Scotland Golf Bible

A guide to green fee value for money

208. Baberton. 22 Jun 23.

November 10, 2026 /

The blacksmith who did take out a patent, the poets who really did meet, and a family called Marshall who keep winning.

Price Paid: Member’s guest.
Current Price (2025): £75 summer. On Golfnow price tbd
Value Rating: £75 summer list, 3/5; typically around £50 on GolfNow 4/5.
Moly’s Score: 83 gross, 37 Stableford points

The 3rd, The Knowe: the fairway undulates from the tee across the old Baberton House parkland, with the view running north beyond the trees.

Juniper Green is a village within the City of Edinburgh council area, about five miles south-west of the city centre. The club dates from 1893, when Sir James Gibson Craig leased it parkland from the Baberton House estate, land the club later bought. Willie Park Junior laid out the original nine holes.

The 1st, Waugh’s Knowe. The quality of the layout shows from the first tee shot: gorse, a falling fairway and bunkers framing the hole.

I was the guest of Derek Phillips, the fellow Dundonian I’d met at Kilspindie (Blog 206) the day before. His friend Mark, just back from illness, made up the threeball. Derek came armed with three claims to fame. I checked them all.

Moly on the 6th tee, Quarry, and swinging rather well.

Claim one: steel shafts were invented here, but nobody took out a patent. This is half right, and the wrong half is the interesting one. Founder member Tom Horsburgh, a blacksmith, forged steel-shafted clubs at his smiddy near Balerno and took out UK Patent No 8603 in May 1894. What he didn’t take out were foreign patents. His shafts were solid, the Americans made theirs hollow, and his patent lapsed in the 1920s. The R&A only allowed steel in 1929. Some of his clubs and copies of the patent papers are in the clubhouse; the rest are in the golf museum in St Andrews.

The paper trail: the agent’s letter of 16 May 1894 enclosing the seal of British Patent No 8603, “Improvements in Golf Clubs”, which turns straight to foreign and colonial patents. Horsburgh didn’t take the hint.

Claim two: the war poets. Historian Neil McLennan traced a letter placing the meeting of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves at Baberton on 13 October 1917. Sassoon wouldn’t cancel his golf match, so Owen brought Graves to the club. Owen was dead within thirteen months. English literature owes something to a golfer who wouldn’t give up his tee time.

Sassoon’s letter to Graves on Craiglockhart War Hospital notepaper, framed beside portraits of Owen, Sassoon and Graves. Two of them survived the war.

Claim three: Ewen Murray’s father, Jimmy, was the pro here for more than three decades and taught the game to Ewen, now the voice of Sky’s golf coverage. The 11th bears his name. I parred it. Three out of three, with an asterisk.

The honours board is thick with Marshalls. Joan Marshall was club champion ten times and set a course record of 68 in 1982. Her daughter Karen beat it by a stroke and has 14 titles. The 14th was renamed after Joan in 2018, and this year Karen and Ella Marshall helped retain the Edinburgh Ladies Inter-Club title.

Friends Derek (left) and Mark walk up the 13th.

We played just after the club championships, and the condition was fabulous: greens, tees and fairways alike. It’s hilly and a hard walk. The trees are tight, but the ground beneath them is clear. The real quality is in the green complexes and the bunkers, which were being rebuilt with rolled faces and rubber-resin liners.

The 5th, Garden: a 224-yard par 3 to a green tucked beneath the conifers against an old stone wall. The name hints at what that wall once enclosed.

Stroke indexes 1 to 4 are brutes, with long approaches. Those four holes cost me seven shots. The other fourteen cost me six.

The 12th, Whitelaw, stroke index 1: 474 yards for a par 4, rising to a green ringed by bunkers. A six felt like a fair result.

At £50, typical GolfNow price, this is 4/5 value: a historic, beautifully kept parkland course with a good clubhouse. At £75 list it’s 3.5/5, still fair when Royal Burgess, across the city, charges £200.

Derek on the 18th tee, Redan, with Edinburgh’s skyline and the Castle on the horizon, five miles and a world away.

Facts:
Course Type: Parkland
Par: 70 (3 par 5s, 10 par 4s, 5 par 3s)
Distance: 6,016 yards (white)
Course Rating / Slope: 69.6 / 126
Course Quality: 4/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 83 (37 Stableford points)

207. Gullane Number 3. 21 Jun 23.

November 9, 2026 /

After my three previous blogs covering borrowed, lost and swapped names, a course called exactly what it is.

Price Paid: £35 twilight (2023), at the starter’s box
Current Price (2026): £70 weekday, £90 weekend (£75 from noon). Twilight (April to September, from 15:36) £55 weekday, £65 weekend. Winter offer £55 weekday.
Value Rating: Price paid 5/5; current twilight 5/5; current list weekday 4.5/5, weekend 4/5

This week playing East Lothian golf has been a story of names. Luffness New plays on ground older than its name (Blog 204). Old Tom’s Luffness holes lie unmarked under Gullane No 2 (Blog 205). The original Luffness club went to the Craigielaw links and became Kilspindie (Blog 206). Gullane’s courses are simply numbered in the order they were built. No 3 opened in 1910, the third. It’s like an antidote to Kilspindie.

No 3 starts beside No 2 at the west end of Gullane, East Lothian, about 20 miles east of Edinburgh. The designer was Willie Park Jr, who laid out No 2 twelve years earlier, whereas the designer of Gullane No 1 remains a mystery (Blog 143).

The 8th, 165 yards. Don’t be fooled by 5,134 yards: my ball at the foot of a revetted face, with the flag on the green above and the Firth of Forth beyond.

I teed off alone at ten past four, with Kilspindie’s 82 already in my legs. On my own I was round in two and a half hours; the card allows three for a two-ball. The 87 is the day’s second round talking, not the course going soft.

The 3rd, 293 yards, with the path winding up Gullane Hill behind the green. It looks harmless. I took seven.

Don’t be fooled by the length. It’s par 67, with one par 5, the 443-yard 14th, and six par 3s. In Gullane No 2’s Blog (Blog 205) I said No 3 had far fewer bunkers than No 2. Fewer, maybe, but no softer: they’re deep and strategically placed. The rough is punishing on a few holes, and some of the greens are huge. After the 7 at the 3rd I added another 7 at the 16th, and a 6 on the closing par 3.

The 11th, 135 yards straight up the hill to two bunkers. The tee is the only green thing in sight on the parched June day.

After the opening holes the course climbs Gullane Hill, and the views make the case for it on their own. Look west and you see Aberlady Bay, the Luffness links and, across the water, Aberlady, where I’d started the day at Kilspindie. The whole week’s story is in one frame.

From the 7th tee, Blogs 204 to 206 in one frame: the links below, Aberlady Bay, and Aberlady across the water, home of Kilspindie. The Pentlands close the view.

Now the value. On a weekday, No 1 costs £285, No 2 £100 and No 3 £70. Same turf, same greens, same bunkering, same views.

The 4th green, with Arthur’s Seat and the Pentlands across a glittering Forth. That view costs £215 less here than on No 1.

My £35 twilight round in 2023 now costs £55, up more than half in three years, and still worth 5/5. At the £70 weekday list rate it’s 4.5/5, and £90 at weekends makes it 4/5.

The 15th, 176 yards, with North Berwick Law on the horizon and a green you could land a light aircraft on. Two putts for par felt like an achievement.

The 17th, back down to the village, with a revetted bunker right of the green waiting for anyone in a hurry to finish.

That’s four courses in three days, played, without my planning it, in the order they were laid out: Luffness New 1894, Gullane No 2 1898, Kilspindie 1899, Gullane No 3 1910. If I go back to Gullane on my own money, this is the course I’ll play.

Facts:

Course Type: Links
Par: 67 (1 par 5, 10 par 4s, 6 par 3s)
Distance: 5,134 yards (white tees)
Course Rating / Slope: 65.3 / 114
Course Quality: 4.5/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 87 (31 Stableford points)

Moly’s Gullane No 3 scorecard: 87 gross, 31 points

206. Kilspindie. 21 Jun 23.

November 9, 2026 /

Luffness, then Craigielaw, now Kilspindie: the club that kept losing its name.

Price Paid: Member’s guest
Current Price: £100 (2025, club website), weekdays and weekends (club website)
Value: 4/5 at list price
Moly’s Score: 82 gross, 36 Stableford points

Kilspindie sits on the western edge of Aberlady, about 15 miles east of Edinburgh,squeezed between the village and Aberlady Bay. The week I played Kilspindie, Lloyd Cole of the Commotions told The Times where he feels happiest: “If my game doesn’t totally suck, as it has the past few years, the links of Kilspindie, East Lothian, with my son Frank.” I understand why, after playing it only once.

Moly on the 5th tee, The Law. It’s 272 yards, a par 4 you can drive in theory, with the Firth of Forth alongside all the way.

I played with Kilspindie member Mike Johnson and his pal Derek Phillips, who, like me, is a Dundonian. Fittingly, the Kilspindie name isn’t local either. The Douglases of Kilspindie probably took it from a hamlet in the Carse of Gowrie, twelve miles west of Dundee, an area where Derek and I most likely picked berries in our youth. The most famous of the Douglases, Archibald “Greysteil” Douglas, was Provost of Edinburgh and Treasurer to the young James V. The Douglases’ castle stood behind Aberlady kirk. So two Dundonians spent the morning on a links named after berry lands near Dundee. I like that.

Approaching the 13th, The Kirk, between the old stone walls. Kilspindie Castle’s stones went into the walls around Aberlady, and it’s nice to think a few ended up here.

Blog 204 tells the story of the Luffness club division in 1894, into Luffness and Luffness New, the latter moving to its current course. The Aberlady-based Luffness members remained on the old course until it’s lease ran out in 1898, and the Earl of Wemyss offered the club links land across the Aberlady Bay. Some histories, Scottish Golf History among them, say it became Kilspindie that year, but the clubhouse wall tells a different story. A notice setting caddie rules from 16 January 1899 is signed for “Luffness Golf Club”, and so is a rifle-range notice dated 16 March 1899. The club’s own date of 1899 stands, and the renaming came no earlier than spring.

Caddie rules for the “Muirfield, Gullane, Craigielaw & Luffness Mill Links”, 1899: four links and four clubs. The old Luffness club signs for the third, Craigielaw, and New Luffness for Luffness Mill.

The caddie notice has a further twist. Four links are named and four clubs sign it, so the old club’s new ground was the Craigielaw links. One golf history says just that: the members “moved to the Craigielaw Links in 1898”. The club had already lost the name Luffness to its own breakaway. A century later it lost the second. In the late 1990s Kilspindie set out to build a second eighteen on the ground next door, its landlord’s ground, and members paid handsomely for the privilege. After two years of fractious negotiation, the Wemyss and March Estates pulled out in 2001. The estate then built the course itself, with Donald Steel, and called it Craigielaw (Blog 182). So, the landlord that rescued the club in 1898 had become its competitor next door. As far as I can tell, Kilspindie still leases its links from the same estate. The two clubs now name a hole after each other: Kilspindie’s 17th is “Craigielaw” and Craigielaw’s 6th is “Kilspindie”. Make of that what you will.

Mike on the 17th green, named Craigielaw, with the stone wall and the clubhouse beyond.

The Wanster, the ground under the 9th to 11th is “perhaps the oldest golfing ground of the lot”. I’ve checked. Aberlady golfers played there sometime before 1867, and the club says before 1850, sharing the ground with the Aberlady company of the Haddingtonshire Rifle Volunteers. Gullane, however, has seven holes on record by 1840, plus a legend of 1650 matches in which Aberlady’s weavers walked over to Gullane to play. The verdict is that very Scottish one: not proven. When the golfers came back to the Wanster in 1898, the riflemen were still there, and members were told to “turn at the Third Hole” whenever the Volunteers were shooting. The 4th, The Target, and the 11th, The Magazine, are named after the range.

“Notice as to Rifle Range”, March 1899, still signed for Luffness Golf Club and issued “in terms of the Lease of the Links”: a tenant from its first season.

The golf is a delight. The 2nd to the 7th run along the coast, and water is in play on several of them when the tide is in. The greens were the best of the week, which is saying something after Luffness New and Gullane No 2.

Mike putts out on the 4th, The Target, with the beach drained by the tide and the hills of Fife beyond.
The 6th tee, Green Craig, as smooth as many greens, with 268 yards of fairway running towards Aberlady and the beach on the right.

Keep your ego in check, though. From the yellows it’s 5,209 yards, and several par 4s are almost drivable. My 82 was exactly my handicap, 36 points, and it was not half as good as my 86 in the wind at Luffness New. Lloyd Cole’s caveat applies in reverse: here, even a mediocre game can look good.

Moly on the 8th, Gosford Bay, the club’s signature par 3, with the shore all down the right. I made par, as the scorecard will confirm.

The clubhouse is a time capsule. The members’ lockers line the bar and dining room, next to the whisky cabinet. I’m told that in years gone by, members thought nothing of changing there while other people ate their lunch.

Lockers 11 to 16, the past captains, and the malt whisky cabinet, all in the same room.

Value? At £100, Kilspindie costs half Luffness New’s summer rate (£210, Blog 204), and the same as a weekday round on Gullane No 2 (Blog 205) and less than Craigielaw’s £125 (Blog 182). It’s short, but the setting, the greens and the history are first-rate. That’s 4/5.

Mike finishes on the 18th, Home.

Gullane No 3 that afternoon: Blog 207.

Facts:

Course Type: Links
Par: 69 (1 par 5, 14 par 4s, 4 par 3s)
Distance: 5,209 yards (yellow)
Course Rating / Slope: 65.7 / 106
Course Quality: 4.5/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 82 (36 Stableford points)

Moly’s scorecard – 82.

205. Gullane Number 2. 20 Jun 23.

November 5, 2026 /

Built partly on Old Tom’s Luffness leftovers, borrowed recently by the Scottish Open, and a third of the price of its Number 1 brother.

Price Paid: Guest of a member
Current Price (2026): £100 weekday, £125 weekend; club offers from £80. GolfNow: ~£80.
Value Rating: Current list: weekday 4/5, weekend 3.5/5; offers 4.5/5
Moly’s Score: 80 gross, 41 Stableford points

When I reviewed Gullane No 1 (Blog 143), Alastair Allanach was my host. He’s a Gullane member who has played more courses than anyone I know. A year later, the day after playing Luffness New (Blog 204), he took me round his club’s middle child.

Gullane sits on the south shore of the Firth of Forth in East Lothian, about 20 miles east of Edinburgh. GolfNow gives the address as North Berwick, five miles further along the coast. It isn’t.

Alastair on the high fairway of the 3rd, with East Lothian laid out below him all the way to the Lammermuirs.

Luffness New (Blog 204) left a loose end. In 1893 Gullane’s landowners, the Nisbet Hamilton Ogilvys, pointed out that the northern holes of Old Tom Morris’s Luffness links were on their ground, and asked for rent. Luffness built a ‘New’ course instead. When the old club’s lease ran out in 1898 it left for Aberlady and soon called itself Kilspindie, and that same year Willie Park Jr’s Gullane No 2 opened. According to Scottish Golf History, the 12th and 13th, and probably the 14th, play over Old Tom’s original Luffness course. They’re the holes that come down off the hill to the edge of Aberlady Bay. Nothing on the ground tells you so.

The 12th tee, dropping off the hill onto what was Old Tom Morris’s Luffness links, with Aberlady Bay below and Arthur’s Seat on the horizon.

Now the economics. When I played No 1 in 2022, the visitor rate was £195. In 2026 it’s £285 on a weekday and £325 at weekends. No 2 costs £100 on the same hill. You don’t need an economist to work out where the visitors are going, and No 2 is much busier than its old reputation as the members’ spare would suggest.

The gentle opening, two pleasant par 4s to warm you up, had me guessing James Braid. Wrong. Park, twice Open champion, laid it out, and the real business starts at the 3rd. It’s a 233-yard par 4 that climbs blind up the flank of the hill, with only the top of the flag showing. I made a three, and at the summit you’re rewarded with a view west to Arthur’s Seat.

The 4th, stroke index 1, falls back towards the Forth. Alastair hit a drive straight at the tankers anchored in the Firth, then a delicate chip between two bunkers.

Alastair’s drive from the 4th tee, with ships at anchor in the Forth, with Fife beyond.
Alastair chips onto the 4th green. Bunkers like these are why you stay on the grass.

The approaches are cleverly done. Hidden fronts and dead ground hide where the green actually starts, and from the findable rough you need more club than the yardage says, again and again.

The 14th, probably on Old Tom’s ground: a marker pole, a flag and an orange shirt. Everything else is a matter of faith.

The greens were remarkable. It was a long dry spell and the fairways were straw-coloured, yet the putting surfaces were firm, true and green, better even than Luffness’s the day before. They were subtle too. I stood over a lot of putts I expected to make, and didn’t make them.

The 6th. A crow weighs up my ball on a fairway that hadn’t seen rain in weeks.
The 8th green: the drought breaks, and the umbrella finally earns its place on the trolley.

When the Scottish Open came to Gullane in 2015, the composite course took 16 holes from No 1 and borrowed No 2’s 7th and 8th, played as the 14th and 15th. The composite was used again in 2018. Those were my two worst holes: a bogey and a double, one Stableford point each. The Tour has the better of me there.

The 7th, borrowed for the Scottish Open: a green on the edge of the bank, with a squall crossing the Forth behind.

Many commentators consider the quality of a course’s winners a decent measure of the course. Gullane’s composite produced Rickie Fowler in 2015, then Brandon Stone in 2018 with a closing 60, a putt away from the Tour’s first 59. That same summer, Ariya Jutanugarn won the Ladies Scottish Open here, and the win took her to world number one. No fluke champions here.

It’s a touch of a curate’s egg, though. Between the great holes there are respite holes. No 2 has fewer bunkers than No 1, though far more than its near-twin No 3. And the 18th is weak: a flat 291-yard par 4 aimed at the clubhouse car park. I made par and felt no better for it.

The 18th: flat, short and pointed at the car park. Not the finish the rest of the course deserves.

At £100 for Summer midweek this is decent value for a course with Scottish Open pedigree and greens of this standard, and the £80 off-peak rates arguably make it a bargain. If No 1’s price makes you wince, and it should, No 2 is where to go. Better still, find yourself a friend like Alastair.

The 14th green with lupins in the dunes and Aberlady Bay beyond. Look at the colour of the green against the fairways around it.
Moly (left) and Alastair: the 19th, and a toast to the middle child.

Facts:

Course Type: Links
Par: 71 (2 par 5s, 13 par 4s, 3 par 3s)
Distance: 6,015 yards (yellow tees)
Course Rating / Slope: 69.3 / 122
Course Quality: 4.5/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 80
Scorecard:

Moly’s Gullane 2 scorecard, 9 over round in 80.

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