Scotland Golf Bible

A guide to green fee value for money

198. Lockerbie. 3 May 23.

October 29, 2026 /

Lockerbie: a good course in ‘Chapter 11’. I hope it finds a way out.

Price Paid: c. £17 (GolfNow)
Current Price (2026): £30 weekdays / £35 weekends list (Apr-Oct), £20 Nov-Mar; GolfNow £18–20
Value: 3.5/5 at price paid and current GolfNow / 3/5 at current list
Moly’s Score: 87 gross, net 74, 30 Stableford points

The 8th, Little Ponds: 118 yards over water to a green backed by conifers. The prettiest hole on the course and, for once, a par.

Lockerbie Golf Club’s website says the original nine holes, laid out when the club was founded in 1889, were designed by “the legendary James Braid”. Braid was 19 in 1889. He was a joiner in Earlsferry and didn’t turn professional until 1896. Unless the club hired a teenage Fife joiner to lay out a course 150 miles from home, two dates have been merged into one sentence. One directory puts Braid’s involvement at 1927, as a redesign, which would at least fit his career. I couldn’t find a primary source for it. The 4th is called “Braids Special”, which looks like the Brechin pattern (Blog 28): one visit, a few suggestions, then a century of creep. Lockerbie is nonetheless a member of the Association of James Braid Courses. So is Lochmaben, four miles down the road.

The 4th, “Braids Special”, sponsored by a packaging firm and a High Street solicitor. Whatever Braid did here, local businesses are doing the lifting now.

Whoever designed it, the course makes good use of its ground. It sits on a rise above the town, with views over Annandale and, on a clear day, to the Lake District. The holes have real variety: a pond carry at the 8th, a long par 3 at the 5th, and my favourite, the par 3 16th, Queensberry View. It isn’t too tough, which is exactly what a society course should be, and for years that’s what Lockerbie was.

The best hole on the course for me, the Stroke Index 5, par 3 16th hole.

The routing is the weak point. Nine holes were added in 1986, and the parallel fairways running up and down the slope look like the product of several reshuffles, well that’s my hunch.

The routing around Lockerbie. It must have changed over the years?

Condition, on the day, was poor. The fairways were freckled with daisies, the bunkers were compacted and weedy, and rakes were scarce. The 18th green was patchy. In fairness, I played in early May with the course still shaking off a wet winter, and the tees were excellent: flat, firm and well cut. A summer visit would be a fairer measure.

The bunker on the par four 6th, The Beeches: compacted sand, weeds and a lone rake. Volunteers can only be in so many places at once.

The clubhouse was the saddest part. It was tired and run down, and the locals told me food was now a rarity. They put the membership at under 200, paying around £450 a year, with much of the maintenance supported by volunteers. The public record backs up the gist. In 2016 the club asked its landlord, the Lockerbie and Lochmaben Common Good Fund, for a rent cut. In 2018 it lost 24 members in a year and needed £60,000 for drainage. In late 2020 the council served notice to end its lease. Covid brought a membership bounce and a reprieve, and a five-year deal with a local wind farm company is worth £10,000 a year, roughly the subscriptions of 22 members. Add the sponsors’ boards on every tee and you have a club the town clearly still wants.

Fran teeing on the par three 5th, the longest of the five par 3s at 196 yards from red.

So has the town outgrown its club? No. Lockerbie had 2,029 people in 1881 and has around 4,200 today. What has changed is the car. A Victorian town course was built for golfers who walked to it. Today’s golfer can just as easily drive four miles to Lochmaben. As with Maybole (Blog 193), what decides survival at this end of Scottish golf isn’t the size of the town. It’s whether you’re the course people choose within a fifteen-minute drive.

Drove Road, the par four 3rd: a lone tree in mid-fairway, daisies underfoot and the hills beyond. Pretty, as long as you don’t look down.

On the night of 21 December 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a terrorist bomb over the town. All 259 people on board and 11 residents of Lockerbie were killed. The victims fell across a wide area, including this golf course and the fields beside it. TIME reported at the time that sixty were recovered from the course. I played it on an ordinary spring afternoon nearly 35 years later, and it felt like an ordinary town course. It isn’t, quite, and the history of the course can’t escape that dreadful night. The town’s memorial garden is at Dryfesdale Cemetery, on the other side of Lockerbie, and worth a prayer.

The 18th green, Home, looking out over Lockerbie and the Annandale valley.

I came away harsher than Lockerbie deserves, and I think the clubhouse did most of the talking. A golf course is like a set of accounts: a snapshot, not a verdict. Lockerbie is in ‘Chapter 11’. Companies come out of Chapter 11, and the bones here are good. At around £17 through GolfNow it’s 3.5/5, and 3/5 at the £30 list price. Get the greens and bunkers right, and both numbers go up. I’m not convinced it will make it. I’d very much like to be wrong, and I’d like to go back in summer to find out.

Me on the 15th tee, St Blane’s. The tees were the best-kept thing on the course.

Facts:
Course Type: Parkland
Par: 67 (0 par 5s, 13 par 4s, 5 par 3s)
Distance (yellow): 5,334 yards
Course Rating/Slope: 65.9 / 115 (yellow)
Course Quality: 3/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 87

Moly’s 87 at Lockerbie, included only 2 over par on the five par 3s.

197. Seafield. 2 May 23.

October 27, 2026 /

Belleisle’s little sister. Born on a racecourse, raised in the shadow of a more renowned sibling.

Price Paid: £19.99 (GolfNow)
Current Price (2026): £32 list; £32 GolfNow, with hot deals from £21
Value: 4/5 at £19.99 / 3/5 at £32 / 4/5 at £21
Moly’s Score: 85 gross, nett 73, 31 Stableford points (off 12)

Fran with her approach on the 17th. This is not typical of what Seafield looks like, most is flat and easy walking.

My final South Ayrshire council course, and the smaller of the two within Belleisle Park. Seafield shares its estate, pro shop and car park with Belleisle (Blog 189), and GolfNow calls it “Belleisle’s Little Sister.” That’s fair, but the family history is more interesting than the nickname.

Long before golf, there were horses. Ayr races were run at Seafield from 1771 on an oval with bends likely to unseat a jockey. Its patrons included the Earl of Eglinton, the Duke of Portland and the Caledonian Hunt, to whom Burns dedicated his Edinburgh edition in 1787. The Ayr Gold Cup, one of the UK’s richest sprint handicaps, was raced here. In 1907 the track was judged too small for racing which moved to Craigie. Part of the old oval became part of Seafield golf course.

The 1st, from the elevated tee down into the burn valley. It’s a fine opening view, and one of only a handful of holes with any real change in height.

When golf started here is less clear. A 1988 greenkeeping article says nine holes were laid out inside the racecourse in 1904, which would have meant golfers dodging racehorses for three years. GolfNow says 1907, then “redesigned by James Braid in 1927.” A long-standing course list says 1930. Braid certainly designed Belleisle in 1927. For Seafield, I couldn’t find an independent source that names him, and the 1988 article calls it the “poor relation.” I suspect the Braid credit came across from big sister along with the shared car park. Until someone shows me a plan with his name on it, it’s unproven.

Behind the 12th green: View House, once the racecourse grandstand. Today it’s boarded-up arches and a toilet block.

The racing connection still stands. View House, built in 1867 by the Ayr architect James McDerment, provided changing rooms and viewing terraces for the Western Meeting and by 1957 was a golf clubhouse. It isn’t anyone’s clubhouse now. Belleisle got the smart new building. Seafield got the leftovers of the racecourse.

Moly lining up a putt on the 13th beneath ivy-clad Scots pines and the old estate wall. The greens were in good order, with the wall in play on a few holes.

The golf is pleasant. At 5,452 yards off the whites, par 68 with no par 5s, it’s short but not trivial. Fourteen par 4s give it a steady rhythm, and the four par 3s ask enough questions. It sits in a more salubrious part of Ayr than Dalmilling (Blog 192), and it feels like it. The turf and greens were good, and most of the course is flat parkland. The burn valley only comes into play on the 1st and 16th, which are the holes people photograph. I went out in 40 and came home in 45 for 31 points, respectable rather than memorable.

Moly driving off the 16th across the burn and footbridge, with the fairway climbing to the bunkers. This is Seafield at its most dramatic, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Two gripes. There were too few rakes for the number of bunkers. And the café was shut by 3.30pm on a spring afternoon. South Ayrshire markets this place to the world as part of its golf coast. I’m not sure what an American visitor makes of finishing 18 holes in Burns country and finding nowhere to buy a cup of tea.

The 14th, a very typical hole at Seafield

At £19.99 on GolfNow, Seafield is a well-kept, enjoyable 18 holes for less than a round of drinks in the clubhouse it doesn’t have. That’s 4/5. At £32 list you’re paying a full municipal fee for the lesser course, with Belleisle next door. That’s 3/5. The £21 hot deals bring it back to 4/5. It’s a minor course, honestly priced when discounted, and its history is more interesting than its golf.

Facts:
Course Type: Parkland
Par: 68 (0 par 5s, 14 par 4s, 4 par 3s)
Distance: 5,452 yards (whites)
Course Rating / Slope: 66.5 / 111
Course Quality: 3/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 85

Steady round of 85, with all 4s, 5s or 6s.

196. Girvan.1 May 23.

October 25, 2026 /

Is this where the Girvan Gang played?

Price Paid – £15 (GolfNow)
Current Price – £24 list (2026); £17 GolfNow
Value – 4/5 at £15 / [GolfNow tbc] / 3.5/5 at £24
Moly’s Score – 81 gross (31 Stableford points)

Moly off the 5th tee, aiming straight at Ailsa Craig. 171 yards of links, and the wind decides the club.

In my Turnberry Ailsa blog (Blog 188) I introduced the Girvan Gang. In a letter of 1751 they appear as a gaggle of lairds, a minister and a doctor playing golf at Girvan, with Sir John adjudicating both the golf and the drinking. That was three years before the St Andrews golfers formed their Society. So where did they play?

Nobody wrote it down. In a town of about a thousand souls there were only two candidates: the town green, now Stair Park and rows of Victorian villas, or the shore north of the river, where holes one to eight run today. My money is on the shore. If I’m right, Girvan’s first eight holes may be the oldest golfing ground still in play in Ayrshire.

Moly on the 1st tee, off the whites. Firth on the left, Arran on the horizon, and the old shore turf ahead.

The documented story is just as good. In 1892 Girvan’s golfers held an open-air meeting on the ruins of Turnberry Castle and formed a club to play the Turnberry links. Nine years later, when their nine-hole course north of the river was sold for villas, they moved there. Turnberry, in effect, was founded by Girvan. But Turnberry was five miles away and too far for winter golf. So in 1903 the town leased 40 acres of shore, and David Kinnell of Prestwick St Nicholas laid out nine holes on it. He thought them the finest of their size. Directories still credit James Braid. I can find no evidence he did anything here.

Fran off the 2nd, Arran across the water.

The Course

The eight links holes are a delight: firm, rumpled and wind-blown, with a run of brutal par 3s. From the whites, the 3rd is 220 yards, the 7th is 215 and the 8th is 243. It’s the kind of small, magical links that could stand beside Shiskine on Arran, the sort you’d travel just to play.

Ailsa Craig wearing its cloud cap behind the 5th green. Golf has been played on this shore since at least 1891, a decade before Turnberry existed.

Then you cross the road. In 1911 the members, wanting to “remove the congestion”, took a field along the river and extended to 18 holes. The council took the course over in the 1920s and bought it outright in 1926 for £3,000. So the council didn’t make the parkland, but it has had a century to put things right and hasn’t. Of those ten inland holes, two are good, maybe three if you’re generous to the 18th. The rest are flat field golf with a river attached, and the backdrop changes from Ailsa Craig to William Grant’s grain distillery, the Girvan end of the family that gives the world Glenfiddich and, from these very stills, Hendrick’s gin.

Looking back from the 8th tee along the old raised beach. In 1903 the papers praised the “range of hills” sheltering the course. The town Kinnell’s golfers walked from sits at the far end.
The 16th green, under the gaze of Hendrick’s gin. From Ailsa Craig to the distillery in eight holes.

In fairness, the bunkering is excellent throughout, and the island bunker at the 12th is genuinely handsome.

Something worth photographing on the inland half: the island bunker at the 12th.

The Oddities

The clubhouse sits on the road between the two halves, the starter’s hut sits somewhere else, and the starter was the grumpiest I’ve met in a while. On a municipal course, the person at the hut is the welcome. Get that wrong and nothing else recovers it.

The tee colours run white, red, yellow, with yellow as the shortest set for everyone. The stroke indices differ between tees: the 15th is SI 1 off white and SI 7 off red. Fran spotted the yellows were the forward tees and played them, so she got the shortest yardage but ladies’ par 65, with the long par 3s staying par 3s.

Girvan’s handicap board: white, red, yellow, in that order. Visitors, take note.

The Missed Opportunity

The practice green beside the starter’s box looks very much like an old 9th. Behind it, nearer the town, there’s a strip of land that could make Girvan a proper nine-hole links. How many Scottish towns have swapped a brilliant nine for a mediocre 18? Girvan is the clearest case I’ve seen. The council could give the town its links back, the ground where the Girvan Gang may have played, untouched and uncrafted. It hasn’t.

The Verdict

At £15 on GolfNow, 4/5: the front eight alone are worth it. At £24, 3.5/5. Would I go back? For the front eight, gladly.

Facts:
Course Type: Links (holes 1–8) / Parkland (9–18)
Par: 64 (no par 5s, 10 par 4s, 8 par 3s)
Distance: 5,086 yards (white)
Course Rating / Slope: 64.5 / 105
Course Quality: 3/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 81 (net 69, 31 Stableford)

Moly’s scorecard, gross 81

195. Troon Links (Fullarton). 30 Apr 23.

October 25, 2026 /

The junior course, priced like one. Usually.

Price Paid: £19.99 (GolfNow)
Current Price (2026): £28 list; GolfNow £23.99–£25.99 (October)
Value Rating: 4/5 at £19.99 / 4/5 at current GolfNow / 3.5/5 at list
Moly’s Score: 80 gross, 33 Stableford points

The 4th from the yellow tees, a 300-yard corridor of whin, heather and Scots pine; Fullarton in a single frame.

The day before, I played Lochgreen (Blog 194) for £19.99 on GolfNow. The next afternoon, I played Fullarton for £19.99 on GolfNow. Same clubhouse, same starter, same price.

They are not the same course. Lochgreen is 6,473 yards from the yellows, par 74, and was an Open qualifying course for forty years. Fullarton is 4,724 yards, par 66, with six par 3s and not a single par 5 on the men’s card. I assumed the council had simply priced all three alike. I was wrong, and it is worth explaining why.

Golf South Ayrshire’s list price for Fullarton is £28, against £38 for Lochgreen and Darley. That isn’t a rate per yard. Plenty of courses under 5,000 yards are worth far more than £28, and charge it. It is a ranking: Fullarton is the junior course of the three, and it is priced as one. On the quality of what’s here, that’s about right. The current GolfNow rates keep a similar gap. In April 2023, though, the discount algorithm briefly priced Lochgreen and Fullarton the same. On that weekend, the bargain was next door.

The 7th green and the reason for my 6. One of Fullarton’s few bunkers, and I found it.

Fullarton is a nice little course, routed through whin and pine. The bunkering is minimal and the greens are very small, so the defence is accuracy rather than sand. Miss a small green and you are chipping from tight turf. Miss the fairway and you are in the whin. It was also in better condition than either Lochgreen or Darley, less beaten up.

The routing is not obvious, so keep the scorecard map handy, as the 8th and 9th sit amongst the back 9 holes. I went out in 38 gross for 20 points, then came home in 42 for 13. The 173-yard 12th earned a 6 and a blank. Final tally: 80 gross, 33 points.

The 11th, 199 yards: the longest of the six par 3s and a small target. The sky cleared just in time for the back nine.

Golf South Ayrshire sells Fullarton at £28 as a quick round for beginners, and should take less than three hours. The marketing copy is less reliable than the pricing, though. Its own GolfNow blurb promises eight par 3s; the scorecard has six. The GolfNow listing gives Fullarton a par of 71 and 6,785 yards, roughly Lochgreen’s length.

Who designed it, and when? Nobody seems to know. GolfNow says 1905. One app credits Joe Finger in 1983, a Texan who as far as I can tell never designed a hole in Scotland. Another says 1973, the year Troon Welbeck Golf Club was founded. Wikipedia hints that the course came with the Fullarton estate after the council bought it.

The 9th, a 133-yard par 3 with the edge of town behind the green. Fullarton was once the grounds of an estate; now the houses come right up to the course.

That estate has its own story. Fullarton House was built in 1745 and sold in the early 1800s to the Marquis of Titchfield, later the 4th Duke of Portland. The same family’s land gave Royal Troon its links across the railway. The council bought the house in 1928 and demolished it in 1966; the stables survive as Fullarton Courtyard. That is a story for another blog, and a reminder that the same Duke supplied the Open course and the town’s courses.

At £19.99 or the current GolfNow rate, Fullarton is good value at 4/5. At £28 list it is a fair 3.5/5. It is a short, quick, well-kept links, priced for exactly the golfers it is meant for.

Troon Links trilogy: Darley (Blog 136) for the money, Lochgreen (Blog 194) for the Open.

Facts:
Course Type: Inland links
Par: 66 (12 par 4s, 6 par 3s)
Distance: 4,724 yards (yellow)
Course Rating / Slope: 61.6 / 99
Course Quality: 3/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 80 (33 points)

Moly’s card, 80

« Older posts

© 2026 Scotland Golf Bible

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑