The New Course has carried its name since it opened in 1895, which tells you something about St Andrews. Here, a links laid out in the 1890s is still the young one, and the ground it shares with its famous neighbour is so old in golfing memory that anything after it seems to have arrived only yesterday. It began as a practical answer to a crowd. By the late 1800s the trains were pouring visitors into the town, and the Old Course could not hold them all. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club agreed to pay for a second course, and in return it was granted tee times on the Old. Those rights were written into an Act of Parliament in 1894, the forerunner of the Act of 1974 that still governs the public links. Old Tom Morris designed the course with Benjamin Hall Blyth, an engineer from Edinburgh. Until then the older ground had simply been called the Links. Only when there was a New did there need to be an Old, so the elder course owes a piece of its own name to the younger. The two sit side by side, separated only by a walking path, and the family resemblance is plain. The New shares fairways with its neighbour, it has a double green serving the 3rd and the 15th, and it runs out and back in the traditional way. Its fairways undulate, and the bunkers are deep pots. Yet it has a different temperament. The ground lacks the Old's slopes and curves, so hanging lies are fewer. The holes are tighter and more sharply defined, and with only one double green, most of them stand alone as characters in their own right. The New feels less quirky and more normal in the best sense, though a discerning eye finds subtleties and charms of its own, and it is perhaps the prettier of the two. Dense swathes of gorse frame fairways and greens, and in bloom they blaze with colour. They also let you focus on the shot in front of you, so that you can almost disappear into it. Some of the best holes wait in the dunes around the turn for home. The 10th is a tough 464-yard par 4, and Bernard Darwin admired it while judging that it was not in the Old Course mould. In 1910 he called it "a really fine one, running down a narrow gorge between two ranges of hills, with a fine, slashing second shot with the brassey, albeit more or less a blind one." It is a hole that earns its place by being its own thing. There is a long ache in the course's story, too. It has always lived in a great shadow. There is no Swilcan Bridge here, no Road Hole or Eden Hole, and no bunker has grown famous enough to earn its own name. Very few people pose for photographs on its first tee, or weep when they play its 18th. Set it on almost any other coastal stretch of the British Isles and it would surely be recognised as the excellent links it is. Had it not lingered so long in that shadow, and perhaps been updated as so many other links have been, it might even have hosted an Open Championship. Instead it remains the quieter sibling, and the locals' favourite. Darwin hinted at one reason for that affection. He wrote of growing "sick to death of the crowding and waiting on the Old course," and of being glad then "to steal away on to the New course and have a round, which will probably be at any rate a comparatively quick one." A shorter wait may be part of it. But turn for home with the town of St Andrews beckoning ahead, and you begin to understand the rest. Judge the New on its own merit, and it becomes a peaceful, almost spiritual walk, and in some ways a more genuine Scottish way to know this ground.