At 8pm the other evening in St Andrews, with the sun setting gently over the town, I watched as two American golf fans gazed up at the old castle window from which David Beaton, his body butchered and mutilated, was recently suspended upon death

Well, I say recently. It was actually in 1546, a terrible year for such incidents in the Home of Golf.

Loitering golf fans, the soles of their feet caked in the sand from the dunes that encroach the Old Course, would do well to give themselves a 30-minute crash-course on these hallowed streets through which they walk.

In lovely, ancient St Andrews occurred some of the grisliest murders Europe has ever known. Jordan Spieth doesn’t know the half of it.

The TV aerial pictures of this jewel of a university town on Wednesday evening were exquisite: the dimming sun, the verdant links, the waves lapping up within a pitching-wedge of the R&A clubhouse. It all looked so serene.

And so it is. Except for the brutal, chaotic history that has brought both golf and revered learning to this ancient seat on the rocky coast of Fife.

I was minded of the fate of Archbishop Beaton while traipsing down North Street, my Old Course guide in hand, when I stepped upon the cobbled initials “P.H.” beneath the spire of St Salvator’s Chapel, 350 yards as the crow flies from the 18th pin.

Patrick Hamilton was an early Protestant agitator whose burning at the stake on North Street in 1528 took fully six hours, the St Andrews wind and rain having repeatedly put out the flames.

To this day many locals in the town shudder at the story. In the weeks following Hamilton’s dire end – surely life’s ultimate triple-bogey - you were said to be accursed thereon if you had stood and watched the whole ghastly incident.

“The reek of Patrick Hamilton,” a St Andrews historian wrote, “infected as many as it blew upon.” Today students, tourists or golfers in St Andrews are said to suffer some wretched luck if, as I did on Wednesday, they step upon the cobbled initials.

(That being said, I’ve trodden on the spot of Patrick Hamilton’s execution at least 100 times, and my luck’s held up.)

As the years passed St Andrews gave up brutal murder, kept to religion, and found that playing “the gowf” was a far better way of settling disputes and passing the time.

Slayings and death-by-roasting in the town ebbed away, and a strange type of whimsy took their place.

There are stories from not so long ago of sheep grazing on the 18th fairway and hunkering down for the night in these undulations around the Valley of Sin. At least one book has related how St Andrews caddies, either near-penniless or done-in with drink, slept in the bunkers in the “summer” months.

By the time all the murdering had stopped, golf was truly taking hold, and the Old Course emerged from its millennia of wind-swept construction to present itself as a prized gift of nature – and coastal ecosystem – for the game.

Today the ancientness of St Andrews resounds in every street, and its relationship with golf is a part of that stroll back in time. It was Jack Nicklaus who once said of the Old Course: “I’d never seen anything like it…walking the 18th hole, past these buildings on your right, you almost seemed to be walking right into the heart of the town.”

Golf flourished here, and so did academia. St Andrews University students soon learned how to play the Old Course for nothing, getting up at 5.30am in the summer term and managing maybe 12 holes before the course ranger arrived, first on his bike (the 1950s), then on a motorbike (the 1980s), and now on a motorised buggy with a tracking system.

I once scammed on to the course myself – at 5am - and reached the 14th green before being hauled up by the long arm of the R&A. I was 19 years old. A bit of a spat duly developed.

Right behind the 18th green, just across the road, stands what was once the Grand Hotel of St Andrews, but which for 57 years from 1949 was a student residence called Hamilton Hall.

In there, for free, a student had a room for a year or more, looking over either the Old Course or the West Sands. We took it totally for granted. Pre-1980 and the imminent golf tourist boom, there was still this innocence about St Andrews and its setting.

Back then, in terms of today’s Open circus, the auld toun didn’t know what was to hit it. Golfers, students, academics and locals happily mingled and milled around.

In these summer days it is said that St Andrews during Open week is at its best. But this is not the case.

St Andrews is at its best, its most authentic, on a wet November night at 11.30pm, when the streets are dark and empty, and the sea is roaring behind you, and your footsteps echo off these ancient walls.

It is in that beautiful bleakness that St Andrews speaks of itself, and of its past.