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Golf
in Fife.

It’s 20:54 in Fife.
Fife

Where to play golf in Fife.

Fife is where golf grew up, and playing here feels like a pilgrimage even if you only ever pick up a club on holiday. Beyond the famous links at St Andrews there's a links laid out by Old Tom Morris on the rocky shore at the very tip of the East Neuk. There's also a little nine-hole course where you play with old hickory-shafted clubs, just as golfers did a century ago. When you've finished, the museum of golf beside the Old Course tells the story of more than four hundred years of the game. Book your tee times early in summer, and allow for the wind off the sea.

Kingarrock Hickory Golf→
Crail Golfing Society→
The R&A World Golf Museum→
Did you know20 hours ago

Old Tom Morris, four times winner of the Open, was born on North Street in St Andrews in 1821, the son of a weaver.

He kept the greens of the Old Course for nearly forty years and laid out golf courses all over Scotland. A plaque marks the house he was born in.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife
Today19 hours agoFifeKingarrock Hickory GolfAttractionFifeThe R&A World Golf MuseumAttractionFifeCrail Golfing SocietyAttraction

A day for the links.

8° and clear: the sort of afternoon the coast courses were laid out for.

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True or false19 hours ago

True or false: a round of golf has eighteen holes because a bottle of whisky holds eighteen drams.

Did you know18 hours ago

The fifth hole on the Balcomie links at Crail is called Hell's Hole, after the rocky stretch of beach beside it that the fishermen called Hell.

It is the hardest hole on the golf course, a long par four along the shore, but the name is older than the golf.

See Crail Golfing Society · Fife
In St Andrews18 hours ago

Almost 1,000 schoolchildren from Fife and Dundee ran their Daily Mile on the Old Course at St Andrews this week.

They came on Tuesday and Wednesday, before the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship teed off, and they had company. James Milner, the footballer with the most Premier League appearances, and Michael Vaughan, the former England cricket captain, walked and ran alongside them.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife
Did you know17 hours ago

King James IV, whose own family had banned golf, is recorded buying golf clubs and balls to play at St Andrews, in Fife, in 1504.

Parliament under James II had ordered in 1457 that golf be utterly cried down. By 1502 James IV had bought his first set of clubs, from Perth, and two years later the royal accounts at Falkland Palace show money spent on clubs and balls for golf at St Andrews. Whether the king actually teed up on the links is not recorded.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife
From our guide17 hours ago

Kingarrock Hickory Golf.

Titanium and graphite clubs? Pah! Golf with hickory-shafted clubs, or hickory golf, is a traditional variety of golf that its proponents argue brings more ‘feel’ into the swing. Here at Kingarrock, the nine-hole course is dedicated to this older form of the game, and you’ll be supplied with five original clubs from the early 20th century, as well as replicas of balls from the same era.

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Did you know16 hours ago

The Old Course at St Andrews, in Fife, closes to golfers on Sundays, and on some Sundays the town comes out to stroll and picnic on it.

The Old Course is a public golf course on common land, held in trust for the town under an act of Parliament. In 1552 Archbishop John Hamilton gave the townspeople of St Andrews the right to use the links, the sandy ground by the sea the course is laid on, for golf, football, shooting and all games. That grant is the earliest written evidence of golf at St Andrews. The golf still stops on Sundays to let the course rest, and the most famous course in the game becomes a park for the people who have always had a right to it.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife
True or false16 hours ago

True or false: the first golfer from America to win the Open was American-born.

From the magazine15 hours agoThe printed copy of Issue 08Issue 08Spring / Summer 2024

Three standing stones some 4,000 years old stand in the middle of the second fairway at Lundin Ladies Golf Club, near Leven in Fife.

Lundin Ladies Golf Club is one of the oldest golf courses in the world to have a wholly female membership, and it is the only course anywhere with three megalithic standing stones on a fairway. The sandstone trio reach heights of up to 5 metres. To the golfers they are obstacles to play around, and to everyone else they are prehistoric jewels. You don't need to play a round to see them: ask at the hut by the entrance and you can walk out to the stones.

See Standing Stones of Lundin · Fife
Did you know15 hours ago

Once a year the Old Course at St Andrews is played backwards, the way golfers went round it until the late 1800s.

For most of its history the course ran clockwise: golfers went out along what is now the way home. From the late nineteenth century the two directions took turns week by week, and only in the twentieth did today's route become fixed. Now, for a few days each spring, the St Andrews Links Trust turns it round again. Golfers go from the first tee to the seventeenth green, then the eighteenth tee to the sixteenth green, and on round to finish from the second tee to the eighteenth.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife
Did you know14 hours ago

The Old Course Hotel at St Andrews was built on the town's old railway goods yard, so close to the 17th hole that golfers drive over its corner.

The railway's own hotel company opened it on 25 June 1968, and the line itself closed the next year. The seventeenth, the Road Hole, used to be played over the railway's sheds; the sheds the tee shot now crosses are replicas, standing in the hotel's grounds.

See Old Course at St Andrews · Fife