The History of Golf in Scotland: From Banned Sport to Global Game

Golf was banned in Scotland in 1457. The law passed by James II's Parliament was specific: "fute-ball and Golfe be utterly cryed downe and not usit". The problem wasn't morality. It was archery. The men of Scotland were neglecting their archery practice — the essential military skill of the era — in favour of hitting balls around the links land east of Edinburgh, and the king needed archers who could actually shoot.

The ban was reaffirmed in 1471 and again in 1491. It clearly didn't work.

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The first courses

The links land east of Edinburgh — the term "links" refers to the sandy, undulating ground between the beach and the cultivated farmland — was common ground, used by rabbits, livestock, and eventually golfers. Leith Links, on the coast two miles from Edinburgh's city centre, is documented as a golf course from at least 1744, when the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers wrote the first codified rules of golf: thirteen articles that remain, in adapted form, the basis of the game's laws today.

The Honourable Company later moved to Musselburgh Links — still playable, now a public course with a racing track on the inside — and eventually to Muirfield, where they remain as one of the most exclusive golf clubs on earth.

St Andrews was playing golf in the same period. A 1552 charter confirmed the townspeople's right to use the links for golf and other recreation; this is the document that underpins the Links Trust's management of the Old Course as a public resource today. The R&A — the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews — was founded in 1754 as the Society of St Andrews Golfers. It received its Royal prefix in 1834 from William IV and became the governing body for golf outside the United States and Mexico, a role it held until 2004 when the modern R&A rules-setting body was formally established.

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The Open Championship

The Open Championship — the first major, the oldest in the game — began at Prestwick Golf Club in Ayrshire in 1860. Eight players entered the inaugural championship. Willie Park of Musselburgh won with a score of 174 for thirty-six holes. He received a morocco leather belt, now in the R&A collection at St Andrews.

Prestwick hosted the first twelve Opens, all won by either Old Tom Morris, Young Tom Morris, Willie Park or Tom Kidd — Scottish professionals from clubs within twenty miles of each other. The Championship spread to St Andrews and Musselburgh in 1873 and 1874, then settled into a rotation between the two venues and Prestwick until the 1890s, when Muirfield and Royal St George's in Kent entered the rota.

The early Open was a different event. Prize money was small; professional golfers were employees of clubs, not celebrities. Entry was open to anyone who could get there. The field in the first decade included working men who played for the prize, amateurs who played for the prestige, and professionals who understood the difference between a good wind and a bad one in a way that the amateurs did not.

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Old Tom Morris

Tom Morris — "Old Tom," to distinguish him from his son — is the most important figure in the physical history of Scottish golf. Born in St Andrews in 1821, he became the greenkeeper at Prestwick in 1851 and returned to St Andrews in 1864 as keeper of the green, a post he held for 38 years. He won the Open Championship four times (1861, 1862, 1864, 1867) and designed or remodelled dozens of courses across Scotland and Ireland, including Prestwick, Royal Dornoch, Muirfield, Carnoustie, and what is now Royal County Down.

The courses Morris laid out share characteristics that became the template for links golf: holes that move through the natural topography rather than imposing order on it, greens positioned where the land levels naturally, fairways that funnel the ball into the hazards the landscape provides. Morris didn't design traps; he noticed where the ball would go and let it go there.

His son, Young Tom Morris, won four consecutive Opens from 1868 to 1872 and is credited with driving the development of the game in the same period — he played with a fluency and power that his contemporaries couldn't match. He died in 1875 at 24 years old, his health having collapsed following the death of his wife and child. His grave is in the churchyard behind the 18th green at St Andrews. Most visitors who walk past it don't know who he was.

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The course architects

The generation after Morris produced the architects who shaped modern Scottish golf. James Braid — five-time Open Champion (1901, 1905, 1906, 1908, 1910) and prodigious course designer — laid out or remodelled over 200 courses in Scotland including Carnoustie (expansion), Gleneagles, and dozens of rural courses that still use his routing today. His design approach was faster and more prolific than Morris's; he would arrive by train, walk the land, mark the holes, and return to London having laid out a golf course in a day.

Willie Park Jr designed Sunningdale. Harry Colt designed Royal Portrush. Alister MacKenzie — born in Normanton, trained at Cambridge — designed Cypress Point, Augusta National and Royal Melbourne before his death in 1934, and co-designed Lahinch and did early work at several Scottish clubs.

The 20th century saw less Scottish course construction than the Victorian era; the land was largely allocated. The modern exceptions — Kingsbarns (Kyle Phillips, 2000), Castle Stuart (Mark Parsinen and Gil Hanse, 2009) — were built on sites the Victorians passed over as too difficult or expensive.

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How the game spread

Golf left Scotland in the luggage of Scottish emigrants. The Royal Calcutta Golf Club, founded 1829, is the oldest outside Britain. Royal Montreal was founded in 1873 by a Scotsman. The first American clubs — St Andrews in Yonkers (1888), Shinnecock Hills (1891) — were founded by Americans who had played golf in Scotland and wanted to recreate it.

The game spread downward through the social classes at different speeds in different countries. In Scotland, the links had always been public or semi-public land — the Old Course was, and remains, a public course. In England and America, golf developed initially through private clubs accessible only to the wealthy, a pattern that shaped the social character of the game in those countries for the next century.

Scotland remained the reference point throughout: the courses visitors wanted to play, the standard against which other courses were measured, the source of the professionals who designed and taught elsewhere. When Willie Park Jr moved to North America to design courses and teach golf, or when Donald Ross settled in Pinehurst and designed over 400 American courses, or when Tom Simpson went to Belgium and the Netherlands — the export of Scottish golf knowledge and taste is what connected links land on the east coast of Scotland to the fairways of Augusta, Pebble Beach and Augusta National.

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Where to experience it

The history of Scottish golf is most legible at the venues that haven't changed. Musselburgh Links is the oldest course in the world still in continuous use. Prestwick Golf Club has the layout that hosted the first twenty-four Opens largely intact. St Andrews Old Course uses a routing that dates to the 1760s. The R&A Clubhouse — not open to the public, but visible from the 18th fairway — is where the rules of golf were formalised.

The Scottish Golf Museum sits at the entrance to the Old Course and holds the world's largest collection of golf artefacts including the original Championship Belt. It's free for Old Course ticket holders, £8 for others, and is the most honest hour you'll spend learning what the game actually is.