Construction began in 1158 under Bishop Arnold. The work outlasted bishops, kings, and architectural fashions. The west end was finished, then blown down in a storm, then rebuilt between 1272 and 1279. The cathedral was finally completed in 1318, with a central tower, six turrets, and an interior long enough to hold any procession the medieval church could imagine. A fire damaged it in 1378. Restoration finished in 1440. The cathedral was served by the Augustinian Canons of St Andrews Cathedral Priory, themselves successors to the older Celtic-Christian Culdees who had kept the apostle's shrine before them. Pilgrims came in their thousands. The cathedral, the priory, the bishop's castle, and the university that grew out of the priory school made St Andrews the most important ecclesiastical town in Scotland.

On the cathedral grounds stands an older, narrower structure: St Rule's Tower, 33 metres high, built in grey sandstone ashlar in the 11th century. It was the tower of the earlier church that the cathedral replaced. The legend says St Rule, also called St Regulus, brought the relics of St Andrew from Patras in Greece to this spot in the 4th century. The truth is murkier, but the tower is real. It served as a landmark and a seamark, visible from miles offshore, drawing pilgrims to the apostle's bones. The original ladders between wooden floors were replaced in the 18th century by a stone spiral stair. You can climb it today. The view at the top takes in the cathedral ruins, the town, the harbour, the West Sands, the Old Course in the distance, and the cold blue plate of the North Sea.

In June 1559, a mob whose preaching had been provided by John Knox ransacked the cathedral. The interior was destroyed: altars, statues, painted glass, reliquaries, the accumulated devotional craft of four centuries. By 1561 the building had been abandoned. At about the end of the 16th century the central tower collapsed, taking the north wall with it. For two centuries townsfolk quarried the ruins for building stone. Roofs went up around St Andrews using cathedral masonry. Nothing was done to preserve what remained until 1826, when antiquarian sensibility caught up with the loss. Since then, the ruins have been cared for: the ground plan cut into the turf, the surviving gables stabilized, the priory and cemetery laid out for visitors. The east and west gables stand. Most of the south wall of the nave survives. The west wall of the south transept stands. The arcade columns are gone, but you can see where they were. The cathedral now exists chiefly as an outline against the sky.

The cathedral burial ground reads like a census of important Scottish life. Saint Andrew is buried here, in part: a few bones that survived the iconoclasms. So is Robert Chambers, the publisher and author of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, an evolutionary precursor to Darwin. So are Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, the father and son who shaped early modern golf at St Andrews; Young Tom died at 24 in 1875, broken-hearted by the death of his wife and child, and his grave still draws golfers from every continent. Adam Ferguson, the Enlightenment philosopher, is here. Allan Robertson, who is sometimes called the first professional golfer, lies a few rows over. In the Eastern Cemetery rests Warington Baden-Powell, founder of the Sea Scouts, and the artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, and Vice-Admiral Dashwood Fowler Moir who fought at the Battle of Jutland and died protecting an Atlantic convoy in the next war. The cathedral could not survive what was done to it. The people who chose to be buried in its shadow are the cathedral's continued life.