St Andrews · Fife · The Home of Golf
Old Course at St Andrews
People have played golf on this exact stretch of linksland since at least the 1400s — long before anyone wrote the rules down, and long before the R&A existed to enforce them. The course is common land, the greens are shared between outward and inward holes, and the routing owes nothing to a single architect’s plan. It simply accumulated.
Venue-specific Old Course at St Andrews photography from the TGG Media Library.
Why play
The course that taught golf its own rules
Seven of the eighteen greens are shared, double-width surfaces — a quirk that exists nowhere else at this scale in championship golf, and one that forces genuinely different decision-making than a modern purpose-built course. There isn’t a single tree on the property. Wind and firmness do the defending instead, which means the same hole can play completely differently on back-to-back days.
The Old Course has hosted The Open Championship more times than any other venue, most recently in 2022 for the 150th playing, and it remains the R&A’s spiritual headquarters even though the governing body’s actual offices sit metres from the 1st tee rather than inside the course itself.
Playing character
The Road Hole will decide your round
The 17th — the Road Hole — is widely rated among the hardest holes in championship golf: a blind-ish approach played over the corner of a replica railway shed, guarded by a green sitting a single pace from a paved road and stone wall. Hell Bunker on the 14th is deep enough that laying up short of it is often the only sane play. Between those two, patience matters more than length.
Because the greens are shared and enormous, three-putts from 60 feet are common even for good players — leaving the ball on the correct tier matters as much as finding the green at all.
Who it suits
Wider than it looks, harder than it plays on television
The fairways are genuinely broad by modern standards, so most golfers won’t feel short of room from the tee. Scoring well is the hard part — it rewards local knowledge, patience with the ground game, and a willingness to play away from the flag rather than at it. Go in expecting an experience rather than a personal-best round.
Stay · Play · Recover
Build a full St Andrews trip, not one tee time
Pair the Old Course with the New or Jubilee links rather than compressing everything around a single round — St Andrews rewards a multi-day stay. Walking several links rounds back to back adds up, so build in proper recovery: hydration, mobility work and at least one lighter day in the itinerary.
Before you book
How access actually works
Most visitor rounds are allocated through the daily Old Course Ballot: enter online via standrews.com between 8am and 2pm, exactly 48 hours before your intended round, with results posted around 4pm. There’s no charge to enter and no obligation if you win — you simply pay the green fee to confirm. The course doesn’t run a ballot on Sundays, when it’s closed to visitor play. Roughly 120 tee times a day go through the ballot, with the rest taken up by advance reservations, members and caddies, so peak summer odds can run into the hundreds of entries per slot. Rules, prices and the ballot process do change, so check standrews.com directly before committing travel.