Golf was banned in Scotland in 1457, by an Act of Parliament that judged it a distraction from archery practice. The links at St Andrews survived the prohibition, and the game returned within a lifetime. By 1552 a charter confirmed the townspeople's right to play on the ground beside the West Sands, a right that has never lapsed. The Old Course took its shape from geology rather than design. Wind and receding sea built a strip of dune and gorse between the estuary of the Eden and the town, and sheep grazed the hollows into bunkers. There were once twenty-two holes; the number was reduced to eighteen in 1764, and the world adopted that figure without argument. The double greens — seven of them, each serving two holes — remain the course's defining oddity, a consequence of players once walking out and back over the same ground. Old Tom Morris, greenkeeper here from 1865, reshaped the eighteenth and gave his name to the closing green. The Swilcan Bridge, a stone arch over a burn barely three metres wide, is older than the game's written rules and now the most photographed structure in the sport. A well-planned edinburgh to st andrews golf tour treats the links as one chapter among several. The town holds the ruined cathedral, once the largest church in Scotland, its gable ends still standing after the Reformation stripped it. St Andrews Castle keeps its mine and counter-mine, tunnels dug during the siege of 1546 and still walkable. The university, founded in 1413, is the third oldest in the English-speaking world, and its red gowns still cross the streets on Sunday mornings. What matters today is continuity. The Old Course is a public course on common land, closed to play on Sundays, when townspeople walk their dogs across the fairways. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, whose clubhouse of 1854 stands behind the first tee, wrote the rules that govern the game across most of the world. The Open Championship has returned here twenty-nine times, more than to any other venue. Fife's fishing villages — Crail, Anstruther, Pittenweem — lie a short drive south along the coast, their harbours built from the same grey stone. Modern edinburgh to st andrews golf tour tours pair the links with Dunnottar Castle, Falkland Palace or Dunfermline Abbey, drawing a single line through Scottish golf, monarchy and the sea.