Some golf courses keep people out. Aiken Golf Club, just across the South Carolina line from the exclusive clubs around Augusta, will gladly have you in, and more than a century on it still opens its doors. It began in 1912 as eleven holes associated with the Highland Park Hotel, a resort founded by a member of the Tufts family, the family best known for founding Pinehurst. Three years later John R. Inglis arrived as golf professional and stretched the routing to eighteen. Inglis came down from Upstate New York, where he had worked on projects for William Flynn and Donald Ross, and so a question lingers over these holes: how much of the great Scot is actually in the ground here? Ross may have lent Inglis a hand with the layout, or he may only have traveled south in Inglis's head. Either way his influence almost certainly came to Aiken with Inglis, a ghost who may or may not have walked the property but who shaped it all the same. You can still read the two eras in the routing. The original 1912 loop runs five holes out and six back, and Inglis's seven-hole addition from 1915 breaks away from the seventh green, which was the seventh green then and is the seventh green now. It is a course with seams you can feel, a little like an old house whose additions are honest about when they were built. Inglis left another mark of a gentler kind. May Dunn, the first female golf professional in the United States, suggested that he add ladies' tees, which makes Aiken the first club in the nation to have them. Of all the firsts a resort course might claim, that one feels most in keeping with the place, a small act of welcome set into the ground. The good years did not last. Like so many Southern resorts that flourished in the 1920s, Highland Park struggled during the Depression. The city bought the course in 1939, and the hotel was demolished in 1941. Aiken kept its golf course afloat for twenty years, then in 1959 sold it to a golf professional named Jim McNair, Sr. The McNairs have owned and run it as a semi-private club ever since. After some hard years, Jim McNair, Jr., made a gutsy choice in the mid-1990s: he would renovate the course in-house. Between 1996 and 2000, with a D5 bulldozer and a few crew members, he transformed every hole in a blend of restoration and renovation that added more Ross features. The ghost grew a little more solid, by family hands rather than famous ones. What emerged is a course of about 5,800 yards that plays far longer than the number suggests, partly because power is rarely the answer. On most holes there is little to gain by driving the ball beyond 250 yards. Swing harder and you find hazards, the narrowest sections of the fairways, tricky angles into the greens. Bombers are welcome to try. The course will simply wait for them to learn. And then there is the joy of how it fits into the town. From downtown Aiken you can pick up your bag and walk to the pro shop in roughly the length of a long par 5, pay a modest green fee, play eighteen in three or four hours, and climb to the Legends Grille on the clubhouse's second floor for a beer and a bite before walking home. There is even a putting course, simple and fun, closer in spirit to mini golf than to the bumpy Himalayas-style greens so fashionable now. It is the kind of accessibility that is too rare outside Scotland, and fitting for a course that may owe a Scot more than anyone can prove.