Muirfield Review

The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers wrote the first rules of golf at Leith in 1744 and moved to Muirfield in 1891, taking the Open with them. Old Tom Morris laid out the original course, and after the club bought 50 more acres in 1923 Harry Colt redesigned it in 1925, adding fourteen new holes and creating the arrangement that sets Muirfield apart from the other great links. Rather than nine out and nine back, the front nine runs clockwise around the edge of the property and the back nine anticlockwise inside it, so no more than three consecutive holes face the same way and the wind arrives from a new angle on nearly every tee.

The result is often called the fairest course on the Open rota. What you see is largely what you get, and the difficulty lies in small, deep bunkers, thick rough and modest greens with subtle borrows. Jack Nicklaus, who won the first of his three Opens here in 1966, called it the best course in Britain and named his own Muirfield Village after it. The roll of sixteen Open champions runs from Harold Hilton in 1892 to Phil Mickelson in 2013, by way of Vardon, Hagen, Cotton, Player, Trevino, Watson, Faldo twice and Els.

The club voted to admit women members in 2017, a year after a failed ballot cost it its place on the Open rota, and it staged the Women's Open in 2022.

Visitors play on Tuesdays and Thursdays and pay 395 pounds for eighteen holes in 2026, or 605 for a thirty six hole day with lunch, and the 2026 season is fully booked from mid April to October. The price and the rationing hold the value grade down, though the thirty six hole day is a tradition golfers cross the world for.