Long before anyone designed a golf course, the wind and a spiny yellow shrub were already deciding how the game was played on the Scottish coast. This is the real story behind the scene on our plate “Against the Wind”.

The pot bunker looks like a small thing, but its shape and its stacked-turf face come from wind, sheep and centuries of hard-won practice on links land. Here is where it came from, how it is built, and why golfers still respect it.

Nothing in nature says a round of golf should be 18 holes. It was a decision made at St Andrews in 1764, and it took a long time to become the rule everywhere else.

Who plays first from the tee, and why do golfers call it the honour? We trace the order of play from the 1744 Leith rules to the modern Rules of Golf and today’s ready golf.

Golf grew up on windswept coastal ground, and its clothes grew up with it: wool, tweed, oiled cotton and, much later, membranes. Here is how golfers dressed for the rain and how it changed.

Long before the wooden peg, golfers built their own tee from a pinch of wet sand. Here is what the early rules say about it, and where the peg really came from.

Before golf was a members’ game, the links was ground the whole town used: for grazing, for washing, for walking and for hitting a ball. This is the real history of that shared land, and what survives of it.

Cleek, mashie, niblick, spoon and baffy: what each old club was for, where the names came from, and why they never map neatly onto a modern seven iron.