Scotland Golf Bible

A guide to green fee value for money

203. Swanston. 18 Jun 23.

November 2, 2026 /

Treasure Island was written in Braemar. Swanston’s best golf was written on the hill.

Price Paid: £23 (GolfNow, Sunday afternoon)
Current Price (2026): £40 weekday / £50 weekend (summer list); £15 / £20 (winter list); GolfNow Hot Deals from £17
Value Rating: 4/5 at £23 paid / 4/5 at current GolfNow / 3/5 at current summer list
Moly’s Score: 82 gross, 36 Stableford points

The 12th green, with Edinburgh Castle on view.

Swanston sits about four miles south of Edinburgh city centre on the lower slopes of Caerketton Hill. Margaret Carswell, its founder, was a keen golfer who was refused membership by various Edinburgh clubs. Outraged at this, she set up her own ladies-only club here in 1928, and for that deserves a statue. She had spotted the land on a Pentland walk, took a lease, laid out nine holes and extended them to eighteen the following year, advised by her greenkeeper, Herbert More. The 2nd is called More’s Walk. The men were let in soon after.

Fran on the 2nd, More’s Walk, named after the greenkeeper who helped Margaret Carswell lay out the original course.

The club makes a bigger claim. Its history page says a sliced approach at the 1st lands in Robert Louis Stevenson’s garden, and that the adventures of Long John Silver were conceived there. The first part stands. Stevenson’s parents leased Swanston Cottage from 1867 to 1880, and he walked the Pentlands. Sadly, the book claim falls out of bounds. The Stevensons arrived in Braemar on 2 August 1881, where the first fifteen chapters of Treasure Island were written, after drawing a map to amuse his stepson. By then the Swanston lease had ended. Swanston’s real novel is St Ives, which has a chapter titled “Swanston Cottage”. The 10th hole is named St Ives; the scorecard knows its Stevenson story better than the website.

The 6th, Valley, from the tee. A 200-yard par 3 dropping into a bowl of gorse, and the best hole on the course.

The front nine is the reason to play. It is moorland golf: gorse, Scots pine, steep slopes and the Caerketton crags overhead. The 6th, Valley, is the pick, a long downhill par 3 into a green framed by bunkers and foxgloves. I made par and felt I’d earned it. The 7th, Shearie Knowe, is 140 yards uphill to a green on a knoll. I took six, having found very deep rough. The 8th, Plateau, is a 231-yard par 4 over the gorse, and I birdied it. Golf is not a fair game. After weeks without rain the fairways were like straw, but the greens were excellent.

The 6th green after a dry spell: crisp stripes on the putting surface, burnt grass everywhere else.
The 7th, Shearie Knowe, climbing towards Caerketton. A short hole and my only blob of the front nine.
The 8th, Plateau: 231 yards over the gorse to a green on the ridge. A birdie here, straight after a six.

On the 13th we met Bharal and Gurung, two Nepalese Gurkha soldiers serving at Redford Barracks. Golf is scarce in Nepal, with only seven courses, and these decent golfers were loving being in Scotland.

On the 13th with Bharal and Gurung of Redfern Barracks who knew a good front nine when they saw one.

So has the Lothianburn merger worked? It was barely a merger. Lothianburn’s membership fell from about 820 to 270 in under a decade, and the club closed in 2013 after 120 years; its clubhouse was its own, but its course had been leased from Swanston Farm, which took the land back. In April 2016 Swanston added two of Lothianburn’s holes, one of them now the 15th, named Lothianburn. Pylons and tree tubes give it a touch of the municipal.

The 15th, Lothianburn, one of two holes taken from the old club in 2016. Pylons overhead, tree tubes alongside, and a long way from the gorse.

The bigger change came earlier. In 2005 the owner, Colin McClung, hired Ronnie Lumsden and Graeme Tait to replace five holes on the course’s highest slopes. The work put six new holes on 30 hectares of farmland and raised par from 66 to 68. Tait himself admitted the farmland had lost most of its character and offered few features to design around. That is the open, flatter golf I found on the back nine. My instinct holds: the course is weaker than the land allows. But the culprit is not Lothianburn. It is the decision to swap the hill for the field. The 4th, incidentally, is named Gilbert McClung. It is a family farm, and the golf is one of its crops.

The farm’s other crops include a range, a par-3 course, footgolf and the Brasserie, opened in 2007. Next door is a small members’ bar that only did pies. It seemed an odd arrangement.

Value is simple. At £23 on GolfNow, the front nine alone justified the fee: 4/5. At £50 for a summer weekend, you are paying full price for nine holes of moorland and nine of farmland: 3/5. Book a Hot Deal, enjoy the view from the 12th, and save your energy for the 6th.

The 18th, Swanston Burn, playing towards the converted farm steading that now houses the clubhouse and Brasserie.

Facts:
Course Type: Moorland (front nine), parkland on former farmland (much of the back nine)
Par: 67 (1 par 5, 11 par 4s, 6 par 3s)
Distance: 5,401 yards (yellow tees)
Course Rating / Slope: 66.8 / 113
Course Quality: 3.5/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 82 (36 points)

Moly’s scorecard at Swanston, a decent 82

202. West Linton. 17 Jun 23.

November 1, 2026 /

A schoolmaster with a trowel, a committee with two greenkeepers, and James Braid’s name on the booking sites.

Price Paid: £33 via GolfNow (a £25 GolfPass voucher took it to £8, but vouchers aren’t prices)
Current Price (2026): £65 weekday round, £75 weekend round (list); twilight £45 weekday, £50 weekend; GolfNow typically £47 to £55 in summer
Value: 5/5 at £33 / 4/5 at current GolfNow / 3.5/5 at list
Moly’s Score: 98 gross, 84 nett

The 6th, “Mendick”, from the forward tee. Heather down the left, pines down the right, and Mendick Hill on the skyline giving the hole its name.

West Linton is a conservation village in the Scottish Borders, historically Peeblesshire, 17 miles south-west of Edinburgh on the A702, tucked under the southern end of the Pentland Hills. In 1863 a young St Andrews graduate called Robert Millar came to teach here. Like many students, he had found a love of the game playing St Andrews Links, but West Linton didn’t have a course. So every morning before school, in black frock coat, choker and full beard, he hit balls around the village parks in all weathers. The villagers decided he was eccentric. It took him twenty-seven years to convince them otherwise.

The railway arrived in 1864, bringing walkers and anglers, and Millar reckoned golfers would follow. It still took until June 1890 for him to call a meeting in the school, where he made the minister captain, the banker treasurer, and appointed himself secretary. The tenant of North Slipperfield let them a heather-covered grouse moor for £5 a year. According to the West Linton Historical Association, the exiled King Charles X of France had once come there to shoot. Millar, the only golfer in the room, went out with a former pupil and cut nine holes with trowels, marking the tees with logs. Members were advised to keep right of the central bog.

The board in the clubhouse credits the schoolmaster. A weekend round was 7/-. Sunday golf cost extra, which tells you the board isn’t Victorian. Based on the pricing I calculate this sign is from the 1950s.

GolfNow and the many golfing directories list the architect as James Braid, who visited in 1926. He drew a map and wrote a report: mostly new tees and bunkers, a new 4th, and the 6th and 7th merged into one. That was advice on the original nine-hole course. The second nine wasn’t built until the early 1970s, cheaply, by a three-man sub-committee and a couple of greenkeepers, and was opened by Eric Brown and Bernard Gallagher in September 1974. Therefore, half the holes postdate Braid by nearly fifty years, and the other half were laid out by a schoolmaster. Braid improved West Linton; he didn’t design it.

Whoever deserves the credit, it’s a very good course. Heather, pine and birch, open fairways, and genuine carries from several tees. The greens are the best feature, varied in shape. The bunkering does its job. Find the sand and you pay for it.

The 3rd, “Syke Burn”. A carry over heather into a corridor of pines. Miss left or right and you are reloading.

I played with Fran. The course was very dry and the greens were rock hard; approach shots pitched and kept going, and that is my official explanation for 98. The turf was good, the woodland floors were tidy, and Ian the pro, formerly of Shotts, could not have been friendlier. The 15th, “Lang Whang”, is named after the lonely A70 moorland road over the Pentlands (“whang” is Scots for a bootlace). From the yellows it is a 453-yard par 4. I took eight.

The 13th, “MacKellar’s Wood”. Typical of my luck on the day. Look at the ground under the trees, though: mown, cleared and findable. This course is looked after.
The 4th, “Lucky Dip”. A resident pheasant, unbothered by my approach, on a fairway parched by a dry June.

Value? I paid £33 on GolfNow, and at that price this is 5/5. A Golfpass voucher brought it to only £8, which happens to be roughly what Millar’s 7/- weekend round would be worth today, if the board is from the 1950s. Prices have moved up since. Today the list price is £65 weekday and £75 weekend, with GolfNow around £47 to £55. The course is no worse, but it isn’t twice as good either. At GolfNow rates it’s 4/5; at list, 3.5/5.

The 14th, “Westwater”. Bracken to carry, a drystone dyke on the left, and a fairway striped and baked.
The 18th, “Home”. From the yellows it’s a 222-yard par 3, uphill to the clubhouse. Not a gentle finish.

Would I go back? Yes, at the right price.

Facts:
Course Type: Heathland
Par: 68 (1 par 5, 12 par 4s, 5 par 3s)
Distance: 5,867 yards (yellow)
Course Rating / Slope: 68.7 / 121
Course Quality: 4/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 98

West Linton Scorecard, 98, that doesn’t take away from what a great course this is.

201. Douglas Water. 16 Jun 23.

October 31, 2026 /

Three seams of coal, one sand less ‘bunker’ and a £7 envelope.

Price Paid: £7 for nine holes (honesty box)
Current Price: Not published. In 2023 it was £7 for nine holes and £12 for eighteen.
Value: 3.5/5 at the price paid; current price to be confirmed
Moly’s Score: 48 gross, 13 Stableford points (nine holes)

The 1st green, aptly named Table, sits on a built-up shelf and was burnt to straw in the June sun. Miss short at your peril.

The day before, Newcastleton (Blog 200) had shown how not to collect a green fee. Douglas Water showed how it’s done. Envelopes in the porch for £7 cash, plus bank details for online payment. Everything in the fridge costs £1, from Irn Bru to a KitKat Chunky. An Uncle Sam poster reminds you the club depends on your honesty. ‘Simples’.

Uncle Sam wants your £7: the honesty box poster and the porch table, with envelopes, a £1 tuck shop and a payment link added in biro.

Playing alone, the only other person around was Jock, the part time greenkeeper who cuts the fairways for four or five hours each week. The club has about 70 members paying around £200 a year, which comes to roughly £14,000. A meagre existence, demonstrating golfing economics at the lower end of Scottish golf.

Jock told me the course sits on three old coal mines, with very little topsoil, and that the National Coal Board gave the land to the community when the pits closed. The first part stands up better than I expected. Three coal seams surface on this hillside, running into the ground at nearly 45 degrees. Generations of miners worked along the outcrops with picks, shovels and barrows, leaving three parallel lines of crop pits, which are now the humps and hollows you play over. The Rigside Colliery shaft was sunk right beside the present clubhouse in 1878, and its concrete engine foundations still stick out of the undergrowth.

Moly on the 1st. Two caps, one golfer, no one else on the course.

The club was formed in 1922 on the derelict land the pits had left behind, a quarter of a century before the NCB came into being. Whatever the Coal Board did later, it didn’t hand over a golf course. Nor did James Braid lay one out, whatever one online directory says. Douglas Water appears nowhere in the Association of James Braid Courses’ list of his 415 courses.

Hells Bunker at the 3rd, the only bunker on the course: a grassed pit with barely a grain of sand, which the scorecard insists is a bunker.

The old workings show most clearly at the 3rd, ‘Hells Bunker’. It is the only bunker on the course, and it contains no sand. The course was laid out around the deepest crop pits, and it’s hard to look into this one without suspecting it was dug by a collier rather than an architect. I found it, and took seven.

The 5th tee: a carry over heather, with a mown strip through the middle. Wide fairways, but this is what waits on either side.

The course is basic but more testing than the price suggests. The fairways are generous, but the rough is heather and thick grass, and anything that goes in stays there. The older members have complained about it..apparently! The greens were poor in a dry June. Several are raised on plateaus and squared off, almost certainly because there was no soil to shape them any other way. The ground still settles, which means constant work on the drainage and on keeping the greens level.

Approaching the 6th, one of the square greens, with the scar of an opencast working on the hills beyond. The coalfield never leaves the view.

The hole names are pure Lanarkshire: Saur Trauchle By, Guid Skelp, Smiddy, Oot o’ Sicht. The 6th is called Water Hole, but I couldn’t find any water on it, making my par perhaps easier than it should be.

The 6th, Water Hole: not a drop in sight, and a green baked to straw.

When the last pit in Douglas Water closed in 1967, much of the population left, and the station, the football club and most of the local services followed. The golf club didn’t. More than a hundred years after it was laid out on the coalfield’s leftovers, it is still run on trust and a part-time mower. Nobody would call it a great course. At £7, that isn’t the point. It’s 3.5/5 and I’d happily put another envelope in the box.

Facts:
Course Type: Inland hilltop parkland with heather rough
Par: 36 for nine holes (2 par 5s, 5 par 4s, 2 par 3s); 72 over 18
Distance: 2,951 yards (whites)
Course Rating / Slope: SSS 69 (18 holes, from the scorecard); no Course Rating or Slope published
Course Quality: 2/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 48 (13 Stableford points)

Moly’s Douglas Water scorecard. 48.

200. Newcastleton.15 Jun 23.

October 30, 2026 /

The village won back its hill from the Duke. The grass won it back from the village.

Price Paid: £15 (9 holes), paid at the village Spar after the round
Current Price (2026): £20 day ticket; no 9-hole rate listed
Value Rating: 1/5 at £15 or £20
Moly’s Score: 50 gross, 11 Stableford points (9 holes)

The 7th fairway in mid-June: buttercups, daisies and clover. I made par here. Don’t ask how.

Two hundred blogs, and the milestone falls on a 1/5 for value. Fran and I drove over the hill from Langholm (Blog 199) the same afternoon. Langholm had been everything a rural nine-holer should be: a tenner in the honesty box, the toilet code left with the scorecards, small true greens. Newcastleton was chalk to Langholm’s cheese.

The clubhouse: corrugated, blue and shut. No box, no toilets, little clue where to pay.

The clubhouse was locked. There was no box and no notice with bank details. I’ve paid at a good many honesty boxes around Scotland, and the trend is towards a sign with a sort code so you can pay from your phone on the first tee. Newcastleton was the first to send me to a shop. A notice behind the glass listed the Spar, a café and the caravan park. I played, then paid after; what else were you expected to do? The club website said £12.50; the Spar said £15. To be fair to the Spar, the club’s own board agreed with it. It was the website that was out of date. The next day, Douglas Water (Blog 201) showed how it’s done: an envelope, a box in the porch and £7 for nine holes.

The 2023 fee board, apostrophes and all. £15 for nine holes, payable anywhere except at the golf course.

There’s a bigger story on this hill. Newcastleton is a planned village, laid out in 1793 by the third Duke of Buccleuch for hand-loom weavers. In 2020 the community trust bought 750 acres of Holm Hill, the hill the course sits on, back from the Buccleuch estate. Among the plans was a new clubhouse for the golf club. When we played, three years later, the blue tin hut was still there, and it looked as though nobody had been round with a mower for a fortnight.

The 3rd: one strip cut and left, clippings dead where they fell, and the rough marching in from both sides.

That’s a shame, because underneath there is a proper course. It’s a substantial layout climbing Holm Hill, very difficult first time round, with a 452-yard par-4 9th. There’s not a bunker on it, and like Langholm it doesn’t need one; the hill does the work. But the greens were not really greens. The 1st was fairway length, with a ragged cup sitting proud and five fresh droppings a foot from the hole. Take my score of 50 with a pinch of salt.

The 1st green. Someone had been round before us and left their card.

I did make a 2 at the 106-yard 2nd, “Wee Hill”, played uphill to a flag that barely shows over the crest. The slate tee sign announces it as the 11th? The tee signs are half lost to lichen and bracken. On the 3rd stands what looks like a retired bus shelter, with a sapling growing through the bench.

The 2nd, “Wee Hill”: 106 yards uphill, bracken left, divots unrepaired. My birdie. My only one.
Alongside the 3rd fairway: shelter from the storm, if you can reach the bench. The next bus is not expected.

The club says the course is managed and maintained by its members, and calls its clubhouse “such as it is”. Fran and I were Ladies Captain and Club Captain of Isle of Wedmore in 2025, so we know what volunteers give. But if the volunteers can’t keep the course in a state to charge for, the honest answer is to keep it members only rather than take £15 from visitors, half as much again as Langholm’s tenner, for a course in a far worse state. Today’s £20 is double. There was also no toilet, which is fine for me but not for Fran, who wisely walked rather than played.

The 6th, ‘The Quarry’. The sign is in the same state as the course.

The club now lists bank transfer as a way to pay, so one complaint has been answered. The rest is down to the mower. Value is 1/5 at £15 and 1/5 at today’s £20 day ticket. Should I have played? Probably not. But when you’ve driven all the way there…

The approach to the 9th, with Liddesdale beyond. The best view on the course, and an 8 on the card. The setting deserves better.

Facts:
Course Type: Hillside parkland
Par: 34 (7 par 4s, 2 par 3s); 69 over 18 from second-nine tees
Distance: 2,654 yards, white tees (9 holes)
Course Rating / Slope: 67.5 / 111 (18 holes)
Course Quality: 1/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 50 (9 holes), 11 Stableford points

Moly’s Newcastleton Scorecard – 50, including a 2 on the 2nd

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