Royal North Devon

Few clubs anywhere can claim the history Royal North Devon carries. Founded in 1864, it is the oldest surviving golf club in England, and its links at Westward Ho! — a coastal village named, unusually, after a Charles Kingsley novel — have been shaped by the same Atlantic winds and grazing sheep for over 160 years. The course is a genuine piece of living golf history, and it shows in every bounce, every blind approach, and every tuft of marsh grass that encroaches on the fairways. Tom Morris Sr. had a hand in its early layout, and the club nurtured some of the game's great early figures, including five-time Open Champion J.H. Taylor, who grew up caddying here.

Playing Westward Ho! is an exercise in submission. The links sits on a common, meaning livestock still wander the land, and the notorious rushes — thick, spiky stands of cord grass — are a hazard found nowhere else in championship golf.

This is the rawest kind of links experience England offers: no artifice, no polish, just open sky, punishing rough, and a course that has asked the same hard questions of golfers since the Victorian era.