| Club History
- by Willie Miller
The game of Golf is first mentioned in 1457.
That year, and in 1471 and 1491, Parliament, Town Councils, Kirk
Sessions and Guilds made many efforts to suppress the game by
issuing decrees banning it. This indicates that interest in the
game (although quite different from the game we know today) was
widespread and not just confined to the upper classes. It continued
to be enjoyed by men (and women) from a wide range of social
backgrounds into the eighteenth century, when with the introduction
of Societies of Golfing Gentlemen with their rules and more expensively
crafted clubs and balls, it began to become a sport available
only to the more wealthy citizens, a situation that lasted well
into the twentieth century. These golfing societies, apart from
a few really wealthy ones which had their own private ground,
had to share common courses. In the second half of the 19th century,
the majority of Edinburgh golfers played at Musselburgh Links.
It was at Musselburgh in 1893 that the Lothian
Golf Club, the forerunner of Turnhouse Golf Club, was formed,
but by that time there were about 60 such non-course owning Clubs
in Edinburgh and the available courses like Musselburgh were
becoming so congested that, particularly on competition days,
long delays were inevitable and many of the attached Clubs who
considered they could afford it began to think of finding land
where they could create their own course.
The Lothian Club must have begun their search
fairly soon after their inauguration, for within four years and
after viewing many sites, they had leased an area of forty acres
at Lennie Hill on the road to Stirling, from a farmer, Mr. Stenhouse
of Turnhouse.
In those days when road traffic was still
horse-drawn, the fastest and most convenient form of travel was
by train, and the choice of site was heavily influenced by the
existence of the nearby railway station and siding which served
the stone quarry (the one now filled in, to the left of the first
fairway) and which had been built after the opening of the Forth
Bridge in 1890.
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