Thousands of golfers travel to Scotland each year, where the game originated. Many make the pilgrimage to the country's historic courses, from the dramatic hills of the Royal Dornoch in the Highlands to the coastal plains of St Andrews, home of the revered Old Course and The Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
But those who make a beeline for these hallowed 18-hole courses are missing out on two of the games' lesser-known – if equally sacred – sites. In Edinburgh, Bruntsfield Links and Leith Links are both still open to the public (Bruntsfield even hosts year-long golf), and they each played a pivotal role in transforming golf into the game it is today.
In the 1700s, these two links gave the world its first formal golf membership club and its first golf club house. It was at Leith that the first golf tournament took place, which was also the first time the rules of golf were written down. In essence: modern golf wouldn't exist without Leith and Bruntsfield.
But with the recent "shock merger announcement" of the PGA Tour and the Saudi-funded LIV Golf, one of the world's most popular sports is about to enter a new era. And as the globe's oldest golf tournament (the Open Championship) starts this week, it's worth looking back at how the sport took off.
"Edinburgh was Scotland's biggest city [in the 1400s to 1700s], with important people like lawyers and judges and even the Stuart kings, who also played golf," said golf historian Neil Laird, who runs the website Scottish Golf History. "The reason why Bruntsfield and Leith became so important is because of the proximity to [the old city of] Edinburgh and lots of important golfers."
Finding space in the city
When I first moved to Edinburgh, Bruntsfield Links quickly became my favourite park. Its green lawns are less crowded than neighbouring The Meadows, and if you choose your spot carefully, you can see two unmistakable signs of the cityscape: Edinburgh Castle, one of the oldest fortified places in Europe; and Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano that towers over the city.
Something else makes the park special: Bruntsfield has always been an open park where people can play golf while others walk about, converse or just sit and enjoy the views. One evening this summer, players were making their way across the park's short-hole course , a few feet away from sweaty runners, mothers pushing prams and students having a picnic.
This unique space-sharing arrangement goes back centuries. It's commonly believed that golf originated from the medieval Dutch game of het kolven or kolf and crossed the North Sea to eastern Scotland in the early 1400s, where it took its modern form. The Scots created a custom-made club and ball, agreed that the ball's target
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