Prestwick Golf Club

Overview: The entry for Prestwick Golf Club lists 6544 yards and par 71 for its links layout. The course is compact, rumpled and full of features that require imagination: blind shots, railway-sleeper bunkers, crossing lines and greens hidden behind dunes. Its character is very different from a modern championship resort because the land dictates the strategy and several holes still feel like they grew from the original links rather than being plotted on a blank sheet. The famous closing stretch asks for control as the course turns through the dunes and back toward the historic clubhouse.

History: Prestwick Golf Club was founded in 1851, and Old Tom Morris laid out the original 12-hole course. On 17 October 1860 Prestwick hosted the first Open Championship, beginning a run of 24 Opens that lasted until 1925. The course expanded to 18 holes in 1882 while retaining six original greens and three original holes, so the present round still contains direct traces of the earliest championship layout. As the Open grew, the compact site could no longer handle the scale of the event, but Prestwick remained a significant venue for amateur championships and a living record of the game's formative decades.

Did You Know? The blind fifth is called Himalayas and plays over a tall dune to a green protected by sand. The third's huge Cardinal bunker and the seventeenth's Alps, an original second hole, are two more reminders that Prestwick was designed before straight, fully visible golf became the standard.