World top-75 ranked

With a rich history closely aligned to the progression of golf in Ireland, Portmarnock has hosted numerous Irish Open Championships, the Walker Cup, Irish Amateur Championships and the British Amateur Championship, and the rumour that it’s being lined up as the next course to be introduced to the Open rotation doesn’t look like dying down (we think this one has legs)

From Sam Snead to Seve Ballesteros, some of golf’s best-known names have tested their skills against this majestic narrow tongue of shallow dunes-land, just north of Dublin.

Considered by many as one of the fairest links courses in the world it delivers an incredible challenge and true test of golf.

Perhaps five-time Open Championship winner Tom Watson summed up the links best during his visits saying, “There are no tricks or nasty surprises, only an honest, albeit searching test of shot making skills.”

World top-5 ranked

Periodically Royal County Down can displace the likes of Pine Creek or Cyprus Point as the world’s highest rated golf course (its that good).

It is framed in one of the most stunningly natural links settings in golf. The Murlough Nature Reserve provides the stage, the magnificent Mourne mountains the backdrop. The narrowest ribbons of fairways thread their way through as impressive a set of sand dunes as could be imagined. The fairways are surrounded by purple heather and golden gorse, so beautiful to look at, but so punishing for any who may stray from the prescribed path. The ‘bearded’ bunkers are world famous, featuring overhanging lips of marram, red fescue and heather. The greens are fast and many are domed, rejecting any shot lacking conviction.

The ninth hole is one of the most photographed holes in world golf, a 486 yard par 4, it is played from one side of a huge mound down to a fairway some 60 ft below and 260 yards from the tee. From the bottom of the slope the second shot is played over two bunkers to a raised green.

World top-10 ranked

Golf Digest has rated Royal Dornoch the highest of Scotland’s many worthy candidates, and it remains one of elite quartet that vies for the title of best courses.

The Championship course represented a paradigm in design that endures today. The ‘bump-and-run‘ was the traditional shot to mitigate a links wind. Elevated plinth greens were introduced and ringed with fiendish pot-bunkers to guard them from any such commando approach. Without completely taking the traditional ‘stock shot’ out of the equation, a degree of risk was added. Dornoch therefore challenges you to go the aerial route, and ride the wind. Iron play is the key to the course. The rationale is simple: hit a good approach shot and you should be rewarded. Hit a bad one, and you pay the penalty.

Tom Watson said of Dornoch “the most fun I’ve ever had on a golf course”.

The bunkerless 14th, ‘Foxy’ is often regarded as the signature hole and one of the toughest par 4’s in Scotland

World top-100 ranked

Castle Stuart is another modern addition to the golfing landscape having opened in July 2009.

The course is set on two-tiered balconies overlooking the dark and foreboding waters of the Moray Firth. Players enjoy stunning panoramas from the highest elevations. The course is rich in the textured signature landscape of Scottish ‘whins’, gorse and broom, heather, and marram from beginning to end. These change colour with the seasons as nature commanded, and weave a tapestry of highland hues into this landscape mosaic of rugged beauty.

The course has quickly established a bit tour pedigree when it hosted  the prestigious Scottish Open, where Luke Donald and Alex Noren have triumphed. It was used successfully by Phil Mickelson in 2013 as a springboard to Open success a month later at Muirfield

Recent Ryder Cup Venue

The majestic trio of courses at Gleneagles are a masterpiece of golf course design, which has caught the imagination of  both professional and amateur alike. Lee Trevino remarked whilst standing on the first, “that if this is heaven I sure hope they have some tee times available”.

The regal King’s Course is certainly one of the most beautiful and exhilarating places to play golf in the world, with the springy moorland turf underfoot, the sweeping views from the tees all around, the rock-faced mountains to the north, the green hills to the south, and the peaks of the Trossachs and Ben Vorlich on the western horizon.

Threading through high ridges on the north and west sides of the estate, the Queen’s course is the most aesthetic of the Gleneagles trinity. It presents you with lovely woodland settings, lochans and ditches as water hazards, as well as many moorland characteristics.

Having hosted the 2014 Ryder and 2019 Solheim Cups, the Centenary Course is the longest and probably the most recognisable today. It plays out towards the dark glen, sweeping up the Ochil Hills to the summit of the pass below Ben Shee, which joins it to Glendevon. Course architect, Jack Nicklaus, described it as “The finest parcel of land in the world I have ever been given to work with”

World top 75 ranked

There are records of golf being played at Kingsbarns from 1793, but the modern course opened in 2000, and is set on three-tiered levels, sloping towards the coast. Nearly every hole has stunning views of the North Sea.

Kingsbarns  quickly racked up rave reviews and earned a world ranking of about #50, a position which it’s held more or less since.

The par 5, twelfth hole that plays along the arching shoreline to an exposed green, and the par 3, fifteenth, which involves playing a tee-shot across the waves, are often considered to the courses signature assignments. It was the fourth and fifth that caught Tom Doak’s eye when he described as Kingsbarns

“as piece of construction work, Kingsbarns is one of the best projects I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it for myself”

Perhaps of greatest significance is the number of times it beats more illustrious neighbours in surveys amongst visiting Americans since its always immaculately presented.

Kingsbarns completes the trio of East Coast giants that host the European Tour’s Dunhill links challenge each year alongside Carnoustie and the Old Course.

World top-10 ranked & Open Championship venue

The precise identity of the St Andrews Course we play will depend on the outcome of the ‘open’ ballots and the singles ballots (no one is going to sell a ‘guaranteed’ package for such a short duration)

With all the usual disclaimers of a lottery being random, and there being no such thing as a certainty etc plus the variable factor of availability for the specific week chosen, we should be able to contest three open ballots (Thurs to Sat) and one ‘singles’ ballot (Fri for Sat), for a total of four (if we sought to use every opportunity to do so).  Our prospects of success would be similar to a ‘coin toss’ (competitive, – certainly not a forlorn long-shot)

Our duration exposure to St Andrews is still too short for anyone to sell a ‘guaranteed’ package for it

If we fail, then we’ll look to use the St Andrews New Course as compensation under the present-pay-and-play-on-the-day protocol that exists

World top-50 ranked & Open Championship venue

Dubbed ‘Car-Nasty’, Carnoustie is considered by many to be the most difficult links in the Open Championship rotation

In recent years it has seen some dramatic finishes, none more so than in 1999 when Jean van de Velde took an eight at the 72^nd hole to throw away the claret jug. Iconic images of him paddling in the notorious ‘Barry Burn’ have entered golfing legend. The final four holes are the hardest finish on the rotation. After the carnage of 1999 (6 over won) Sport Illustrated described it as

“a nasty antique that was brought down from the attic after 24 years …the rough was deeper; and the R&A made the fairways as narrow as an eel’s appendix scar”.

Whereas the eighteenth is the hole that has often generated the most drama. The par 3 sixteenth has the highest average scoring par 3 on the Open Championship rotation as indeed the closing four are the hardest.  The Par 5, sixth ‘Hogan’s Alley’, is another famous hole with a punitive out of bounds fence running down it’s left

1999 Carnoustie reduced Sergio Garcia to tears after successive scores of 89 and 83

World top-50 ranked

The links of North Berwick are a traditional out and back nine. Undulating fairways, blind shots, tricky burns and even stone walls make their presence felt in the landscape. The course really is a throw back to the experiences of the game’s pioneers who had to interpret the landscape and weave the hazards nature handed them into their own personal tapestries. North Berwick has an endearing old-fashioned feel.

North Berwick also possesses the original ‘Redan’ hole, (15). Found the world over, ‘Redans’ are the most copied hole in golf.

The Redan completes a trio of holes from 13 which is rarely surpassed in Scottish golf, perhaps only Turnberry’s 9 to 11, and Carnoustie’s 16-18  has better claims for being the best consecutive 3 in a row.

North Berwick is one of those rare courses you never hear a bad word said about, and we’re always struck by the fact that it seems to be the most knowledgeable and the best judges who enthuse most about it.

It would be wrong to think that it’s a curiosity relic though. It’s a beguiling world top-50 ranked course on merit.

World top-10 ranked & Open Championship venue

Frequently ranked inside the world’s top 10, Muirfield is the ‘blue-blooded’ aristocrat of Scottish golf and always immaculately presented. It doesn’t really have any weak holes. So impressed was Jack, he went back to Ohio and built Muirfield Village in homage to the original.

Muirfield instigated a then revolutionary design of two loops of nine. This was to prevent players dialling into the wind of the traditional out and back nine and adjusting.  This design ensures that the wind is constantly changing direction so as to test all aspects of your game and reading of a ball in flight. All three paradigms of golf design penal, heroic and strategic.

The prestigious roll call of Muirfield Open championship winners is perhaps its best testimonial. Player, Nicklaus, Trevino, Watson, Faldo, Els & most recently of course, Mickelson. It offers golfers choices and then requires you to execute. It is a golfers, golf course.

Muirfield is notoriously exclusive however, access is limited. Booking early isn’t just advised, it’s pretty well essential.

World top-25 ranked & Open Championship venue

The iconic Stevenson lighthouse sitting on its craggy headland in amongst the ruins of Turnberry castle, and with views of Ailsa Craig and the Isle of Arran out to sea, plus a tendency to put on spectacular sunsets, Turnberry is the most aesthetic of all the Open venues. In modern golfing legend Turnberry is forever etched in the pages of history as the location for the ‘duel in the sun’ from 1977 when Tom Watson narrowly prevailed over Jack Nicklaus with the rest nowhere. Myths are made in moments, but legends last a lifetime.

In 2016 the course finished it’s stunning redevelopment. The new holes 9-11, look set to become the signature stretch. Not so much Amen Corner, as perhaps a Rocky Horror! The fifth is the hardest on the course and has been toughened up further. The fourteenth, an infinity hole out to sea might become the most awe inspiring.

Is Turnberry the best course in Scotland? We don’t know, it’s a hotly contested accolade, but it’s certainly in any conversation

Sometimes World top-100 ranked, & Open Championship venue

Troon is a traditional links and has hosted the Open a total of ten times. Make your score going out. The inward nine against the omni-present wind is always a trial, made harder by hideously deep rough interspersed with thick gorse and broom.

The par 3, eighth, described by Willie Park as “a pitching surface skimmed down to the size of a Postage Stamp” is the signature hole. The name stuck, and today it’s one the most recognisable short holes in the global game

It’s the par 4, eleventh, ‘the Railway Hole’, that’s the most feared though. In 1997 Tiger Woods carded an eight here. Jack Nicklaus was even more chewed up. He returned a ten in 1962. You have to wonder if there is a hole anywhere in world golf where Jack and Tiger have each signed for quadruples?

More recently Troon staged the memorable 2016 Championship. Henrik Stenson edged Phil Mickelson in one of the most stunning displays of head-to-head play in Major Championship history. They pulled a remarkable 11 shots clear, both shooting record equalling 63’s en-route.

World top-25 ranked & Open Championship venue

Royal Portrush is constructed on an area of natural dune land framed by limestone cliffs. The Open was held here in 1951, and won by Max Faulkner. In 2019 it returned, Shane Lowry playing the elements best of all to prove a popular local(ish) winner, whilst Scottie Scheffler obliged in 2025 (note how quickly the R&A came back!)

The Dunluce Links is home to one of the most stunning par fours in golf, the 411 yard 5th hole. A dogleg hole played from an elevated tee towards the ocean, it rewards the daring shot across a wide expanse of rough. An overly long approach shot will end up on the sand of the White Rocks beach which lies just beyond the rear of the green however. Carnage!

Calamity Corner, the 210 yard par 3 16th hole is the other feature hole. Between the tee and the green is a yawning chasm, which must be cleared to stand any chance of making your three. This is a score wrecker coming at a decisive moment in the round.