The Veiled Nun of St Leonards

If you go through the Pends, heading downhill towards St Andrews harbour, you will see a lane running off to the right just after you have walked through the Pends and before the road turns left and heads steeply downhill between the walls of the cemetery and the walls of St Leonards School.

This little lane is known as the Nun's Walk.  It leads to the Church of St Leonard and it features in one of the most famous ghost stories of St Andrews.

Centuries ago, a young woman lived in St Andrews.  She was well-educated, religious, beautiful and rich.  Needless to say, she was also wooed by many suitors.  She, however, would have none of them and disappointed suitor after disappointed suitor was turned away from her parents'door 

One day, however, she unexpectedly allowed an eligible young man to pursue her and win her hand.  Wedding preparations were made, but the bride suddenly changed her mind and announced that instead of becoming an earthly bride she would enter a nunnery and become a Bride of Christ.

When her fiance heard this he rushed to St Andrews to claim her as his own, but, alas, when he arrived there he found that she had done what she had threatened to do; with a knife she had cut off both her eyelids, slit both her nostrils, cut off her lips and branded both her cheeks with a red-hot poker.

Horrified, he rushed back home and committed suicide.  The young woman died a few weeks later.  Since then, however, people have claimed to have seen a dark figure, heavily-veiled, emerging from behind a tree in this lane.  If you look to the left of this photo you can see the stump which is all that's left of the tree now.

Encountering the Veiled Nun of St Leonards was regarded as a sign of ill-omen, and if she drew aside her heavy veil and showed her mutilated face the unfortunate spectator was doomed to die within the year.

Why did the lady act this way?  Was she a religious fanatic?  Was she so afraid of marriage?  Nobody knows.  There isn't even historical proof of a nunnery existing in St Andrews but the tale has been handed down for centuries...

Golfing Legends

The 150th British Open Championship takes place in St Andrews on July 15th to 18th 2010, and excitement is already mounting in the town.  Golf legends are arriving from all over the world to play on the Old Course, but the town already holds three of the world's most famous golfing legends within its cathedral graveyard. 

Allan Robertson was one of the first professional golf players.  He was recognised as the best golfer of his time.  He was born in St Andrews in 1815 and was a professional ball and club maker who exported his products all over the world.

Old Tom Morris worked for Allan Morris from the time when he was 14 years old, and often played in partnership together, and the two men designed Carnoustie golf course together.  They fell out, however, when Robertson caught Old Tom playing with the new "guttie" ball which he saw as a threat to the traditional "featherie" balls which he made.

Old Tom moved to Prestwick in 1851, to design and build a new golf course where he would become professional and greenkeeper.  Allan Robertson died in 1859 and the British Open Championship came about as a result of his death when, in 1860, golfers at Prestwick held a competition to see who would succeed him as "Champion Golfer".  Old tTom Morris struck the first shot in the competition but Willie Park from Musselburgh was the winner.

The Open, as this annual competition came to be known, is the oldest of the four major championships 

The other two golfing legends cradled within the cathedral grounds are Old Tom Morris and his son Tommy.  Old Tom Morris was born in a house in North Street, St Andrews and was apprenticed to Allan Robertson for four years and spent another five years as his journeyman.  After being fired by Robertson and moving to Prestwick in 1851, he returned to St Andrews in 1865 as greenkeeper and professional on the Old Course which had fallen into poor condition after Allan Robertson's death.

Old Tom stayed in the post of greenkeeper and professional until 1903.  He died just before his 87th birthday in 1908 when he fell down a flight of stairs at the New Golf Club.

  

The story of Young Tom Morris is a tale of blazing talent mixed in with tragedy.  Son of Old Tom, Young Tom was born in St Andrews in 1851 and was raised in Prestwick where, since his father was designer, professional and greenkeeper of the course, he had plenty of opportunity to play golf. 

He showed great talent at the game and won his first Open in 1868 at the age of seventeen.  He then won again in 1869, 1870 and 1872.  His was the first name to be engraved on the famous Claret Jug when it was purchased in 1873.

Tom and his father often played in exhibition matches, and it was during one such match in North Berwick in 1875 that word came to Young Tom that his wife, Margaret, had gone into labour.  There were only two holes left to play, so father and son finished and won the match and hurried home by ship.

By the time they reached St Andrews both mother and baby had died.  Heartbroken, Young Tom died on Christmas morning 1875.  The official cause of death was given as a heart attack.

Golfers from all over the world visit these graves to pay their respects and leave tributes to the Great Old Man of Golf and to the rising star whose life was so tragically cut short

The Haunted Tower

Although St Andrews itself was not a walled town, its cathedral priory was surrounded by a wall, most of which is still intact and was the work of Prior James Hepburn.  The walls are up to twenty feet high and three feet thick, and towers were set along them for defensive purposes.

Thirteen of the towers still remain, but the one known as "The Haunted Tower" is the square tower which bears a panel with the Hepburn arms surmounted with a pot of lilies.

This tower has had the reputation of being haunted for centuries.  The fisherfolk would run past it if they were returning from the harbour after dusk because the figure of a veiled lady dressed all in white was sometimes seen gliding along the ramparts between the towers and sometimes seen drifting over the Kirkhill between the castle and the cathedral.

The story of the White Lady remained a legend with no basis in fact until 1828, when a young apprentice mason called Grieve was working on pointing the tower.  His chisel slipped through a hole in the wall and fell into the upper chamber.  Young Grieve looked into the hole to recover his chisel, only to get the fright of his life.  He rescued his chisel and told Mr Hall of the Woods and Forests Department who was responsible for the maintenance of the Abbey Wall, what he had seen.  The hole in the wall was rapidly sealed up and Grieve was told not to talk about what he had seen.

Mr Hall did, however, tell a few friends and, on the 7th September 1868 before 6 a.m., accompanied by Mr Smith, the watchmaker and Mr Walker, the university librarian, he watched as Mr Grieve, now a qualified mason, made a hole in the wall that was just large enough to allow them to wriggle into the tower.

Inside the upper chamber was a dozen or so coffins,each containing the body of a perfectly preserved man. Each, that is, except one which had rotted enough to allow the body of a perfectly preserved body of a young woman with flowing dark hair, dressed in a white flowing dress and with the remnants of a white leather glove on one hand to fall through its base and onto the floor.

The men sealed up the tower again and left the chamber as they had found it, and the stories of the hauntings continued.  Dean of Guild W.T. Linskill, however, was intrigued by the stories of the White Lady, and on the 21st August 1888, he persuaded Mr Grieve to open up the upper chamber again, and the two men entered it at midnight.

When they entered the chamber they found that the coffins had been smashed and some scattered bones lay around.  There was no sign of the corpse of the beautiful lady.

People have claimed to have seen the ghost of the White Lady as recently as the 1970s, but she is recognised as a harbinger of bad luck.  Who was she?  Nobody knows for certain. 

The fact that she was in an oak coffin with a ridged lid and also that she wore a white leather glove suggests that she might have been a holy woman interred long before the Reformation.  Such corpses were often gloved so that their hands could be kissed by people looking for blessings.

Legend says that she might have been a mistress of Cardinal Beaton, or even Marion Ogilvie, the wife he set aside when he entered the Church.

I doubt if we'll ever know for sure.

Apologies if you've been following this blog.  A gremlin got into my computer and fried the motherboard.  This meant I lost a lot of my photographs, and I'm still trying to have them recovered.  Then somehow a virus crept into this computer.  Buy your lucky white heather, as the late, great Rikki Fulton used to say....

Anyway, enough talk of bad luck for the moment.  This blog entry is going to be about a very pleasant day I had in St Andrews today.  I went along with a friend to the opening of the new Fraser East Gallery at 47, South Street, St Andrews to see the exhibition of Malcolm Cheape's work.  It's on until the 17th July, so, if you're in the area go see it.

An ice cream at Jannetta's, then we took ourselves down to Castle Beach.  My friend, Jan, has started a jewellery business called Sea Glass of St Andrews, and it was such a lovely day that we thought we'd beach-comb to see if we could find some sea glass.

For those of you who haven't heard the term before, sea glass is the name for the weathered pieces of glass that you find washed up on the beach after a storm.  It comes in some remarkably beautiful shapes and colours but can be difficult to spot among the small pebbles on the tide-line.  Another name for it is mermaid's tears.

I had instructions from Jan to collect any unusual bits of pottery I might find as well, so, when I found a round, flat lump of what looked like clay, black in the middle with a terracotta edge, I added it to the collection.  I thought it was maybe one of those old 70s ashtrays that were fashionable way back in the day.

I was wrong.  As I turned it over to show Jan it became very apparent that what I'd found was this...

 

It looks like somebody has been having MUCH worse luck than me.