Leith Links: Where Golf Wrote Its First Rules
Why is it significant?
Let your eye run across this wide municipal lawn, with its football goals, cycle paths and benches... and now try to see a golf course. Not a manicured one, but rough seaside turf, grazing sheep, washing laid out to dry, and gentlemen in tricorn hats striding between five very long holes.
Key Facts
| Place | Leith Links: Where Golf Wrote Its First Rules |
|---|---|
| Address | Links Gardens, Leith Links, Edinburgh EH6, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.97180, -3.16220 |
| Part of Walk | Leith Uncovered: The Shore, the Docks and the Birthplace of Golf's Rules in Edinburgh |
| Generated | Generated |
Let your eye run across this wide municipal lawn, with its football goals, cycle paths and benches... and now try to see a golf course. Not a manicured one, but rough seaside turf, grazing sheep, washing laid out to dry, and gentlemen in tricorn hats striding between five very long holes.
In 1744 a club of Gentlemen Golfers asked the town council of Edinburgh for a prize, and the council gave them a silver club, to be played for every year here on Leith Links. To run the competition fairly, they wrote down thirteen rules. They are the oldest known written rules of golf, ten years older than those of St Andrews. The very first one tells you to tee your ball within a club's length of the hole you have just played... there were no tee boxes, only the turf and a pinch of sand.
The first winner of the silver club was a surgeon, John Rattray. A year later, in 1745, he joined Bonnie Prince Charlie's rising as a surgeon to the Jacobite army, and after the defeat at Culloden he was taken prisoner. The story goes that his life was saved partly through the influence of Duncan Forbes of Culloden, the government's senior judge in Scotland... and a fellow golfer. Friendship or politics, nobody can quite say, but Rattray survived.
Royal legends cling to these Links too. It is said that Charles I was in the middle of a round here in 1641 when a messenger brought news of rebellion in Ireland, and that he abandoned the game at once. Another tale has the future James VII, then Duke of York, winning a match here with a humble shoemaker as his partner, and sharing the stake so generously that the shoemaker built himself a house on the Canongate. Lovely stories... with very little paperwork behind them.
In the end golf outgrew the Links. The ground became crowded and worn, and the Gentlemen Golfers, later the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, moved to Musselburgh in 1836 and then to Muirfield, where the Open Championship is still played. Leave the Links at their north-west corner and walk up Constitution Street to Bernard Street, where the road suddenly widens almost into a square.