What are those “elements of mystery and uncertainty” that make every round on the links “a voyage of discovery?”

The unpredictable Scottish weather plays a starring role. So do the infinite variations of land, sea, and sky.

In The Perfect Golfer, H.N. Wethered wrote that the “delicate folds” of links “are suggestive of motion and share an intimacy with the waves… almost cousins and part of the ocean if you can imagine sea turned into land, or the land suffering sea change into something rich and rare.”

Yet something else lures golfers to these peculiar stretches of rumpled coastline.

The most absorbing links take us to strange, almost imaginary worlds we haven’t vis­ited since childhood.

Many of us who started golf at a young age can recall little front yard shots conjured up to test skill and pass time. A chip shot around the split rail fence and over your mother’s favorite rose would reach an imaginary hole tucked precariously in the lawn’s corner. Or there was that devilish par-two playing up the staircase, guarded by rail left, a family portrait right, and a snoozing Shih Tzu halfway up the carpet-covered stairs.

On the best links, the hazards are just as unusual—walls, roads, railway lines, club­houses, bridges, towns, and, of course, the sandy pits created by sheep scraping at the turf in search of a warm night’s rest. Occasionally holes even cross each other, as if a naïve child was determined to reach Point B from Point A.

Until the mid-20th century, the home hole at St. Andrews featured no boundary down its right side. If a ball finished just inside the door of Old Tom Morris’ shop, you could stop in, exchange a few pleasantries (like Ty Webb playing through Carl Spackler’s maintenance shop in Caddyshack), and then chip right back out to the fairway.

One can easily imagine Scottish children furtively slicing a gutty toward the town in hopes of concocting some extraordinary recovery shot off a cobblestone step while Old Tom nurses his pipe, laughing at (or cursing?) the innocence of youth.

And for those who discover the game later in life—many eventually make it to the British Isles, or to a place like Bandon Dunes, where such voyages typically ignite their repressed, young-at-heart sensibilities.

Linksland provides an authentic, and at its very best, unpredictable experience. The most storied links ultimately escape criticism because they incorporate features that ex­isted long before anyone knew what golf was. Whether it’s a dune, a swale, or a natural green site, man had nothing to do with creating the best links features. He simply identified the most economical and interesting route through the linksland.

Just as the child erecting a tree house makes the best of whatever materials he and his friends unearth to create an idyllic hideaway, the links creator was equally unconcerned with vanity. In today’s game, vanity dominates. Function, fun, and variety finish well back in the pack.

Why did the early links course designer feel uncompelled to inject aesthetic frills?

According to H.N. Wethered, “The really fine seaside course, although I have not re­fused to admit its occasional plainness of feature, invariably possesses a beauty of quiet and subtle refinement of surface.”

While the modern game tries to play through the upper atmosphere and rearranges beautiful ground in the name of real estate development, there is nothing like stepping onto linksland where no bulldozer has been allowed to compromise the ground. It is unusually solid to the foot.

Nor did humans have the wherewithal or audacity to inject ideas of what the links “should be like.” Originally, tees were found at sea level, not awkwardly propped up like a grass-covered coffins to promote “visibility.” Or, as at St. Andrews today, to gain yardage because of regulatory timidity.

The links game is also enhanced by the need to employ the earth’s surface in your attack. Seaside approaches are not played to putting surfaces erupting from otherwise flat ground, as most modern greens do, because the “USGA green” and its questionable subsurface drainage system knows no other way.

Even maneuvering around the links can benefit from childlike thinking. The occa­sional youthful slash should be taken, but how often have we seen a talented young golfer, oblivious to “how the game is supposed to be played,” innocently feeling his way around the links with clever, even bizarre little shots that adults are unable to imagine?

"Just as close as he dare: that’s golf, and that’s a hazard of immortal importance!” John Low wrote of the best seaside bunkers. “The fine player should, on his way round the links, be just slipping past the bunkers, gaining every yard he can, conquering by the confidence of his own ‘far and sure’ play. The less skillful player should wreck himself ei­ther by attempting risks which are beyond his skill, or by being compelled to lose ground through giving the bunkers a wide berth.”

And writing of early links golf, Max Behr noted, “Golf was then in that fortunate state when it never entered the mind of the golfer that he could vie with nature… The building of inland courses was unthought of, and consequently his mind was undisturbed with the inevitable evolving of principles to govern such an artificial undertaking. He went out to battle with an opponent with no idea in his mind that fortune should bestow its favors equally. If his ball got into more rabbit scrapes or cuppy lies than did his opponent’s, he might rail against his bad luck, but he never questioned that it was as much a part of the game as anything else… In that wonderful state of blissful ignorance the early golfer was unsophisticated to any idea that he could overwhelm nature.”

As golf expanded to places where linksland or even sandy soil did not exist, the subtle­ties that made seaside golf unique were ignored in the race to keep up with the latest fads. All too often, golf abandoned its childhood innocence to eliminate the day-to-day surprises that endear the links to so many golfers.

"Employing a comparison with our own best courses in America,” Bobby Jones said after the Old Course at St. Andrews captured his heart, “I have found that most of our courses, especially those inland, may be played correctly the same way round after round. The holes really are laid out scientifically; visibility is stressed; you can see what you have to do virtually all the time; and once you learn how to do it, you can go right ahead, next day and the next day and the day after that.”

Predictability and sameness have become so entrenched in the game that modern courses are considered deficient if they should dare to subject the golfer to surprises. The youthful willingness to adapt to any and all twists is no longer a necessary asset for the golfer. Idiosyncrasy has been stripped from architecture in the name of science and under the banner of “progress.”

Even as these odd and innocent little golfing universes called links were proven in their ability to force a master like Bobby Jones to conjure up shots he had not imagined since childhood (or the round before), the rough and unpredictable edges of links golf were quietly sandblasted away to provide the polished, underwhelming version of golf we know all too well today.

But thankfully, as John Low pointed out over a hundred years ago, "No golfer has ever been forced to say to himself with tears,

‘There are no more links to conquer.’”