Scotland's national day is the 30th of November. Here's the story of the saint, the saltire and the town, and a bottle worth raising to all three.
Burns Night gets the haggis. Hogmanay gets the fireworks. But Scotland's actual national day, St Andrew's Day on the 30th of November, tends to slip by with barely a mention. We think it deserves better. At the very least, it deserves a dram.
Who was St Andrew?
Andrew was a fisherman from Galilee and one of the first of the twelve apostles. He's said to have been crucified at Patras in Greece, and to have asked for a diagonal cross because he didn't feel worthy of dying on the same shape of cross as Jesus. That X-shaped cross is the saltire, and it's been Scotland's symbol ever since.
He never set foot in Scotland, as far as anyone knows. That hasn't stopped us claiming him. The Declaration of Arbroath named him as Scotland's patron saint back in 1320, and he's shared out with Greece, Romania, Russia and Barbados too. A popular man.
A cross in the sky
The saltire comes with a legend of its own. Around the 9th century, so the story goes, a Pictish king called Óengus (or Angus) was facing a larger army of Angles near what's now Athelstaneford in East Lothian. The night before the battle he prayed for help, and the next day a white X of cloud appeared against a blue sky. Óengus won, and he swore that St Andrew would be Scotland's patron saint from then on.
A white cross on a blue sky. Look up on a clear day in East Lothian and you can still see where they got the idea.
The town that took his name
Legend has it that St Rule (or Regulus) carried relics of the saint to the east coast of Fife, and the settlement that grew up around them became St Andrews. It went on to have the biggest cathedral in Scotland, the country's oldest university and, a little later, the Old Course, making it the home of golf. Not bad going for a town built around a few bones.
Which brings us to our bottle.
St Andrews, on a bottle
Our St Andrews blended malt wears Samuel Bough's oil painting Off St. Andrews (1856) on its canvas label, reproduced with the permission of the National Galleries of Scotland. It's a real painting by a named artist, not a stock photo, and when the whisky's gone, the bottle is very much worth keeping.
It's the obvious dram for the 30th. It also makes a good gift for anyone who studied there, anyone who's walked the Old Course (or hacked their way round it), or a homesick Scot abroad who misses the east coast wind.
The rest of the collection
St Andrews is one of a set. Our Iconic Scotland collection puts paintings from the national collection on bottles of blended malt. There's Loch Ness, Skye, Edinburgh, Stirling and Glasgow, plus Bothwell, our own home village on the Clyde.
For faces rather than places, the Famous Scots collection does the same with portraits: Robert Burns, Mary, Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Sir Walter Scott, Adam Smith and David Hume.
How to mark the day
Since 2007, St Andrew's Day has been an official bank holiday in Scotland, though plenty of employers haven't quite caught on yet. If you do get the day off, there are worse ways to spend it than a ceilidh, a decent dinner and a dram raised to the saint. If you don't, the evening's still yours.
Either way, bottles are blended and labelled to order, so order by mid-November to have one in hand for the 30th. Or blend your own in the Lab and put your own saltire-blue name on the label.
Happy St Andrew's Day, and slàinte mhath.