PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — For the first time in 68 years, the British Open has come to lovely and, for the moment, soggy Royal Portrush. Which also means that for the first time in 68 years, the British Open has left the British mainland and traveled across the Irish Sea.

And yet walking the course or visiting the spectator village this week, it all seems so familiar to an Open regular, from the grandstands to the cavernous media tent to the two imposing yellow scoreboards that face each other across the 18th green.

“What they’ve done here is quite extraordinary, isn’t it?” David McCombes said as he directed his young staff deep inside one of the multistory scoreboards, which are still operated manually.

McCombes is a history teacher at Charterhouse School, an English boarding school in Godalming in Surrey, England, whose students and alumni have been updating the scoreboards by hand since 1979. The opposite scoreboard is manned by representatives from rival Cranleigh School.