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On Second Thought, St. Andrews Steps Back From Remodel by Swilcan Bridge

Related Topics: Swilcan Bridge, St Andrews Links

Want a patio-like surface by a bridge that’s perhaps more than 700 years old? St. Andrews did, but many others most definitely did not.

Rory McIlroy crossed the Swilcan Bridge during a European Tour tournament at the Old Course in October.Credit...Oisin Keniry/Getty Images

St. Andrews Links — the stately sporting refuge in Scotland that has outlasted major champions, monarchs and well-to-do duffers — caved Monday and abandoned plans for a patio-like surface by the Swilcan Bridge.

Few locales in golf invite quite so many pilgrimages as the stone bridge, which crosses a burn on the Old Course’s 18th hole and is the centerpiece of photographs that surface in Scottish pubs, man-caves all over suburban America and Tiger Woods’s office in Florida.