Magistrates for a burgh held the links from time immemorial for behoof of the inhabitants, and, inter alia, subject to the obligation of preserving the same for the purposes of the game of golf and for the recreation and amusement of the inhabitants. They had from time to time exercised powers of administration and management over the links, such as the letting of the pasturage, the regulation of bleaching clothes on the links, the construction of a sloping walk, and the levelling and filling up other portions of the ground. The magistrates proposed to make a macadamised road along the outside boundary of the links, where that boundary adjoins certain feus let off by them in 1820, which feus are no longer, in point of law, part of the links.
P., an inhabitant of the burgh and member of the principal golfing club there and others, the Appellants, sought by note of suspension and interdict to restrain the magistrates either from making the road or from permitting any road to be used in that place for wheel traffic:—
Held, substantially affirming the decision of the Judges of the Court below, but altering their interlocutor, that the evidence proved that the proposed road would have no substantial interference with the obligation of golfing, &c., and that the road might be reconciled with its due observance; but that it was inconsistent with that obligation for the magistrates to alienate any part of the solum of the ground in question, or to abdicate their existing powers of administration either by granting private easements to particular individuals, or, having made the road, to create a public easement by dedicating it to the public.