The Old Course at St Andrews is where the game took its modern shape. Golf has been played on this ground since the fifteenth century, and the links you walk today is recognisably the one Old Tom Morris refined in the 1800s.
Playing the Old Course
The opening and closing holes share the widest fairway in championship golf, but the course defends itself with hidden bunkers, firm running ground, and the famous double greens. Local knowledge is everything — which is where a caddie earns their fee.
The 17th — the Road Hole — is among the hardest par fours anywhere, played over the corner of a reconstructed railway shed to a green guarded by a road and a deep pot bunker. Finish across the Swilcan Bridge and up the 18th, and you have walked the most photographed closing hole in golf.