Historic Scotland & National Trust for Scotland places in Fife

One of Scotland's oldest standing castles, a 12th-century hall house grown into the Douglas earls of Morton's tower and ranges, with walled garden, terraces and doocot; adult £8.50, £7.50 online, half price in the first EH year.

The roofless five-sided apse of the Dominican friary chapel of 1525 on South Street, St Andrews, all that survived the Reformation of 1559; free, seen from the street at any time.

Ruined Cistercian monastery of 1217 on a hillside above the Forth, beside the abbey church and kirkyard, on the Fife Pilgrim Way; free, open all year, a steep walk up from the free shore car parks.

Romanesque abbey nave of 1128 and the burial place of Robert the Bruce, St Margaret and David I, beside the ruined palace where Charles I was born; free entry, church in use, palace ruins closed for conservation.

Scotland's best-preserved monastic buildings on an island in the Firth of Forth, with the most complete cloister in Scotland, a 13th-century fresco and wartime defences, by boat from South Queensferry; landing £8.50, ferry extra.

Royal castle begun in 1460 for Mary of Gueldres and turned into an artillery fort by the Sinclairs, on a promontory above the Forth at Kirkcaldy; free, exterior only, April to October, reached through Ravenscraig Park.

A six-storey L-plan tower house near Cupar, rebuilt in the 1610s by the scholar and judge Sir John Scot; free, seen from outside, with the grounds open April to September and parking a mile away at Hill of Tarvit.

Cliff-top palace, fortress and prison of Scotland's medieval archbishops, scene of Cardinal Beaton's murder and the siege of 1546, with its bottle dungeon and exhibition; adult £11, £10 online, half price in the first EH year.

Ruins of medieval Scotland's largest church above the sea at St Andrews, with St Rule's Tower of about 1130 and the graves of Old and Young Tom Morris; free entry to the grounds.

A medieval parish church of the 1170s on the Fife Coastal Path at Dalgety Bay, with the two-storey burial aisle and laird's loft of the Earl of Dunfermline; free, open daily, limited parking nearby.

Scotland's best preserved town gate, built in 1587 at the west end of South Street in St Andrews and renovated in 1843; free and open at all times, with traffic still passing through its central arch.

Renaissance hunting palace of the Stuart kings in a Fife village, with Britain's oldest real tennis court and a celebrated garden.

Lorimer's Edwardian house for a jute magnate, with his art collection, below-stairs rooms, terraced gardens and a hickory golf course.

14th-century tower house in the East Neuk restored by the Lorimers, with painted rooms, a sculptor's studio and an Arts and Crafts walled garden.

Scotland's most complete 17th-century burgh, with the ochre Culross Palace, its painted rooms and period garden, and cobbled streets seen in Outlander.