GOLF I St Andrews Ladies' Putting Club, Fife, Scotland

There’s an awful lot of stick and ball games whose origins go way back but Scotland is generally considered to be the inventor of the modern game of golf as we know it. The sport was first mentioned in a 1457 act of parliament and by 1567 Mary, Queen of Scots, was said to have played a few rounds following the murder of her husband which prompted a contemporary to write that she’d been taking part in her ‘usual amusements in the adjoining fields that were plainly not adapted to women’. Cripes, how dangerous for her. Bearing in mind her eventual execution you’d imagine she might have been worried about more than tripping over her petticoat while attempting to sink a nine footer. 300 years later, her ancestor Queen Victoria, instigated a surge of interest in Scottish tourism and Gaelic culture that helped golf’s popularity reach new heights in the UK and much of the Empire.

Despite Mary and Vicky, ordinary women were somewhat limited in participatory sports. For some reason, croquet, battledore and archery were in and rugby, cricket and swimming were out. Mixed doubles at tennis was presumably considered the height of sexual deviance. This gender division was certainly present at St Andrews which is the undisputed home of the game. The caddies (the ones that carry the clubs for your wealthier/lazier golfer) had traditionally jumped in for a quick round once the privileged members had gone for tea. ‘Adventurous’ women started to play and presumably once they began to beat the caddies at their own game, those bag carriers got the right royal hump. To alleviate this desperate situation of gendered intermingling the St Andrews Ladies’ Golf Club was created in 1867 and a course was created, inaptly named The Himalayas.