Start where the written record starts. Golf has been documented on Musselburgh's links since 1672, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century this was the centre of the professional game: six Open Championships were played here between 1874 and 1889, the last of them won by Willie Park Jr, whose family workshop stood a few hundred yards away. Today it is nine municipal holes tucked inside the oval of Musselburgh Racecourse, and the move is to do it properly: hire a set of hickories from the starter, play the nine in period style, and make your peace with the ground the whole game grew from. Guinness once certified it the oldest course in the world before the title was argued back toward St Andrews, which tells you everything about how seriously this corner of Scotland takes its history. It is a pilgrimage stop, not a championship test, and at £21.50 it is the cheapest great decision on this coast.

Gullane is a village with one hill and three golf courses on it, and No. 1 is the one the championships come for. Laid out in 1884 by hands the club's own history admits are lost to time, it climbs Gullane Hill in its opening holes and then hands you the reward: from the high ground the whole of East Lothian's golf coast unrolls in one panorama, Aberlady Bay on one side, the Forth and Fife beyond. After Muirfield, no course in the county has staged more serious golf, more than forty championships including the Scottish Opens of 2015 and 2018, won by Rickie Fowler and Brandon Stone. It is a true, running links with pot bunkers and wispy rough and not a weak stretch on it. The £285 weekday fee is marquee money, but Gullane's combination tickets soften it, and the same booking desk covers all three courses. Few clubs anywhere make visitors feel less like intruders.

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers wrote the first thirteen rules of golf in 1744, which makes Muirfield the oldest club in the world with continuous records, and its home since 1891 is Old Tom Morris's masterpiece of routing: an outer loop running clockwise, an inner loop running against it, so the wind never repeats itself two holes in a row. Sixteen Opens have been decided here, from Harry Vardon's first to Phil Mickelson's astonishing Sunday in 2013, and the bunkering is as exact as anything in championship golf. Now the honest part. Visitors play Tuesdays and Thursdays only, the classic day is two rounds with lunch between for £395, and the 2026 book is already closed from mid April to October. Enquiries open a full year ahead and the diary goes fast. If Muirfield matters to you, fix your Tuesday or Thursday first, build the whole trip around it, and carry proof of handicap. If the dates do not fall, the itinerary around it loses surprisingly little.

If the trip has a heart, it beats here. The club dates to 1832 and golf has run over the West Links since the seventeenth century; only St Andrews has hosted continuous play over the same ground for longer. It is also, hole for hole, the most influential course you can actually book: the 15th, Redan, a par 3 angled behind a fronting bunker on a falling green, is the most copied hole in world golf, recreated on great courses across America by Macdonald, Raynor and everyone since. The 13th, The Pit, hides the smallest green on the course behind a drystone wall you must carry with your approach, and the wall is very much in play. Beach on the right from the first tee, Craigleith and the Bass Rock offshore, greens that tumble like the sea took a pass at them. Visitors book Sunday to Thursday, the season runs March to November, and £320 in high summer buys the round most architecture people would keep if they could only keep one.