Scotland’s 10 Best Modern Courses

scotland modern

As the acknowledged “Home of Golf,” Scotland has a long and proud history with the game, and especially in regard to the courses on which the game is played. The Old Course in St. Andrews is the most famous course in the world, in part because of its age and history. Old, it most certainly […]

Golf Course Architect Clive Clark – LINKS Golf Podcast Ep. 135

clive clark

An all-new season of the LINKS Golf Podcast begins with a conversation featuring golf course architect Clive Clark. The hosts chat with Clark, a former player and broadcaster, about his memories from playing against Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf in the Ryder Cup, making the first televised hole-in-one in Masters history, and his acclaimed design […]

Modern Classics: Dumbarnie Links

Dumbarnie Links

Likely the last true links to be built in Scotland, it looks to be 100 years old or more—not just three Dumbarnie Links was a 20-year dream in the making. When it finally emerged from a stretch of inaccessible, virgin linksland along the southern shores of the Firth of Forth in 2019, it became quickly […]

10 Top Golf Courses That Opened in 2020

2020

Even with golf’s resurgence in 2020 amid the pandemic, new course openings are exceedingly limited. After all, with more than 38,000 courses in over 200 countries worldwide, there’s no shortage of supply. Think about that. Even if you played one new course every single day, you’d need more than 100 years to play them all. […]

Dumbarnie and Coul Links: How Two Acclaimed Links Course Proposals Met Vastly Different Fates

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]The two projects were announced with great fanfare—and had golfers salivating. In 2015, Coul Links Ltd., a consortium headed by Americans Mike Keiser and Todd Warnock, proposed the construction of a new links course in Embo, Scotland, just north of Dornoch. It was to be the first Scottish links from the esteemed design team of […]

The Best Courses Under Five Years Old

A classic golf course has its quirks, charm, and beauty. To walk in the steps of legends or feel connected to golfers of an era-gone-by can never get old—nor will the uniqueness of a course that has been on the same plot of land for a hundred years. But there’s just something about a modern […]

Dumbarnie Links

On a trip to Scotland last fall I had the opportunity to play a sneak-preview round at Dumbarnie Links. Clive Clark, a member of the 1973 Great Britain and Ireland Ryder Cup team, has taken a relatively undistinguished landscape and created 18 fun, testing, and memorable holes. About nine miles south of St. Andrews on […]

5 Most Exciting Courses in Development

In the decade since the Great Recession, the worlds of golf course construction and course architecture have undergone wholesale changes. The emphasis is now on quality rather than quantity, as well as natural over decorative, which means courses generally cost less to build and maintain and are far less harmful to the environment. A handful […]

Three New Golf Courses Coming to Scotland

By Tony Dear   Some Scottish golf is royal. Much of it is ancient. It’s the home of the game to which nearly a quarter of a million devotees travel each year in order to play the most sanctified courses in the world. To many disciples, this ground is holy. The country couldn’t be accused […]