Links to the past

On my walk into Edinburgh today I wandered passed Bruntsfield Links. It was looking fine in the spring sunshine and there where even a few poeple hacking their way around the wee golf course. I wondered if they appreciated the links history with Golf. The pursuit of golf was a major factor in preserving the Links as an open space. In 1791, it was proposed to drive a straight road across them (to link present-day Home Street to the crest of the hill at present-day Church Hill), thus bypassing the little village of Wrightshouses. The proposers argued that the existing road constituted "the worst and most inconvenient of all the entries into Edinburgh...which must always be the case while it is carried through so narrow and a dirty a village inhabited by so many low people". The proposal was, however, successfully blocked by the Burgess Golfing Society which used the Links, and the road re-routed to circumvent them. Later a request made to the Council by Walter Scott in 1798 (before his fame as a novelist), that the volunteer cavalry regiment of which he was quartermaster should be allowed to train on the Links, based on the traditional right to muster troops there, was rejected. The Council cited the position taken by the golfing societies as the reason. Golf is still played on the Links in the form of a 36 hole Short Hole Golf Course.