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
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
