Understanding The Old Course
The Old Course at St Andrews is a slow burn.
Its reputation arrives long before you do. The spiritual home of golf. The world’s most famous links. Such descriptions have been repeated so often that they risk becoming part of the scenery. Yet standing on the first tee, with the stone buildings of St Andrews behind you and an improbable breadth of fairway stretching towards the Eden Estuary, the lore suddenly feels real.
The Old Course is not simply where golf has been played for a long time. Its where the game has grown out of the landscape itself.
A Landscape That Became A Golf Course
Golf may have been played across the links at St Andrews as early as the 12th century. What is certain is that by the middle of the 16th century the game was sufficiently embedded in local life for the Archbishop of St Andrews, in 1553, to confirm the community’s right to play over the links.
The Society of St Andrews Golfers followed in 1754. A decade later, the course was reduced from 22 holes to 18—a decision that eventually extended far beyond this small corner of Fife. In 1834, King William IV bestowed royal patronage upon the club and the Society became the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
The history here is not exclusively male. In 1867, St Andrews became home to the world’s first ladies’ golf club, placing the town at another significant point in the development of the game.
But dates only explain so much. St Andrews matters because golf has never felt entirely separate from everyday life here.
Bernard Darwin captured this beautifully in The Golf Courses of the British Isles in 1910, describing the particular pleasure of seeing “a whole town given up to golf.” More than a century later, that remains part of the appeal. The links sit beside streets, houses, hotels, university buildings and the North Sea. Players carrying clubs mingle with students, residents and visitors. The game belongs to the town and the town belongs to the game.
A Course That Takes Its Time
For all its fame, the Old Course can be surprisingly elusive on first acquaintance.
First-time visitors may wonder what, precisely, they are supposed to be seeing. Images make the links appear flatter and simpler than it really is. On foot, another landscape emerges: humps, folds, hollows and ripples; bunkers disappearing into the ground; subtle slopes that alter a player’s stance and line.
The Old Course needs to be studied rather than just admired.
Dr Alister MacKenzie understood this quality well. In The Spirit of St Andrews, he observed that a good golf course is “not necessarily a course which appeals the first time one plays over it,” but one that grows with repeated visits.
Few courses embody that idea better.
Many of the Old Course’s strategic questions are deliberately difficult to read. What looks safe from the tee may leave a poor angle into the green. What appears too aggressive can reveal itself as the smart play. Bunkers hidden from view influence golfers even when they cannot be seen.
Tom Doak has argued that this opacity helps explain why some visitors initially consider the Old Course overrated: its best pin positions are not always encountered by everyday players, while many of its strategic features are so subtle that they can be almost invisible to first timers.
Perhaps that is precisely the point. St Andrews does not perform for the newcomer. It expects you to pay attention.
The First Tee
And yet there is nothing understated about the feeling of beginning a round here.
The opening fairway is famously generous, but its width does little to calm your nerves. The Royal and Ancient clubhouse sits behind you. The Swilcan Burn waits ahead. People wander nearby. The first shot at St Andrews can feel simultaneously like the easiest and most difficult shot in golf.
From there, the familiar names begin to appear.
The Swilcan Burn. Hell Bunker. The Principal’s Nose. The Road Hole. The Valley of Sin.
Few landscapes in sport possess such a vocabulary.
The 17th—the Road Hole—remains the course’s most formidable icon. The drive asks the golfer to take a line over the corner of the Old Course Hotel before an approach towards a narrow, treacherous green protected by the Road Hole bunker on one side and the road on the other. Few holes carry this combination of history, anxiety and theatre.
Then comes the walk home.
Across the Swilcan Bridge, past the ancient stone that has witnessed generations of champions and amateurs, and towards the broad 18th fairway. The town returns to view. Beyond the green lies the Royal and Ancient clubhouse; short of it, the Valley of Sin waits for one final mistake.
It is difficult to imagine a more thrilling closing scene.
The Scale Of The Greens
Among the Old Course’s greatest features are its extraordinary putting surfaces.
The boundaries between fairway, fringe and green can seem almost arbitrary. Everything flows together. The closely cropped fairways can be faster and more undulating than the greens at many clubs.
Then there is the scale.
Seven of the Old Course’s greens are shared by two holes, creating the famous double greens. Some occupy more than an acre. A ball can be safely on the putting surface and still belong to another postcode.
Their size is jaw-dropping at first, then strategically fascinating. Distance control becomes as important with the putter as it is with a wedge. The contours that seemed insignificant from 150 yards suddenly become valleys and ridges beneath your feet.
The Old Course has a habit of changing scale depending on where you stand.
Designed By Time
There is no single architect behind St Andrews. Its principal designer was the landscape itself: wind, sand, animals, and generations of golfers gradually discovering routes through the dunes.
But several people helped shape today’s course.
Allan Robertson, one of the great early figures in professional golf, widened fairways in 1848, developed the enormous double greens and created the famous Road Hole. His protégé, Old Tom Morris, continued refining the links over subsequent decades.
Their achievement was not to restrict the land, but to understand and use what was already there.
That distinction remains important. The Old Course feels as though it began with accidents rather than intention. Bunkers sit where hazards naturally developed. Fairways merge into greens. Holes overlap. Outward and inward journeys share enormous stretches of ground.
On paper, it shouldn’t work. On the ground, it is endlessly interesting.
Golf’s Original Reference Point
The curious thing about the Old Course is that its greatness becomes clearer after leaving it.
Certain shots return to mind. A bunker you never noticed from the tee. An angle that suddenly makes sense. A contour that carried the ball somewhere unexpected. You begin to understand why golfers can spend a lifetime studying the place.
Tom Simpson once suggested that if everyone understood the Old Course, what constitutes good golf would become very simple: he could simply say “St Andrews” and leave it there.
It is an audacious claim. But after several centuries, the Old Course continues to make its case.
Every golfer should play it once, certainly. But once rather misses the point.
The Old Course is not a monument to be visited and checked off a list. It is a landscape to return to: in different weather, with different winds, different pins and, ideally, a little more understanding each time.
Its greatest trick is not that it has survived for centuries.
It is that after all those centuries, it refuses to give everything away.