Excerpt from The Fringes of Fife

Much has happened since, in light mood and in light marching order, these walks along the seamargin of Fife were first taken, some three-and-thirty years ago. The coasts of 'the Kingdom' present a surface hardened and compacted by time and weather - a kind of chequer-board of the ancient and the modern - of the work of nature and of man, and it yields slowly to the hand of change. But here also old pieces have fallen out of the pattern and have been replaced by new pieces. Fife is not in all respects the Fife it was when, more than three decades ago, and with the towers of St Andrews beckoning us forward, we turned our backs upon it with a promise, implied if not expressed, and until now unfulfilled, to return and complete what had been begun.

In the interval, the ways and methods of locomotion have been revolutionised, and with them men's ideas and practice concerning travel and its objects. Pedestrianism is far on the way to go out of fashion. In 1894 the 'push-bike' was a comparatively new invention, it was not even known by the name, it had ceased to be a velocipede, but was still a bicycle.

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