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)
Belleisle – the people’s course, heading back to the gentry?
Price paid £30 (GolfPass voucher).
Value 5/5 at £30; 4/5 at current GolfNow (~ £43); 3.5/5 at list price £60.
Belleisle’s story has a sweet beginning. The estate’s lands, originally Netherton of Alloway, passed through Ayrshire gentry before Hugh Hamilton bought the property around 1787 using Jamaican plantation money, renaming it Belleisle. The Baronial sandstone mansion was rebuilt in the 1800s, then the Coats family, Paisley thread manufacturers, acquired it in 1886.
The beautifully manicured 12th fairway at Belleisle, showcases the condition.
Following the death of George Coats, Ayr Burgh Council purchased the entire estate for £25,000, opening James Braid’s two courses in 1927. Finally, the working man could walk the same ground his grandfather had doffed his cap to. There is a certain irony, then, in the fact that the listed green fee has doubled in two years since I played to now £60. One finds oneself wondering when the first £100 municipal round will arrive and whether Scotland will even notice what it has lost.
The opening tee at Belleisle; wide, well-maintained, and immediately signalling something above the municipal average.
Belleisle is the flagship of Golf South Ayrshire’s eight courses, which are covered in Blog 136. It is a proper Braid design, only two par fours under 400 yards from the yellow tees, fast-running fairways, and sound bunkering. The greens and surrounds are the real quality indicator, and on the day Fran and I played, late April sunshine, warmer to the eye than to the skin, they were excellent. It played like a good private members’ course in England. Which, at a municipal green fee, is precisely the point.
The approach to the 2nd, beautiful parkland character
The white tees add nearly 400 yards and lift the par from 69 to 71, with holes 1 and 15 both becoming par 5s. The 15th in particular, 426 yards from yellow, 478 from white, would actually be easier from the white.
The 15th, a long par four with a stone bridge, a burn, and an estate lodge for company.
Fran and I played steadily. I shot 89, undone by a 10 on the 18th, a 504-yard par 5 with a burn, a dogleg, and a steep gully that I negotiated with maximum creativity!
Fran playing into the 6th, with the par 3 7th and Arran beyond. Municipal golf at its finest.
A shortage of bunker rakes is noteworthy, a Golf South Ayrshire policy issue discussed in Blog 136, not a Belleisle-specific failing. The absence of twilight rates is more surprising for a late April afternoon, and is itself a small symptom of the broader commercial drift in municipal golf pricing.
Fran’s approach to the 18th, with the roofless shell of Belleisle House behind. Sold by the council in 2012, gutted by accidental fire in 2019, the council were mid-process repurchasing it when the blaze broke out.
The mansion tells its own story. Belleisle House, Category B listed, Scottish Baronial, presiding over the 18th fairway; it was sold off by South Ayrshire Council in 2012 for £300,000 and gutted by an accidental fire in 2019. The council now own the shell. The golf course thrives; the house that once commanded the estate does not.
For international visitors wanting to understand Scottish golf, Belleisle is essential. It showcases what civic investment in the game can produce at its best. At £29.99 it was exceptional. At £43 via GolfNow today it remains good value. At the £60 list price, the ancestors might start to feel the ground shifting beneath them again.
Course Type: Parkland Par 69 yellow tees (2 par 5s, 12 par 4s, 4 par 3s) / Par 71 white tees Distance: 6,036 yards (yellow tees) Course Rating / Slope (yellow): 70.2 / 119 Moly’s Gross Score: 89
Moly ‘addressing the haggis’ – a prelude to Burns’ later work, Tam o’ Shanter
I’m a Burns man. I know his poems, songs and characters. When I unearthed that the real-life inspiration for Burns’ poem Tam o’ Shanter farmed one mile from Turnberry’s first tee, I had to dig deeper.
Shanter Farm sits adjacent to ‘Maidens’ on the Ayrshire coast. Douglas Graham farmed it in the late 1700s. His drinking ‘crony’ was John Davidson, a cobbler from Kirkoswald. Burns was just 16, in 1775, when he was sent to study in Kirkoswald, where he met Douglas and John, presumably in the pub. They made a lasting impression on the young Robert, who 15 years later used them as the blueprint for ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ and ‘Souter Johnnie’, the hero and his trusted companion, in, arguably, the greatest narrative Scottish poem.
The land of Tam o Shanter would become one of the finest golf courses on earth, but the metaphorical ownership by Burns’ characters wouldn’t end there.
Moly on the first tee, with the Turnberry hotel behind. I just had to wear a Hoodie.
The Course
The Ailsa is in my top three of the 300 plus courses I’ve played to date (at June 2026). It also sits comfortably in most top 20 lists for courses world wide.
A course was laid out in 1901 by Willie Fernie, who was commissioned by Archibald Kennedy, the 3rd Marquess of Ailsa, who foresaw the links could be highly profitable with a railway and hotel, both of which duly opened in 1906. Sadly, the World Wars obliterated the golf resort – the railway closed permanently in 1942. Between 1949 and 1951, Philip Mackenzie Ross, the pre-eminent post war architect, restored the layout to the one which, in 1977, famously hosted the “Duel in the Sun”, between Nicklaus and Watson.
‘The Donald’ purchased the resort in 2014 for £47m, renaming it ‘Trump Turnberry’ and, between 2015 and 2016, Martin Ebert reconstructed the five holes along the coast and transformed the 9th from a par four into arguably the most dramatic par three in Scottish golf. Later he would extend the 16th into a challenging par 4, which will hopefully one day test Open entrants.
The headline rate to play in Summer is an astonishing “up to £1000” (2026). Which begs the question, “How much is perfection worth?”, a hyperbolic one probably crafted by Trump himself. Unbeknownst to Donald, Burns wrote a potentially prophetic and skewering poem about his like, called ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer”. ‘Holy Willie’, a man of towering narcissism who presents himself as chosen and blessed, operating by rules that apply to everyone else. Joking aside, the course is magnificent; perhaps Holy Willie occasionally got it right.
Light breeze on a perfect March day, the greens in Summer condition, here at the 2nd
The Art of The Deal?
At Scotland’s posh courses, like Muirfield or Royal Troon, the list price is the list price. They don’t negotiate. Trump operates differently – he’ll do a deal. When I played, the eye watering rate was £500. Looking late on the day before, the tee sheet showed plenty of spaces. I phoned the Pro shop, deployed my persuasive Dundonian vernacular, explaining I could only afford a ‘hundred quid that I’d saved up’. We settled at what might be my best value golf ever – £130. The man on the other end of my call had, in his own small way, something of the Bard’s spirit from Burns’ The Jolly Beggars; happy to set aside rank and rule for an afternoon, and let an ordinary punter in on the deal. He operated outside the script and created a very happy man..
So, is it perfect? At £500 (2023) I would give it four out of five on value, still exceptional, because very few courses in Scotland could justify that price. At £130 it is five out of five without hesitation. My greatest value ever.
The partially obscured tee shot at the fourth, with the full panoply on view – Arran, Lighthouse, Dunes, Gorse, Rough.
The Round
I was paired with 8 handicapper Ian Moffat of Cumbernauld, a naval submariner home on leave, who chose to play from the white tees (6,543 yards), whilst I played the yellows (6,110 yards). The added 433 yards sounds manageable unless you are playing into a stiffening links breeze on a treacherous layout.
Despite a few early lost balls Ian continued off white, displaying the perseverance of submariners. Whilst I didn’t keep Ian’s score, I suspect it was the wrong side of a century, as mine would have been off white. Ian was, in the finest Burns tradition, one ‘Tam Samson’, the Kilmarnock sportsman Burns immortalised for his dogged refusal to leave the field, a man who would rather perish in the attempt than concede defeat. Burns wrote that Tam Samson’s dying words would be that he had never given up. Ian Moffat did not give up either – well done Ian.
Ian Moffat on the 8th green, Ailsa Craig perfectly framed in the March sunshine.
I shot 89, with three triple bogeys. I hit the ball about as well as I can. If Burns had played golf – and given his appetite for competitive pursuits, convivial company, and the Ayrshire outdoors, I suspect he would have been a natural – he would have recognised himself in the honest, truth-seeking spirit of the game. He was always ‘Davie’, the brother poet, the man seeking meaning in simple honest experience rather than in rank or gold. I’d like to think that summarised our day at Turnberry.
The wonderfully green entrance at the par 5 fifth hole. The bunkers gave me 8!
The first two holes ease you in, running through inland undulations with the hotel presiding grandly over everything. By the third, the sea begins to announce itself. By the fourth, you are into the dunes proper, the gorse blazing yellow in the March light.
Moly at the 6th, a short par three, where the prevailing westerly will be a challenge.
The coastal sequence from holes four to eleven is beautiful. Ebert’s redesign brought several of these holes right to the clifftop edge. The seventh was already magnificent; a long par five threading between dunes with the sea appearing and disappearing to the left.
The 7th, a par 5 . My birdie putt awaits!
The Ninth
The ninth hole at Turnberry Ailsa is now one of the great short holes in world golf; but not really short for us mortals! Ebert converted it from a par four, placing the tee on the cliff beside the ruins of Turnberry Castle; birthplace, most likely, of Robert the Bruce, though that story belongs to the other course here, the King Robert the Bruce course. The green sits just below the lighthouse, perched above the rocks and the sea, perhaps the best half way house in golf.
With Arran visible across the water and a light breeze off the Firth, standing on the 9th tee at Turnberry is one of those moments that reminds you why you play this game.
Was Burns a Golfer?
It is worth pausing to consider how old this story is. Jack Boyd, in his history of Turnberry Golf Club, quotes a letter of 15th February 1751 from Archibald Kennedy (most likely the great-grandfather of his namesake who built the course in 1901) to Sir Thomas Kennedy, describing golf at Girvan, five miles south of Turnberry, among lairds, a minister, and a doctor, with Sir John judge of both the golf and the drinking. So, three years before the St Andrews Golf Society was formed, golf was being played on the Ayrshire coast. Burns, born in 1759, would have known golfers and recognised all the aforementioned players. He would have found Tam o’ Shanter among them.
The manicured 10th green to start the back nine.
The twelfth tee looks back toward the war memorial on the hill — a stark reminder that this land was twice an RAF airfield, its fairways buried under concrete and tarmac while pilots trained and died here. Something approaching 200 men lost their lives at Turnberry during the two wars.
The War Memorial stands above the twelfth green, here seen from the fairway bunker 150 yards from the green.
From thirteen onward the course begins its journey home, moving back through the dunes toward the hotel. These holes are less dramatic than the coastal sequence but beautifully crafted — fair, strategic, and very demanding but dependent on the prevailing wind..
Ian Moffat on the tee at 13th tee.
The sixteenth is perhaps the most challenging hole on the course — a long par four that turns slightly left, the hotel reappearing on the horizon as you play back toward it. It was extended by Ebert with a redefined sharper burn.
This burn at the long par 4 16th will be a card wrecker even for the pros.
After the Round
The clubhouse at Turnberry is exactly what you would expect from a five-star resort that has hosted four Open Championships. Leather armchairs. Views across the course to the sea. A club sandwich and a pot of tea for £27, served with a Turnberry-branded paper bag and an air of quiet confidence that it is entirely worth it – maybe.
Trump Club and pot of tea, only £27
The Verdict
Turnberry Ailsa is magnificent. Burns walked this coast. Douglas Graham farmed a mile north of the first tee. The Girvan Gang played golf five miles to the south while Burns’ father was still a young man. The lighthouse stands on the ruins of a castle that shaped Scottish history. Two World Wars tried to destroy the course and failed. Holy Willie bought it and made it better.
Whatever you think of the branding, the course itself demands only one response: reverence.
Played: 27 March 2023 Paid: £130 (list price approximately £500) Score: 89 gross, 34 Stableford points, handicap 15, yellow tees (6,110 yards, SSS 70, Slope 124) Value: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ at £130 / ⭐⭐⭐⭐ at rack rate
Golf in Scotland is a competitive market, so a friendly welcome is essential. Ewan Grimes, the recently appointed pro at Hilton Park, could not have been more hospitable to me. It made up for the miserably wet weather and golf course, which arguably should have been closed. At least that meant it was very quiet and took less than 3 hours to play.
The 17th at Hilton Park, a par 3 of 184 yards with common white and yellow tees.
Hilton Park, just outside Milngavie, is about 10 miles north of Glasgow City Centre, but feels much more remote. It is one of only 23 clubs in Scotland that has two or more 18 hole courses. Moreover, it is one of only 3 clubs with two heathland courses, the others being Gleneagles and Blairgowrie.
Moly putting on the 6th, the most difficult of the four par 3s.
I played both the Hilton Park and Allander courses in one day, which was a challenge given the undulating terrain. A buggy might be useful here. There are excellent views, including of the Glasgow skyline, something made easier by the loss of many trees in recent years due to storms.
The Hilton Park layout was much more demanding that its sister Allander course, but as a combination of courses they compliment each other really well.
The well bunkered par three 12th hole, the stroke index 18 hole.
The course routing was a little confusing and I ended up playing the 15th hole twice, having also played some of the Allander holes in the wrong order. I suspect the reason was the shortened winter course. It was so wet, I was the only player.
The 18th is a strong finish at this undulating course.
Sadly, winter greens were in operation on the majority of holes, but I was only charged £30 for both rounds via Golfnow, which was excellent value. Overall, the Hilton Park property is one of the best in Scotland, and worth checking out.
The par four 13th, at well over 400 yards, will play as a 5 for most.
I could really imagine being a member at Hilton Park as the overall package is incredible value. It would make for a great society day out.
Views of Glasgow from the 8th, a short par 4, Moly’s only birdie hole.
Price £45.
Discount: Golf Now, £15, against the Winter rate of £30.
Course Type: Heathland
Par 70 (2 par 5s, 11 par 4s, 5 par 3s)
Distance:5446 (yellow)
Course Rating / Slope Rating (yellow) 67/127.
Moly’s Gross score: 85
Moly’s Hilton Park Scorecard, using mostly winter greens – 84
