East from Stirling, and in the middle of the Lowlands, lie the Ochil Hills. Their southern face forms a steep escarpment 2000ft high, more impressive than some of the hills on the Highland line to the north and easy to mistake for the Highlands to the visitor without a map. Once up the escarpment, perhaps following the route of one of the tumbling burns with waterfalls, the summits are broad whalebacks sloping gently to Gleneagles to the north, with its famous hotel and golf course. These hills make fine walking and are strangely neglected except by locals - perhaps because the Highlands lie so close by. High in these hills, looking down on the broadening plain of the Forth, sits Castle Campbell in its eyrie. This was once called Castle Gloom, sitting above a ravine containing the Burn of Sorrow, and the village of Dolour, now Dollar. All these gloomy names fail to hide the beauty of this area.

Soon one finds oneself in the peninsula of Fife, or, as the locals would have it, the 'Kingdom of Fife.' Despite being so close to the centres of early government in Scotland, Fife always remained a place apart, and the natives' trickyness and thrawness has always been a caricature about the area. With the Forth bridge reaching the peninsula from the south, and the Tay bridge connecting it to Dundee in the north, Locals say that 'Fife is the only county one has to pay to leave and to enter,' although one suspects they are secretly fine with the idea. Fife, since early times, has been an area of fisherfolk and traders with the Low Countries, and Fifers generally stayed out of the wars which raged across Scotland over the centuries, sticking to their own ways. As a result, Fife has the best collection of intact old villages in Scotland, and these villages are a delight to visit. From Culross, not far from Stirling, round to the finest ones of St Monans, Pittenweem, Anstruther, and Crail, the 16th and 17thc. native architecture has survived well, often painted in bright pastel shades. This is a great place to visit in winter, for when the west coast is gripped by dark, depressing rain clouds, the east coast is often clear, and the winter sun makes for ideal light conditions throughout the day. At the tip of the peninsula a fine walk takes one to one of the most interesting towns in the whole of Scotland, St Andrews. St Andrews once had the second biggest cathedral in Britain, and was the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland in medieaval times, but the Protestant reformation swept savagely through Scotland, and the cathedral was destroyed by the Taleban-like reformers as a 'symbol of Catholicism.'

One would think that would have been the start of a decline in St Andrews, but this was not to be. Prior to the wars of independence, Scottish scholars had travelled to Oxford or Cambridge to study, but this avenue was denied them during and after the wars. They then travelled to Europe, to Holland and France, but it was decided that it was time for Scotland to have her own universities, and in 1411 the first Scottish university was founded in St Andrews. Others soon followed, in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Aberdeen. The university kept St Andrews a busy town, and today in winter students make up a quarter of the population. Living so close to each other in a small town makes St Andrews the most social if claustrophobic of all Scotland's universities, and with a large number of students with well connected parents, it is also the best in the country for the sake of future employment. Indeed recently, interest in being a student at St Andrews University went through the roof - especially amongst starry-eyed, predatory young American females. This was probably to do with the best-connected student in the whole of Britain - William Wales, heir to the British thorne - choosing to study at St Andrews for the last few years. However, after the initial excitement, the choice of St Andrews turned out to be an astute one for the royals. They tend to get left alone to their own devices when in Scotland, as it is too far away for most London-based journalists and royal-spotting tourists to bother with.

A university and a cathedral would be plenty for most small towns, but St Andrews has of course one further string to its bow - it is famous as being the home of golf and it is at St Andrews that the rules of the game are formulated. In summer, when the students have gone, the town is thick with tourists, many of them golfers from all round the world come to pay homage to the birthplace of their obsession. St Andrews certainly has plenty more to offer the tourist, with a couple of beaches, and the best pre-union architecture in Scotland after Edinburgh. The weather too is a bonus compared to the rest of the country, although I doubt if many tourists visit Scotland for that!

Away from the coast Fife is not very intesting, being rolling farmland. Indeed, it has always been viewed as such, as shown by the quote at the head of the chapter - the beggars mantle being the pre-improvement farmland and the fringe of gold being the coastal trading and fishing villages. Inland, at the very centre of medieaval Scotland, lies Perth.