Golf on this strip of the Firth of Forth is older than the club that now keeps it. People were playing a rough early game on the town links at North Berwick by 1672, though the local authorities largely frowned on it. Over the years, that open ground became the West Links, a course that grew by negotiation and by inches into one of the most playful places anywhere. It began small. When North Berwick Golf Club was founded in 1832, the ground for organized golf reached only to the March Dyke, a stone wall that crosses the current 3rd and 16th holes. Six holes fit inside it, so a medal round meant three circuits of the same ground. A seventh hole was eventually squeezed in. In 1868, with the help of the Right Hon. John Nisbet-Hamilton, who owned the land, the course moved past the wall. Three new holes were laid out, one of them the Redan. One of the old seven disappeared, and now two circuits made a round. Nine years later, after more talks with the Nisbet-Hamilton family, the links reached the Eil Burn. Provost Brodie and a member named Whitecross helped David Strath, keeper of the green, who had taken hints from Tom Morris on a recent visit. That made eighteen holes, but seven were under 200 yards. So in 1895 the course pushed west again, to 6,095 yards. In 1932 more ground was leased, and modifications under Ben Sayers Jr. and C. K. Hutchison stretched it to a little over 6,400 yards. That slow growth produced a links on land raised above the sea, so the views keep arriving: Craigleith Island and the Bass Rock, a volcanic lump rising more than 300 feet from the water. It is the closest seabird sanctuary to the mainland, with some 80,000 nest sites and roughly a tenth of the world's Atlantic gannets. The holes are odd in the best way. There are stone walls to negotiate, burns to cross, and deep bunkers waiting. The ground heaves into humps and hollows, some shots are blind, and you will need to hit out over the beach. The rough is kept fairly short because the club prefers a round to take no more than three hours. Because of that, the strangeness never turns brutal. A wild shot sends you into adventure rather than into penal grass. Then comes the 15th, the Redan, a par 3 of 190 yards and the most copied hole in golf. Its green sits on a plateau, with one bunker short and left and another farther on to the right. Bernard Darwin called it a beautiful one-shot hole and wrote that you must vary your attack with the wind, either bringing the ball in from the right or going straight at it. The name is a military word for a guarding parapet. The 16th green has a trough running through it, and a putt from front to back through that dip runs straighter than your eyes expect. Even the pro shop has its own quiet wit. It is a low building tucked into the foot of a hill, invisible from the course, unassuming and functional and designed with sneaky intelligence. A walk through town shows how closely the links is woven into its community. If you park along the 18th, though, try to take only the first three spots, and spare your windshield. For a long time North Berwick was a quirky course revered by those who study golf architecture. Now it is beloved far more widely, and some of the world's greatest players push their clubs around it before the Scottish Open. Arthur J. Balfour, a former Prime Minister and once captain of the club, said a tolerable day, a tolerable green and a tolerable opponent ought to supply all the entertainment a reasonable person could require. With a fine sea view in front of him, he added, a golfer might be excused for thinking golf, even indifferent golf, the true end of human existence. At North Berwick, that is hard to argue with.