The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers is one of golf's oldest documented clubs, tracing its origins to a group of Edinburgh golfers who drew up rules for a competition on Leith Links in the mid-eighteenth century, decades before most of the sport's other governing bodies existed. The club later moved its course from Leith to Musselburgh and eventually to Gullane on the East Lothian coast, where its Muirfield links has since hosted the Open Championship on multiple occasions. Gullane itself is a small East Lothian village strung along the coast east of Edinburgh, part of a stretch of Scotland's Firth of Forth shoreline closely associated with links golf, sitting within a short distance of several other well-known courses along the same coastline. The club's history predates almost every other formal golf institution, and its long migration from Leith to its current East Lothian home mirrors the broader shift of Scottish golf away from Edinburgh's expanding city centre during the nineteenth century.