Fife

Fife is a council area, historic county, registration county and lieutenancy area of Scotland. It is situated between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, with inland boundaries with Perth and Kinross (i.e. the historic counties of Perthshire and Kinross-shire) and Clackmannanshire. By custom it is widely held to have been one of the major Pictish kingdoms, known as Fib, and is still commonly known as the Kingdom of Fife within Scotland. A person from Fife is known as a Fifer. In older documents the county was very occasionally known by the anglicisation Fifeshire. Fife is Scotland's third largest local authority area by population. It has a resident population of just under 367,000, over a third of whom live in the three principal settlements, Dunfermline, Kirkcaldy and Glenrothes. On the northeast coast of Fife lies the historic town of St Andrews, home to the University of St Andrews—the most ancient university of Scotland and one of the oldest universities in the world—and the Old Course at St Andrews, considered the world's oldest golf course. History Fife, bounded to the north by the Firth of Tay and to the south by the Firth of Forth, is a natural peninsula whose political boundaries have changed little over the ages. The Pictish king list and De Situ Albanie documents of the Poppleton manuscript mention the division of the Pictish realm or Albany into seven sub-kingdoms, one being Fife. The earliest known reference to the common epithet The Kingdom of Fife dates from only 1678, in a proposition that the term derives from the quasi-regal privileges of the Earl of Fife. The notion of a kingdom may derive from a misinterpretation of an extract from Wyntoun. The name is recorded as Fib in A.D. 1150 and Fif in 1165. It was often associated with Fothriff. The hill-fort of Clatchard Craig, near Newburgh, was occupied as an important Pictish stronghold between the sixth and eighth centuries AD.