In 1922, the Championship Committee made a declaration: “The Open shall henceforth be played only on links courses, to provide a true test for the skilled players.” Up until then the Open had in any case been played exclusively on links courses, but the proliferation of inland courses at the time prompted the clarification.

Imagemap To date, a total of 14 different golf courses have hosted The Open Championship since 1860: seven in Scotland, six in England and one in Northern Ireland.

Golf has been played at Carnoustie since the early 16^th century, and in that time the links here have earned themselves a well-deserved reputation as one of the toughest golf destinations in the world. The original 10-hole course, laid out by Allan Robertson in 1842, was extended to 18 by Old Tom Morris, and then updated by James Braid and James Wright in 1926 to present the classic test that we know today. It’s not just the strong winds which blow along this exposed stretch of the Angus coast; nor the bunkering, which is perfectly positioned to capture anything less than a top-quality shot; but it is also a very long, narrow golf course that, at 7,421 yards, is the longest of any of the Open venues. As Sir Michael Bonallack put it, “When the wind is blowing, it is the toughest golf course in Britain. And when it’s not blowing, it’s probably still the toughest.”

Opens: 1892, 1896, 1901, 1906, 1912, 1929, 1935, 1948, 1959, 1966, 1972, 1980, 1987, 1992, 2002
Location: Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers — as the golf club at Muirfield is properly known — is one of the oldest golf clubs in the world, and the source of the earliest written rules of golf, which date back to 1744. Yet the club has only been based at Muirfield comparatively recently: it was in 1891 that the current course was opened and the club moved from its previous home at the links in nearby Musselburgh. Just a year later, in 1892, Muirfield hosted the first of its fifteen Open Championships, which was won by Harold Hilton, one of only three amateurs to have lifted the Claret Jug.

Whether the honesty of the layout has had anything to do with it or not, the fact remains that Muirfield has an astonishing record of identifying the greatest golfers of the age, with a roll of honour which reads like a Who’s Who of golf over the last century, with winners including Els, Faldo, Watson, Nicklaus, Player, Hagen and Vardon.

Opens: 1874, 1877, 1880, 1883, 1886, 1889
Location: Musselburgh, East Lothian, Scotland

The nine-hole links at Musselburgh is an ancient piece of golfing land, with records confirming that play took place here as far back as the mid-17^th century and anecdotal evidence suggesting that it goes back even further (Mary Queen of Scots is thought to have played here in 1567). The course has hosted over 60 different golf clubs and societies over the years — including Royal Musselburgh and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers — but the original holes have been little changed in that time. Today, the nine-hole course consists of a loop which runs within the confines of Musselburgh Race Course. Seven of these current nine were laid out in 1838, with two more holes added in 1870 to make up the course. There is some debate about how the course might have changed since then, but nobody can deny that playing at Musselburgh gives a unique taste of golf from a bygone era.

Since 1872, the event had been on a strict three-year rotation between St Andrews, Prestwick and Musselburgh, the home courses of the three clubs — the R&A, Prestwick and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers — who had purchased the Claret Jug. When the Honourable Company moved from Musselburgh to Muirfield in 1891, the Championship venue moved with them.

Opens: 1860-1870, 1872, 1875, 1878, 1881, 1884, 1887, 1890, 1893, 1898, 1903, 1908, 1914, 1925
Location: Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland

Prestwick Golf Club is the original home of The Open Championship. The event was organised by members of the club, who subscribed £25 towards the purchase of the distinctive red Championship Belt, which was the original prize for the winner. The club hosted each of the first dozen Championships before St Andrews and Musselburgh joined a three-way rotation of host venues in 1873 and 1874 respectively.

The original course, built in 1851, consisted of 12 holes which played their way up and down across the linksland dunes. By modern standards the holes at Prestwick make up a refreshingly quirky routing, with plentiful blind shots and unusual angles to test the unwary golfer. These playing characteristics were retained when, in 1882, the course was extended to 18 holes, and to this day Prestwick remains an astonishing piece of golfing land that invariably takes first time visitors completely by surprise — particularly those playing without caddies.

Opens: 1932
Location: Sandwich, Kent, England

Prince’s golf club, located immediately adjacent to Royal St George’s, is one of the younger courses ever to have hosted The Open. The course was completed in 1906 with a layout, designed by 1902 Amateur Champion Charles Hutchings, that was among the first to counter the longer distances being achieved with the new breed of rubber-core golf balls. At just under 7,000 yards, it quickly gained a great reputation as a top quality links and a great test of golf.

After a spell during the First World War when the course was used as a coastal defence and training area, the course was quickly restored and began to host golf tournaments. In 1932 The Open visited Prince’s for what would prove to be the first and only time. Gene Sarazen played beautiful golf to set a new scoring record for the Championship of 283, a mark which would remain unsurpassed for 18 years. The event was a success, the reactions of the players were all positive, and the Championship seemed likely to return to the course.

Opens: 1954, 1961, 1965, 1971, 1976, 1983, 1991, 1998, 2008
Location: Southport, Merseyside, England

Royal Birkdale is the golfing jewel of a stretch of beautiful linksland which runs almost uninterrupted for 20 miles north of Liverpool. The course was first established in 1889, but was extensively redesigned in 1922 by Fred Hawtree and J. H. Taylor to create the current layout, which is characterised by it’s picturesque, snaking course through the sand dunes which tower over each of the fairways.

The Open was originally due to visit Royal Birkdale in 1940, but the advent of war delayed this until 1954; since then, however, the course has been (alongside Royal Lytham) the most regular venue for the Championship other than St Andrews, and the 2008 Open rked the ninth visit of the event to the Merseyside links.

Opens: 1909, 1920
Location: Deal, Kent, England

Just a few miles along the coast from Royal St George’s, Royal Cinque Ports is a highly traditional links course, with large sand dunes, ceaselessly undulating fairways and an out-and-back routing which demands players finish their rounds into the teeth of the prevailing south-westerly wind. It makes for a tough golf course that demands straight hitting, particularly when the marrom grass rough is up during the summer.

Royal Cinque Port’s first Open in 1909 was won by J. H. Taylor, one of the great triumvirate, who hit such a patch of form over the two days of the event that he finished up six strokes clear of his nearest rival. The 1920 event was a more dramatic affair, however, witnessing as it did the greatest turnaround in the history of the Championship. Abe Mitchell shot opening rounds of 74 and 73 to give himself a six-stroke lead; further down the scoreboard, George Duncan had shot a pair of 80s in his opening rounds, and found himself 13 shots back. Perhaps in desperation, Duncan bought himself a new driver at the on-site equipment exhibition and proceeded to shoot a 71 in the third round as Mitchell slumped to a disastrous 84. Duncan then shot 72 in his final round to secure the Championship; his overhauling of a 13-shot deficit in the process remains the largest turnaround by an eventual winner.

Opens: 1897, 1902, 1907, 1913, 1924, 1930, 1936, 1947, 1956, 1967, 2006
Location: Hoylake, Wirral, England

Royal Liverpool — or Hoylake, as it is usually known — is the second-oldest seaside links golf course in England, and was the first course in North-West England to host The Open. Built on the racecourse of the Liverpool Hunt Club, it retained a dual role as horse racing venue and golf course for the first few years of its life, but golf soon became the only sport played on this stretch of linksland.

The club played a key part in the development of Amateur golf: in 1885, it hosted the inaugural Amateur Championship; and 1921, it hosted the first informal match which would become the Walker Cup. Furthermore, two of the three amateurs who have won The Open were Hoylake members: John Ball and Harold Hilton, who won the first Open at Hoylake in 1897. Fittingly enough the other amateur winner, Bobby Jones, won his third Open at Hoylake, an event which was the second of four steps in his unprecedented, and unmatched, grand slam.

After the 1967 Open, it seemed as if the Championship would not return to Hoylake. Yet in 2006, following years of work done to create the space needed for a modern Open, the event returned — and it did so in style. In a week of wonderful weather on a superb, fast golf course, Tiger Woods produced an imperious display of intelligent golf — in which he only once used his driver — that left him two shots ahead of Chris DiMarco and lifting the Claret Jug for the third time.

Opens: 1926, 1952, 1958, 1963, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1988, 1996, 2001, 2012
Location: Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, England

The course at Royal Lytham & St Annes was built in 1897, 11 years after the club was founded, and gained a reputation as one of the finest, and most exacting links golf courses in Britain. Though a relatively short course, the routing of the holes and the huge number of bunkers — some 200 in all — make the course one of the most challenging of the Open venues. The design remains faithful to the layout created by George Lowe, the club’s first professional, but it was only after renowned golf course architect Harry Colt made improvements between 1919 and 1922 that the course was chosen to host The Open.

And the Lancashire course could hardly have had a better introduction to Championship golf than the victory by legendary American amateur Bobby Jones when The Open was first played there in 1926. Bobby Locke (1952), Peter Thomson (1958) and Bob Charles (1963) were the next three winners before Tony Jacklin signalled the revival of British golf in 1969 with the first home victory since Max Faulkner 18 years earlier at Royal Portrush.

It took until 1996 for Lytham to produce an American winner. Tom Lehman saw his six-shot lead that he held on Sunday morning eroded by Mark McCumber and Ernie Els, but he held on for a two-shot victory. In 2001, fellow US pro David Duval was three strokes clear of Niclas Fasth of Sweden in winning the Championship.

Opens: 1951
Location: Portrush, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland

Royal Portrush, on the eastern coast of Northern Ireland, is the only course outside Scotland and England to have hosted The Open, which it did in 1951. The course had been newly recreated by Harry Colt in 1932, on the site of the previous 18-hole course which had been laid out in 1888 by Old Tom Morris. The Dunluce course, as the championship course is named, has remained largely unchanged since Colt’s redesign, and is a strikingly beautiful place to play golf. Wind direction varies almost constantly thanks to the layout, which consists of a single, meandering loop making its way through sand dunes and along clifftops, with views of the sea and coastline often framing holes.

The 1951 Open is not Portrush’s only link to The Open Championship: 1947 champion Fred Daly, who until last year was the only Irishman to have won The Open, was a member at the club.

Opens: 1894, 1899, 1904, 1911, 1922, 1928, 1934, 1938, 1949, 1981, 1985, 1993, 2003, 2011
Location: Sandwich, Kent, England

The first course outside Scotland to stage The Open Championship, Royal St George’s is set in a vast area of natural linksland on the Kent coast near to the ancient town of Sandwich. Founded in 1887 by Laidlaw Purves, an eminent Scottish consultant ophthalmologist at Guy’s Hospital in London, it played host to the Amateur Championship in 1892 and to The Open two years later, when J. H. Taylor was the winner with a four-round total of 326, the highest winning aggregate ever recorded in the Championship. Ten years later, Taylor proved that his mastery of the venue was no fluke when he shot 68 to become the first man to break 70 in The Open. That year, 1904, was a good one for scoring: the eventual winner, Jack White, finished on a total of 296, the first time that a winning score was under 300 since the Championship became a 72-hole event in 1892.

Opens: 1923, 1950, 1962, 1973, 1982, 1989, 1997, 2004
Location: Troon, Ayrshire, Scotland

For the first half century and more of The Open’s history, the championship’s visits to south west Scotland were confined to Prestwick, Troon’s next-door neighbour. In 1923, all that changed: The Open came to Troon for the first time, and since then the course has become a regular venue. It has now hosted the Championship on eight occasions.

The course, which took its current form in 1888, is designed in the traditional out-and-back manner of the Old Course at St Andrews. A gentle opening few holes and relatively straightforward closing stretch are the bookends for a series of holes which weave up, round and through some of the most striking linksland to be found at any of the host venues. This character makes wind strength and direction of the wind even more important than is usual on a links course: if the wind is against the players on the back nine, it’s as tough a finish as can be found anywhere.

Opens: 1873, 1876, 1879, 1882, 1885, 1888, 1891, 1895, 1900, 1905, 1910, 1921, 1927, 1933, 1939, 1946, 1955, 1957, 1960, 1964, 1970, 1978, 1984, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010
Location: St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

Golf has been played over the linksland at St Andrews for well over half a millennium, and, while new tees have been built, the Old Course remains essentially unchanged from the days of Old Tom Morris in the mid-to-late 19^th century. The double fairways, double greens and natural bunkering combine to produce a set of strategic demands on the golfer which are unmatched and utterly unique.

In the course of its 27 Opens, St Andrews has had a habit of throwing up winners who are the best of their generation. Tiger Woods, for example, produced performances in 2000 and 2005 that left him comfortably clear of the field, with victories by eight and five shots respectively; during that 2000 Open, the scoring record that Woods broke with his 19-under-par total had been the mark set by Nick Faldo ten years previously, when at the height of his powers the Englishman shot 18 under par to win by five.

Opens: 1977, 1986, 1994, 2009
Location: Turnberry, Ayrshire, Scotland

Built as a luxury hotel and golf course development by the Glasgow and South Western Railway Company in 1903, Turnberry became a landing strip for planes of the Royal Flying Corps during the first world war and for Beaufighters and Liberators on anti-submarine and convoy protection patrols during the second global conflict. A massive two-year rebuilding programme and re-design by Mackenzie Ross led to the Ailsa course being opened in 1951, with the resulting course being a fabulous convergence of top-quality links golf with a stunning cliff-top location which makes Turnberry one of the most scenic golf courses in the world.

The weather and the course were tougher propositions when the Championship returned in 1986, but Greg Norman defied the elements in his second round 63 to set up a lead that he never gave up. Things were closer in 1994, with Sweden’s Jesper Parnevik of dropping a shot at the last to be overtaken by Nick Price, who holed a monstrous eagle putt at the 17th hole.

The 2009 Open Championship will be held on the Ailsa Course on 16-19 July .

To contact the venue telephone +44 (0) 1655 334032 or see their website.

The letting agents for 2009 are CKD Galbraith, in Ayr. Contact Aileen Gemmell on +44 (0) 1292 268181, e-mail aileen.gemmell@ckdgalbraith.co.uk or see the website at www.golfopen2009.com.

The venues for the Open have been decided up until 2012:

2009 - Turnberry, 16-19 July

Official letting agent: CKD Galbraith

2010 - St Andrews, 15-18 July

Official letting agent: Pagan Osborne

2011 - Royal St George’s, 14-17 July

Official letting agent: Colebrook Sturrock

2012 - Royal Lytham & St Annes, 19-22 July

Official letting agent: JGL Relocation and Management Services