How East Lothian’s Firth of Forth shoreline became one of the game’s great golfing heartlands

The geology did it first. Along East Lothian’s coastline, withdrawing glaciers left behind ridges of sand and shell-rich turf, thin-soiled, windswept and quick-draining — ground that resisted the plough but invited the club. Links land, in the original sense, is simply the transitional ground between shore and farmland, and East Lothian has it in abundance: from Longniddry and Gullane in the west to North Berwick and beyond, the Firth of Forth edge is one long argument for the game’s origins in exactly this kind of landscape.

Golf has been documented in East Lothian since at least the sixteenth century, and the county’s claim on the game’s history is not merely sentimental. The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers — one of the oldest golf clubs in the world, founded in 1744 — eventually settled at Muirfield, near Gullane, after earlier homes at Leith and Musselburgh. Muirfield has hosted The Open Championship more times than almost any other course in the rotation, and its close-cropped links, exposed to the Forth winds and organised in two concentric loops, is considered among the most rigorous and equitable tests in the game. There is no house style here; the rough is the rough, the wind is the wind.

Gullane itself sits at the centre of a cluster of courses that would shame a county three times the size. Gullane No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 rise up the distinctive hill behind the village, each offering views of the Bass Rock and the Lothian plain that reward even the most wayward round. The hill is ancient rabbit-grazing land, and the turf has a fine, springy quality that seems almost too good to be accidental.

North Berwick’s West Links is the county’s most theatrical course: the Firth lies just beyond the boundary wall at the ninth hole, the Bass Rock sits in permanent view, and the signature Redan hole — the famous par-three fifteenth, copied across the golfing world — is among the most imitated holes ever designed. The course dates from 1832, and its character owes everything to the shaped dunes, the sea wind and the compressed history of the place.

East Lothian does not market its golf coast so much as simply possess it. The sand was laid down long before the first iron was swung, and the landscape has barely needed to try.