Scotland Golf Bible

A guide to green fee value for money

193. Maybole. 29 Apr 23.

October 22, 2026 /

Maybole: a town that has never agreed on anything, including whether it needs a golf course.

Price Paid: £4 (winter rate, paid at the swimming pool over the road)
Current Price (2026): £8 GolfNow; £24 list (Golf South Ayrshire)
Value: 3/5 at £4 paid | 2.5/5 at £8 GolfNow | 1/5 at £24 list
Moly’s Score: 40 gross, 34 net, 17 Stableford points (9 holes)

Getting a consensus in Maybole has never been easy. Start with the name. A charter of 1192 calls the place Maybothel, which some read as Old English for a maiden’s house. Others prefer Gaelic: a plain with a cattle fold on it. The old folk called it Minnybole, which points to a moor instead. When the Ordnance Survey arrived in the 1850s, its surveyors dutifully listed the rival theories and dismissed one as purely fanciful. Nobody has settled it since.

Then there is the town’s most famous argument. In 1562 John Knox came to Carrick and was challenged by Quintin Kennedy, Abbot of Crossraguel, to debate the Mass. They met in the Provost’s house with forty witnesses apiece and argued for three days. Neither man won. The 1860 Encyclopaedia Britannica records that both claimed victory. That is Maybole in a sentence.

Which brings me to golf, and an argument the town has been having for a decade: does Maybole need a golf course?

The club was founded in 1905 on a course off the Dailly Road. It later moved into the Memorial Park, land the town bought to remember its Great War dead. In 1935 a storm lifted the pavilion off its foundations and smashed it. Visitors then paid sixpence a round and couldn’t play on Sundays. Closure threats came in 2016, 2018 and 2020. In February 2023 the club finally folded for “lack of support”, and the golf press mourned a 118-year-old institution.

I went looking to debunk the 118 years, and I couldn’t. Golf’s Missing Links headlines the club as 1905–2023, then says in its own text that it ceased to exist in 1923. Even the archive can’t reach a consensus. But its Golfer’s Handbook entries run unbroken from the 1930s to the 2000s, so 1923 is plainly a slip for 2023. The club’s age stands. The course is younger.

Fourteen months later, Carrick Speakers Golf Club folded too, after 35 years. That made two clubs gone from one nine-holer. The course carries on regardless as one of eight run by Golf South Ayrshire, and the local councillor insists there is no threat to it. A community company now wants the pavilion as a meeting space and e-bike store. That may be the future of the Scottish town course: still there, but no longer anybody’s club.

The Maybole Golf Club pavilion, shuttered since the club folded in February 2023. Green fees are now paid at the swimming pool across the road, and a community group has applied to turn the building into a meeting space and e-bike store.

I arrived ten weeks after the club folded, paid my £4 at the pool, and played alone. The course repays the effort. It is hilly and constantly undulating, with small greens. The par 3s are the real examination: the 3rd and 6th measure 198 and 219 yards off the yellows, a long way to a small target, and both cost me a shot. Footgolf shares the fairways, and dog walkers share everything else.

The tee markers deserve a paragraph of their own. Each hole has a yellow metal bin, hand-painted with its name and yardages. The 1st is “Railway”. Somebody took real care over these. The dog walkers have found another use for them.

The 1st, “Railway”: hand-painted yardages on a metal tee bin. It doubles as a dog-bag bin, which is about as municipal as golf gets.

The 3rd green looks back over the rooftops of the old Kennedy capital. The 5th climbs steadily to a green beneath the Maybole War Memorial, a reminder of why this park exists at all.

Behind the 3rd green, Maybole’s slate roofs and church fall away down the hill. The green is small and sloping, typical of the course.
The 5th green beneath the Maybole War Memorial. The bunker is neatly raked, its edge less so: honest council maintenance.

The conditioning is honest council standard: well-cut fairways, raked bunkers, and rough edges where the budget runs out. It is better than its South Ayrshire stablemate Dalmilling (Blog 192). I went round in 40 for 17 points, in 65 minutes, which on those greens felt fair.

The 4th Green, showing the dovetailed Foot and Normal golf
From the 9th tee, the view back to the swimming pool, where you pay, and the town beyond. A lone dog walker is on duty.

At £4 this is 3/5 value. Cheap is not the same as good value: there is no club, no clubhouse, and a course that is honest rather than memorable. At £8 on GolfNow it slips to 2.5/5. At the new £24 rack rate it is 1/5, because for that money you’d expect the clubhouse lights to be on.

Whether Maybole needs a golf course is a debate that, like Knox and the abbot, will probably end with both sides claiming victory. For £4, I’m happy to declare mine.

Facts:
Course Type: Parkland (hilly town course in the Memorial Park)
Par: 33 for 9 holes (6 par 4s, 3 par 3s); 66 played twice
Distance: 2,420 yards from the yellows (4,840 for 18)
Course Rating/Slope: 64.0 / 109 (yellow, 18 holes)
Course Quality: 2/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 40 (34 net, 17 Stableford points)

Moly’s card, 40 shots took 65 minutes!

192. Dalmilling. 28 Apr 23.

October 20, 2026 /

Dalmilling – please check this course is still open.

Price paid £17.99 (GolfNow), against a £19 rack rate.

Current price (2026): £45 list; £22 GolfNow; £19 GolfNow Hot Deal.

Value 2/5 at £19–£22 via GolfNow; 1/5 at £45 list price.

Dalmilling has a long history of being given up on. Around 1220, Walter fitz Alan, High Steward of Scotland and ancestor of the Stewart kings, brought the Gilbertines (England’s only home-grown monastic order) to found a priory here on the River Ayr. Within a decade they had resigned it “of their own free will”. By about 1240 the last two canons had been told to hand the lands to Paisley Abbey and go home to England. Nothing of the priory survives.

The 1st, encapsulating the fairly bland layout of the least inspiring of South Ayrshire Council’s courses.

The golf course, opened by the council in 1961, has outlasted the monks six times over, no thanks to the landlord, South Ayrshire Council, which has tried to close it at least three times. There was an attempt which ended with a councillor facing 200 angry golfers. In 2017 the council leader wanted houses and an urban park, conceding that the course was good for golfers but not for anyone else. Then in early 2020 it appeared on a list of five of the council’s eight courses earmarked for closure. Each time it survived. The 2018 reprieve came with promises of trees and a perimeter path, and the pandemic golf boom turned the 2020 hit list into an investment Programme. Hence the headline; Before you drive.

The 6th, the best hole on the course: 107 yards, but the burn in its ditch makes it count.

The council has spent money on the clubhouse but not, as far as I could see, on the course. There were no rakes, a Golf South Ayrshire policy already covered in Blog 136. The tees were marked by little plastic cones, and the teeing grounds were scuffed bare. It took me straight back to the Caird Park nine-holer in Dundee, where I started playing: honest municipal golf, maintained to a budget, for people who expect nothing more.

A typical Dalmilling view at the 8th: wide, open and generous, with divots abounding.

At 5,209 yards from the yellows, with five par 3s, it’s short. The one hole with genuine character is the 6th, a 107-yard par 3 over a burn sunk in a steep-sided ditch, with mature trees on either side. Naturally, I made a double-bogey 5 there.

Fran putting on the 12th, with the open layout under a flat grey April sky.

Dalmilling is a good starter course: short, open and forgiving. But it doesn’t need 18 holes. Nine good ones would serve beginners better and cost the council less. I suspect it survives on the season-ticket and green-fee income of Belleisle (Blog 189) and Troon rather than on its own account. At £17.99 it was cheap, but cheap isn’t the same as good value, hence 2/5. The list price has since more than doubled to £45, for a course where I saw no sign of investment. That’s 1/5. GolfNow still sells it for £19–£22, a gap which suggests even the council doesn’t know what it’s really worth. Or perhaps, they’re laying the ground for closure?

Course Type: Parkland
Par 69 yellow tees (2 par 5s, 11 par 4s, 5 par 3s)
Distance: 5,209 yards (yellow tees)
Course Rating / Slope (yellow): 65.7 / 113
Course Quality: 2/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 85 (32 Stableford points)

Moly’s Dalmilling scorecard, poor for such an open course, albeit ground conditions heavy.

191. Prestwick St Nicholas. 27 Apr 23.

September 17, 2026 /

Friendship has unrivalled value.

Round price: unknown (guest of a member); GolfNow rate at the time £55-£65. Current Fee (2026) £130. Current GolfNow (2026) ~ £65

Value; at current fee, 3/5, at GolfNow 4/5.

Before our game, I’d never met Doug McKinnon, a great friend of my friend Frank Crowe who introduced us. Not only was I heartedly welcomed, Doug waved aside any attempt to pay my guest fee. That kindness is this blog’s message.

The gorse lined first amid grey Ayrshire skies, a classic links opening.

It’s not unusual either. Golfers are proud of their golf club and will show it off given an opportunity, especially as they understand how visitor green fees have outstripped the pocket of most golfers. Indeed, allowing Members’ guests is one of the great benefits of club membership. Social media groups now solely exist, not only in Scotland, to provide platforms for reciprocal guest arrangements as it’s often the only way many are able to afford the more expensive courses.

‘St Nicholas’ is proper links land on the north edge of Prestwick. Gorse adorned throughout, with the Firth of Clyde tight along the course and Arran across the water influencing the local weather. We played into a shifting south-easterly, which, on ground this exposed, epitomised links defence.

The Salt Pan Houses behind the 1st green, a Category A listed building, and one of the most complete survivals of Scotland’s saltboiling industry.

A pair of stone Cat A listed buildings sit behind the 1st green, the Salt Pan Houses, built circa 1760 for the Maryburgh Salt Works. They are regarded as the most complete remains of Scotland’s salt boiling industry. That industry keeps resurfacing: the 3rd is named Maryborough after the works, the 12th is simply “Pans.”

Doug chipping at the 3rd, with the Salt Pan Houses again, closer up.

The club’s founding story is worth recording. Its website leads with “Co-Founded by Old Tom Morris in 1851”, the sort of claim that often outruns the archive. However, this time it’s spot on: Morris, then ‘Keeper of the Green’ at nearby Prestwick Golf Club, met working golfers at the Red Lion Inn in 1851 to found the Prestwick Mechanics Club, the tradesmen’s response to the gentlemen’s club next door. It didn’t become “St Nicholas” until 1858, didn’t get its own course until 1877, and didn’t settle at Grangemuir Road until 1892. So the lineage holds, but the turf we played has sadly nothing to do with anything Morris laid out. However, the story of a working man’s club founded in the shadow of a gentlemen’s one, is better suited than the clubhouse plaque.

The approach on the tough par four 8th, a flooded quarry pit guarding the green.

What you actually play has real variety: flat, easy walking in stretches, then holes that turn hard without warning. The 8th, Quarry, with its flooded pit crowding the green, is one. Knowing which holes to attack and which to defend is the whole strategic game here.

The 2nd hole, Bruce, lays a consistent clue to the great underlying story of the land. Along with the 5th (St Ninians) and the 15th (Kingcase) they all point at the same legend: Robert the Bruce, cured of leprosy after striking his spear into the ground at Kingcase, founded St Ninian’s leper hospital there in gratitude. The well and chapel ruins survive behind the modern church, dated to the 13th century. Three holes walk you straight through it.

Moly on the par three 2nd tee, called ‘Bruce’.
The 15th ‘Kingcase’ the revetted bunker guarding front left, a testament to the conditioning, with the Salt Pan Houses’ chimney line visible again on the horizon.

Two names I couldn’t fully uncover. The 9th, Cock O’ Bendy, nobody at the club could explain. The 11th, Pladda, made more sense once worked out: the only par 5, running along the shoreline, named, one imagines for the small island off Arran, visible from the tee. Ayrshire links have form for naming holes after the view rather than the ground. I carded an 11 there.

The 16th, Tom Morris, I imagine is a regular “card wrecker” where I took 7, gorse pressing in both sides back to the clubhouse. The 17th, easy by comparison, brought a birdie. Golf!

The tough 16th, Tom Morris, running the gauntlet between the gorse back toward the clubhouse; my card-wrecker of the day.

The real teeth are saved for last. The 18th, Home, is 225 yards into the prevailing wind; most golfers won’t reach it with a driver, so it plays as a short par 4 with the wrong club in hand. Doug reckoned Colin Montgomerie once called it the hardest par 3 in Ayrshire; I couldn’t find that written down, so take it as clubhouse lore, but into a stiffening wind I wasn’t arguing.

The 18th, 225 yards into the prevailing wind, one of the toughest par 3s in Scotland.

Would I go back? Without hesitation. A fair, strategic links test with real history behind it, and a good place for a first-timer to start on links golf. For the membership, it looks a thoroughly good club to grow old in. At the GolfNow rate, 4 out of 5. As Doug’s guest, worth more than any number I’ve got.

Facts:

Course Type: Links

Par 69 (1 par 5, 13 par 4s, 4 par 3s)

Distance: 5,686 yards (Yellow tees, as played)

Moly’s Gross Score: 92

Moly’s Prestwick St Nicholas Scorecard

190. Irvine ‘Bogside’. 26 Apr 23.

August 28, 2026 /

An Example of the Golf Market Leaving Normal Golfers Behind

Price Paid: £32 (via GolfNow)
Current Price (2026): £125 (summer, May-Sep)
Value: 5/5 at price paid. 2/5 at current list price.

Tucked between the Ayrshire coastal railway line and the mouth of the River Irvine, this course is shadowed by more famous neighbours, giving an occasional opportunity for value.

Fran facing the magnificent sleeper bunker at the 5th, “Sandface”.

In 1887 Eglinton Estates leased land for a course to be built between the railway, the river, the village of Bartonholm and the ‘Bogside’ racecourse. The racecourse had opened in 1808 and from 1867 hosted the Scottish Grand National, but money ran out and the last meeting ran in 1965, with the Grand National moving south to Ayr. The 11th hole is called “Grandstand” although no remnants exist.

Approach to the 11th “Grandstand”; nothing remains of the racecourse grandstand.

The golf course is strategic fare. Willie Fernie, professional at Troon, made the first significant alterations after the original 1887 layout, and Harold Hilton surveyed the course in 1912. But much of what’s here now is Braid’s,including four entirely new holes (the 10th, 11th, 12th and 13th) carved from land bought from the neighbouring farms and the Eglinton estate.

When we played, the turf was superb given how early in the year, with fast, subtle greens. Not every hole is tight, the 7th, The Cup, is as wide open as Bogside gets, a breather after the squeeze of the holes before it.

Moly at the short par 4 7th, the wide fairway narrows significantly around 230 yards.

The course has some very difficult holes, no more so than ‘Cannon Hill’, the 6th, a worthy stroke index 1.

The approach to the difficult par four 6th, “Cannon Hill’s”, the stroke index 1 hole.

The railway is often in play and gives the course added edge, out of bounds running the length of several holes. The 4th, The Moor, is the hole people talk about: a pond hard against the tee, out of bounds down the left, and a green backed directly onto the railway boundary, the line’s overhead gantries filling the skyline behind the flag.

Tron Carter (TC) of No Laying Up loves the 4th at Bogside.


It’s not just me rating it; Tron Carter of the No Laying Up podcast built himself a fantasy 18-hole course on episode 1151, one hole per course he’d played, matched by hole number, and Bogside’s 4th made the cut as part of his dream.

Here’s my one real gripe. There’s a fair amount of blind driving and approach work through the round, notably at the 12th, one of Braid’s own new holes, no less and again at the 14th, where the green sits in its own hidden punchbowl. That sits oddly against the man who redesigned the course: Braid wrote in Advanced Golf (1908) that blind holes should be avoided, “and especially a blind shot to the green.”

The ‘blind’ 14th green, where the bowl should help your approach find the green.

Now the value case. I paid £32 through GolfNow; today’s rack rate is £90–£125 depending on season, and GolfNow itself is currently listing Bogside at £115 with no Hot Deals running, barely a discount off list price. There’s a folk explanation clubs like to reach for here, that American visitors equate a high green fee with quality, so pricing low would actually cost business. It doesn’t hold up well under scrutiny. A lot of US visitors book through tour operators, buying flights, hotels and golf as a single package, and never see the individual green fee at all; they can’t be pricing courses on a fee they don’t see. What overseas visitors genuinely lack is a reference point: what a comparable course nearby charges, or what this course cost a few years ago. That’s a much simpler explanation for why fees have room to rise unnoticed than any theory about American taste. Whatever the reasoning, Irvine’s tripled its rate since 2023, and the golfer picking up the difference isn’t the tourist it’s golfer like me, deciding whether this round is still worth it. At £32, this was one of the best value rounds I’ve played anywhere in Scotland; Open Final Qualifying pedigree, Braid’s bunkering, a genuinely varied test, for municipal money. At today’s prices — list or GolfNow, that value case collapses; this is a 2/5 course at what it costs now.

The 18th tee and, right on cue, a reminder of the neighbours. .

It finished well, at least. The 18th runs you out almost to the clubhouse door, and it was worth lingering afterwards in the lovely old building with real history inside; Old Tom Morris attended a professional tournament here in 1919, and his signed photograph still hangs on the wall.

A wedge into the 18th, Flagstaff, found enough of the green to leave a putt worth having, and it dropped for a birdie three — the kind of ending that forgives a round its rough patches.

Facts: Course Type — Links/Heathland. Par 71 (yellow tees). Distance — 6,152 yards (Yellow tees).

Moly’s Gross Score, 93 (nett 79).

Moly’s Irvine ‘Bogside’ scorecard
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