Four Years Here and You Saw Nothing?

Stop looking for escapism — visit Scotland

If you pay close attention to your surroundings, you will realise that everything you’re looking for is already there. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez writes that if you get to know as little as the square of your town, you will come to understand the world. Macondo, the mythical town at the heart of his masterpiece, wasn’t just a part of Márquez’s imagination — it was a reflection of his childhood in Aracataca, Colombia. But it was also something far greater — a microcosm of Latin America’s history and culture. Though a physical town named Macondo doesn’t exist in reality, it exists in a way that feels even more real. To Márquez, everyone lives in their own Macondo, be it a small town, village, city square, or neighbourhood — those places we overlook in our restless search for ‘something else’. We are often so busy chasing the things we think we want elsewhere that we forget to look around and appreciate what’s already here. Often, it’s dissatisfaction that drives this phenomenon. Yet before looking ‘somewhere else’, I encourage you to think whether you have truly looked hard enough at what’s right in front of you.

I realised this one day while I was wandering around with a friend — we had our Saturday free and wanted to do something about it. “Maybe Edinburgh or Aberdeen,” he said. “There’s not much to see around here anyway, is there?” Not much to see? I remember wondering if we had even been living in the same St Andrews these past four years.

From the Mount Melville forests to Dunino Den, the Coastal Path, or the walk to Crail, St Andrews is full to the brim with natural beauty. If you love the sea, you have East and West Sands. If you prefer the countryside, Lade Braes is really close. For snow, December through February never disappoints. For the adventurous, there’s an abandoned farm past the Cairnsmill Caravan Park and Crawford Priory near Cupar, perfect for urban exploration. For lovers of flora and fauna, there’s the swan lake at Craigtoun Country Park or the wild ducks around Mount Melville, Highland cows along the Coastal Path, or the field of yellow blooms in Grange Road during springtime. These aren’t hidden treasures — and I am listing them precisely to make you curious. Don’t let yourself leave St Andrews without exploring all it has to offer.

Reading Week tempts us all to always visit ‘somewhere else’ and travel to more ‘exotic’ places. But for most of us students, isn’t St Andrews already ‘somewhere else'? The novelty seems to fade so quickly, and with it, our curiosity to enjoy it. We forget that the town we now treat as mundane is a place others dream of visiting. How can we claim to have lived in Scotland for four years if we haven’t experienced St Andrews in its entirety? Have you seen a Highland cow? Camped in the Highlands? Tasted Anstruther’s famous fish and chips? Visited Crail or took a boat tour of the Isle of May? Scotland offers countless incredible experiences that we, as students, often overlook in our desire to travel elsewhere.

Travelling far and often is very much praised by our generation, so much so that we often seem to constantly escape from wherever we are. We often forget to take the time to enjoy one place for long enough and start searching right where we are — uncover more depth instead of more surface. We chase novelty elsewhere when, more often than not, it’s waiting for us right at our doorstep — in the beauty of our town, the Scottish nature, the friendships we form, and the routines that give our days so much more than we actually enjoy. Márquez believed that, to know the world, we need not look further than our little city square, and if we get to know it well enough (really well) we will find nothing newer than that. "Macondo is not so much a place as a state of mind," he said. Perhaps all we need to do is embrace that mindset and see the magic in what’s already here.

Illustration by Isabella Abbott