Scotland’s kingdom of Fife is home to one of the most revered women in Catholic history. Yet remarkably, the spiritual influence of her work was once at risk of being cemented over, lost forever beneath a car park. Perhaps there is a lesson here: to look beyond the surface.
On a road map, Fife appears to be a mere thoroughfare; the necessary route beyond Edinburgh, taking you to Perthshire and the Highlands. Take a step back and it forms the shape of a peninsula, bordered by the Firth of Tay to the north, the North Sea to the east, and the Firth of Forth to the south.
Ostensibly, it is notorious for the red oxide Forth Rail Bridge (finished in 1882 and recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015), the Forth Road Bridge (opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1958) and the newly erected Queensferry Crossing (the longest three-tower, cable-stayed bridge in the world). Further afield, Fife is perhaps known for the town of St Andrews – the home of golf, the oldest university in Scotland, and St Andrews Abbey. King James IV defined the region as a “beggar’s mantle fringed with gold.”
But from the 117-mile coastline to the interior, there is far more than what meets the eye. Fife is a land of Roman settlements, medieval battles, kings and queens, Pictish stones and Mesolithic beginnings. Its misted coastline fascinated the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and French science fiction writer Jules Verne; the dark rocks saved the life of sixth-century Saint Teneu, pregnant with Saint Mungo.
Fife has a dark past of witch-hunts and myth, a proud history of saints and explorers, and a heritage of North Sea trade, coal mining, agriculture and industry. It also became the adopted home of the lesser-known patroness of Scotland: Saint Margaret.
If you travel five miles east from the west Fife mining villages (Valleyfield, Newmills, Torryburn, Crombie) you reach the Royal Burgh of Dunfermline, the original capital of Scotland. There, opposite Carnegie Hall, one of the smallest clues to Fife and Scotland’s history is on display: the shoulder bone of Margaret Atheling. The daughter of the exiled English prince, Edward Atheling, Margaret was born around 1045 under the protection of the Catholic Kingdom of Hungary. Upon the death of her childless great-uncle, Edward the Confessor, Margaret’s family returned to England in the hope that her father might be named the new king of England. Fate, and William of Normandy, had other plans. Soon after arriving on English shores, Margaret’s father died in mysterious circumstances (murder being the most plausible), and her brother, Edgar Atheling, was deemed too young to take up the throne. With William the Conqueror sensing an opportunity, Margaret’s widowed mother took her two daughters north for safety. Edgar was exiled to Normandy.
While some historians insist they were already engaged to marry, and others suggest that Margaret and Malcolm had long since planned to meet, the next chapter of the young woman’s life has been romanticised throughout the ages. After two years in Northumbria, Margaret’s mother decided it was time to take her family back to the continent, possibly in a bid to retrieve her exiled son. Legend has it that a violent storm drove the family north to the Kingdom of Scotland, where they were shipwrecked in 1068. The widowed King Malcolm III welcomed the lost family, and he and Margaret soon fell in love. They were married in 1070.
Margaret Atheling was King Malcolm III’s queen consort until her death in 1093. Known throughout Europe as the “Pearl of Scotland”, Margaret became recognised as a devout Catholic for her pious influence on “wild” Malcolm, focusing her reign on the needs of the poor, establishing Dunfermline Abbey with Benedictine monks (still a working church today), restoring Iona Abbey, celebrating pilgrimages, and personally providing food for orphans and the seriously ill.
Margaret created the original Queen’s ferry crossing, allowing pilgrims to better make their journeys to the relics of Andrew the Apostle (Saint Andrew), washing the feet of travellers on their way. Today Queensferry Crossing Bridge, the bustling town of South Queensferry (featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped) and the cobbled village of North Queensferry are testament to one of her lasting legacies (and named after her). She also had eight children, with four of the boys – Edmund, Edgar, Alexander and Saint David I – becoming future kings of Scotland, and one of her two daughters, Matilda, marrying Henry I of England.
Tragically, Margaret’s husband and their eldest son, Edward, were killed in the Battle of Alnwick on 13 November 1093. Not yet fifty years old, Margaret died of grief just three days later. Along with Scottish kings, queens and Robert the Bruce, Malcolm and Margaret are buried together in Dunfermline Abbey – the abbey that she founded.
As a consequence of Margaret’s canonisation by Pope Innocent IV in 1250, Dunfermline became a prominent centre of pilgrimage throughout medieval Europe. On 8 October 1290, Pope Nicholas IV stated that those pilgrims who visited the shrine of Saint Margaret would benefit from “an indulgence of a year and 40 days’ penance” – a much-desired guarantee of relief from the time to be spent purifying the soul in purgatory.
There is evidence of the persistence of Margaret’s following all the way up until the time of the Reformation, and her name is attributed to various places and objects – many visitable today: St Margaret’s Stone, St Margaret’s Cave, St Margaret’s Well, St Margaret’s Hope, and, of course, North and South Queensferry.
Testament to both the silent humility of her life and the blind march of urbanisation, perhaps the most profound trace we have of Margaret’s life is to be found all but buried under the Glen Bridge car park in the city of Dunfermline. Wedged between the end of the West Fife Cycle Way and the beginning of the historic old town, Saint Margaret’s Cave sits in the corner, saved from total submersion in 1962 thanks to local outcry. Naturally formed, this simple, unassuming space once proved a sanctuary for thought and contemplation. It was not until 1899 that the first Catholic pilgrimage to Saint Margaret’s Cave took place (the Catholic hierarchy was re-established in Scotland in 1878).
On her feast day on 16 November, pilgrimages to this small cave in Fife continue. In the face of change and far from the beaten path, worshippers keep alive the memory of Scotland’s most influential woman, ensuring the impact of her defiant faith lives on.
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