Brother Calder

Where Brother MacLaing was drawn to people, Brother Calder was drawn first to the land. From boyhood he paced the dunes and hollows of the Old Course, watching how weather, turf and human habit slowly carved a pattern into the links. When, in 1764, the Old Course was formally reduced from twenty-two to eighteen holes, he understood more keenly than most that something profound had happened: the game now had a standard skeleton of holes that others would copy, an official frame the world could measure.

Yet Calder kept noticing everything that lay outside that new frame. He saw how players bunched at certain corners to argue a ruling, how they drifted together on the walk back into town, how a hard-fought match could end not with the final stroke but with a shared drink or a quiet apology in an inn doorway. Evenings by the fire with Brother MacLaing convinced him that Master Liang's old family custom – to finish properly, in company – needed more than memory if it was to survive an age of printed rules and growing clubs.

So Calder began, cautiously, to design what could never appear on a scorecard. He coined phrases that only certain men used, suggested a particular nod or greeting when one recognised a kindred spirit, and spoke, half in jest, of 'the nineteenth' as the part of the course that no architect could draw. In his notebooks, beside rough sketches of the reshaped Old Course, he drew circles and arrows marking where players gathered after play, treating these informal meeting points as seriously as any green or hazard.

For the Order, Brother Calder is revered as the first architect of the unseen hole. Where MacLaing extended Master Liang's spirit across inns and towns, Calder gave that spirit structure: the idea that wherever there is an eighteen-hole course, there must also be an unwalled nineteenth guarded by those who know how to finish a round properly. Together, their lives closed one chapter of the lineage and set the stage for the travelling brothers and innkeepers who would carry the Order's quiet network across Scotland's growing web of clubs and taverns.