1st October, 2025

For half a century, the Jigger Inn has been regarded as the world’s most famous 19th hole – and rightly so. Few can boast such a prestigious setting, or such a venerated clientele, but the pub’s enduring popularity is due in large part to its lack of pretension. Despite its stature, the Jigger is incredibly low-key. There can’t be many other places in the world where local fishermen and students rub shoulders with world leaders and global sporting personalities.

“Most people who play the Old Course come for a drink here,” says Louise Douvall, the Jigger’s manager. “But there’s no special treatment. It doesn’t matter who you are or how many titles you’ve won; everyone has to queue.” Throughout the pub there are caps signed by majors winners, including Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer. “Even they had to get in line.”

Louise has worked at the Jigger Inn since 2006, and assumed the role of lovable landlady in 2015, so she has seen plenty of changes. “We’ve just finished a birthday refurb, but you’d never know,” she grins. “It was very much our intention to keep things as they were. It was important for us that the couple who have been coming here for decades still have their chair in the window, for example, or that someone recognises where they had their first pint 20 years ago. The pub is built on emotional connections with the past.”

Over the past 50 years, one or two evenings have gone down in local folklore, with bands playing late into the night and everyone, staff included, dancing into the wee small hours. Louise, however, remains tight-lipped. “What happens in the Jigger stays in the Jigger,” she says with a wink.