A strange word it is: a singular noun ending in s and rhyming with
jinx, minx and perhaps most appropriately, sphinx. No wonder there’s confusion.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, links first appeared
in print in 931 as hlincas, plural of hlinc, or ridge. Over the ensuing
millennium, some major etymological earthmoving took place, and by the 18th
century links had adopted two new meanings, both connected to golf.
The first described a tract of open ground held in common by towns
for a variety of recreational purposes. A 1651 text refers to Dornoch as “the
fairest and largest linkes of any pairt of Scotland, fitt for archery, goffing,
ryding, and all other exercise.”
The other definition cited links as a golf course—any course,
whether beside the sea or not. Dating from 1761, the world’s fourth-oldest golf
club is the Bruntsfield Links Golfing Society, which held its first competitions
in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle—three miles from the Firth of Forth. Horace
Hutchinson, winner of two of the first three British Amateurs and one of the
game’s first great chroniclers, described the English courses at Blackheath and
Wimbledon as “inland links.”
Today the “common land” definition is obsolete. As for “any
course,” the meaning survives largely among the lighthearted (“Honey, I’m off to
the links.”) and golf-ignorant (“What links are they playing the Masters
on?”).
A modern meaning has taken hold, a definition not so much of links
as linksland, the ground on which a proper links lies.
According to the British Golf Museum, “a links is a stretch of
land near the coast, on which the game is played, characterized by undulating
terrain, often associated with dunes, infertile sandy soil and indigenous
grasses as marram, sea lyme, and the fescues and bents which, when properly
managed, produce the fine textured tight turf for which links are famed.”
