Prestwick sits on the west coast of Ayrshire, about thirty miles southwest of Glasgow, where the Firth of Clyde opens toward the Isle of Arran. The name itself dates to the Old English preost wic, meaning priest's farm - the town began as an outlying holding of a religious house. A competing theory from the philologist George T. Flom proposes an Old Norse origin meaning priest's bay. Either way, the place has been inhabited for a very long time. It was a Burgh of Barony for more than a thousand years before becoming anything more than a small village. Robert the Bruce is said to have been cured of leprosy by the waters of the well at St Ninian's church, and the well still bubbles behind the church to this day. The ruined parish church near the railway station is thought to date from the twelfth century; it stands roofless inside an ancient graveyard.

On a crisp October day in 1860, eight professional golfers walked out onto the Prestwick links to compete for a leather championship belt. That was the first Open Championship. The course was twelve holes long, and the players went around three times for a total of thirty-six holes in a single day. Willie Park Sr. of Musselburgh won. The Open returned to Prestwick every year for twelve years (the championship paused in 1871), and over the next half-century the club hosted it twenty-four times. The Prestwick Old Course - rolling sandy links between beach and hinterland, with railway tracks running along the eastern holes - is the place where competitive professional golf began. The course is private, but it is not preserved as a museum. People still play it. The same wind comes off the Firth that confounded the first champions.

Prestwick Airport opened in the 1930s and within a decade had become the last European refuelling stop on the Great Circle route from London to San Francisco via Thule in Greenland. During the Second World War the US Army Air Corps based aircraft here. For more than half a century after, Prestwick was Scotland's transatlantic gateway - the place where pilots crossing the North Atlantic could top up tanks before the long water leg. Modern jets removed the need for such stops, and Prestwick's commercial fortunes declined sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. Today the airport handles one low-cost airline, Ryanair, along with significant cargo traffic, US military movements, and maintenance work for BAE Systems, Spirit AeroSystems, and GE Aircraft Engines. The airfield also hosts the NATS Scottish and Oceanic Area Control Centre, which controls seventy percent of UK airspace and manages the eastern half of North Atlantic air traffic - the busiest ocean airspace in the world.

Not every story is a happy one. On 28 August 1944, a Douglas C-54 Skymaster of the United States Army Air Forces was attempting to land at Prestwick in bad weather when it came down into a residential area. All twenty people aboard died, along with five people on the ground. The town remembers them, and remembers the Polish airmen, sailors, and merchant seamen who served from this coast in the war - the Polish memorial in the gardens of the RAFA Club, originally erected at nearby Monkton, was unveiled on 2 May 1987 with a service that Polish and Scottish ex-servicemen still attend together. Between the dark and the light, there was once the Lido: Prestwick Bathing Lake, opened in 1931 by the Scottish Secretary William Adamson, the largest swimming pool north of the border. It could hold twelve hundred bathers and three thousand spectators, hosted Miss Scotland competitions and moonlight swimming galas, and closed in 1972. The children's playgrounds along the esplanade now stand where it used to be, with houses behind them looking across the Firth toward Arran.