learning and mission whose influence reached across Britain.
• Royal saints anchored royal power. St Margaret, queen of Malcolm III, was canonised in 1250, and her shrine at Dunfermline drew royal and popular devotion.
• Kings were pilgrims. James IV visited Whithorn and Tain repeatedly, combining devotion with royal progress.
• The Reformation ended it. After 1560 the shrines were destroyed or abandoned, and Acts of Parliament, including one in 1581, banned pilgrimages to chapels, wells and crosses.
• Modern routes revived the idea. They include St Cuthbert's Way (1996), the St Magnus Way (2017), the Fife Pilgrim Way (2019) and the Whithorn Way.

According to legend, relics of the apostle Andrew were carried to the Fife coast by St Rule. Whatever their origin, by the twelfth century the cult of St Andrew made the town Scotland's religious capital and its patron saint's shrine. The great cathedral was consecrated in 1318 in the presence of Robert the Bruce. Pilgrims came from across Europe, and the town grew around their needs.

Historians generally prefer a more prosaic origin for the relics than the St Rule legend. One widely repeated view is that they came by way of Northumbria, carried to Fife by Bishop Acca of Hexham in 732, but this too is a probability rather than a record.

Bede wrote that Ninian built a stone church at Whithorn, called Candida Casa, and converted the southern Picts. Archaeology has revealed an early Christian settlement at Whithorn. In the medieval period its shrine attracted pilgrims including James IV, who walked there on several occasions.

On Iona, Columba founded a monastery in 563. It produced scholars and missionaries, and probably much of the Book of Kells. Columba's relics were later moved because of Viking raids, but Iona kept a reputation as a holy island.

Queen Margaret, an Anglo-Saxon princess who married Malcolm III, was famed for piety and charity. She was canonised in 1250, and her shrine at Dunfermline Abbey became a focus of royal devotion.

In Orkney, Earl Magnus was killed around 1117 and soon venerated as a martyr. His nephew, Earl Rognvald, began St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall in 1137. Its relics were rediscovered in a pillar in the twentieth century.

In the north, St Duthac's shrine at Tain was a favourite of James IV.

Medieval pilgrims travelled for many reasons: to seek a cure, to do penance, to earn indulgences (a reduction in the punishment for sin that the Church taught awaited souls in purgatory), to pray on behalf of someone else, or simply for the experience. Roger Rosewell's survey of British shrines notes that most pilgrimages were short, usually within about forty miles of home, or two days' walk, and made in spring or autumn to avoid the harvest. A few went much further, to Rome, Jerusalem or Santiago de Compostela, and brought home badges such as the scallop shell of St James.

A great shrine was more than a tomb. On Iona, Rosewell points out, the whole island worked as an extended shrine: pilgrims visited Columba's tomb and then a circuit of crosses, chapels, burial grounds and hermitages connected with the saint.

The cult of saints was not confined to the great shrines. Parish and burgh churches were filled with altars dedicated to individual saints, each with its own masses and endowments. St Mary's in Dundee had up to thirty-five altars, and the collegiate church of St Giles in Edinburgh more than fifty. St Giles also held the town's prize relic, an arm bone of the saint with a diamond ring on its finger, acquired in 1454.

Devotion to the Virgin Mary was strong to the very end. As late as the 1530s a new shrine to Our Lady of Loretto was founded at Musselburgh in East Lothian. Royal saints served the crown, too: a seal of Robert the Bruce dating from 1322 carries an image of St Margaret. And Scotland supplied a saint to England. William of Perth, a Scottish pilgrim murdered at Rochester by his adopted son on his way to the Holy Land, was venerated there and canonised in 1246, according to Rosewell (other sources give different dates).

The reformers of 1560 regarded the cult of saints and relics as idolatry. Shrines were stripped, images destroyed and relics lost. In June 1559 reformers stirred by John Knox's preaching stripped St Andrews Cathedral, including the shrine of St Andrew and what Rosewell describes as its half-ton reliquary. In Edinburgh the arm of St Giles was sold to local goldsmiths. Parliament legislated against pilgrimage, and an Act of 1581 penalised visits to chapels, wells and crosses. Some folk customs, such as visiting holy wells, survived quietly into later centuries.

From the late twentieth century, pilgrimage returned as a walking tradition, open to people of any faith or none:

• St Cuthbert's Way (Melrose to Lindisfarne) opened in 1996.
• The St Magnus Way in Orkney opened in 2017.
• The Fife Pilgrim Way opened in 2019.
• The Whithorn Way follows medieval routes to Ninian's shrine.

The Iona Community, founded in 1938 by George MacLeod, rebuilt Iona Abbey and draws visitors from around the world.

• Saints' wells specialised: St Triduana's well at Restalrig, on the edge of Edinburgh, was visited by people seeking cures for eye disease.
• St Andrews Cathedral was the largest building in medieval Scotland.
• Bones thought to be those of St Magnus were found hidden in a pillar of his cathedral in 1919.
• James IV often travelled to Tain on foot or in pilgrim's dress.
• St Giles' Kirk in Edinburgh had more than fifty altars before the Reformation, and its arm relic of St Giles wore a diamond ring.
• A Scottish pilgrim, William of Perth, became a saint in England after he was murdered at Rochester on his way to the Holy Land.
• Most medieval pilgrims travelled no more than about two days' walk from home.

• Early saints: the lives of Ninian and other early saints are known largely from later writers.
• Relics: their authenticity cannot be established historically.
• Pilgrim numbers: medieval figures are not recorded.
• General surveys: Rosewell's book is a short British overview, strongest on England. It describes Columba as the man "responsible for introducing Christianity to Scotland", which is wrong: Christianity was established in southern Scotland, at Whithorn and elsewhere, before Columba reached Iona in 563.

• Iona & the Coming of Christianity
• St Andrews Cathedral & Historic Precinct
• Whithorn & the Isle of Whithorn
• Reformed Worship in Scotland