Prestwick Golf Club

Prestwick is where it all began. The club was founded in 1851 — 57 gentlemen meeting at the Red Lion Inn, with the 13th Earl of Eglinton as its first Captain — and it took on Old Tom Morris as its first 'Keeper of the Green, Ball and Club Maker.' Old Tom laid out the original twelve holes, and it was here, on 17 October 1860, that the club staged the very first Open Championship: eight professionals over three rounds of the twelve-hole links, playing not for prize money but for a red Morocco leather Championship Belt. Willie Park Sr. of Musselburgh won it by two shots from Old Tom himself, lighting the fuse on a rivalry that defined the Championship's first decade.

What followed became the game's founding legend. Old Tom won four of the next seven Opens; then his son, Young Tom Morris, won three in a row from 1868 and, under the rules of the day, kept the Belt outright — which is why there was no Championship in 1871, and why the Claret Jug still played for today was made for 1872. The Open was held at Prestwick twenty-four times up to 1925, before the crowds and the cramped ground finally outgrew each other.

What remains is a gloriously old-fashioned links, full of blind shots, humps, hollows and history. The 1st, 'Railway,' runs hard along the old stone wall and the line of the Ayr railway; the 3rd, 'Cardinal,' is a par-5 whose fairway tumbles into a vast, deep bunker faced with black railway sleepers; and the 5th, 'Himalayas,' is a blind par-3 struck clean over a wall of dunes. It plays to par 71 over about 6,900 yards, and rewards imagination as much as ball-striking.

Prestwick sits barely a mile from Glasgow Prestwick Airport and a short drive from Royal Troon and Turnberry — the three of them making Ayrshire one of the great golfing coasts anywhere.