Luffness, then Craigielaw, now Kilspindie: the club that kept losing its name.
Price Paid: Member’s guest
Current Price: £100 (2025, club website), weekdays and weekends (club website)
Value: 4/5 at list price
Moly’s Score: 82 gross, 36 Stableford points
Kilspindie sits on the western edge of Aberlady, about 15 miles east of Edinburgh,squeezed between the village and Aberlady Bay. The week I played Kilspindie, Lloyd Cole of the Commotions told The Times where he feels happiest: “If my game doesn’t totally suck, as it has the past few years, the links of Kilspindie, East Lothian, with my son Frank.” I understand why, after playing it only once.
I played with Kilspindie member Mike Johnson and his pal Derek Phillips, who, like me, is a Dundonian. Fittingly, the Kilspindie name isn’t local either. The Douglases of Kilspindie probably took it from a hamlet in the Carse of Gowrie, twelve miles west of Dundee, an area where Derek and I most likely picked berries in our youth. The most famous of the Douglases, Archibald “Greysteil” Douglas, was Provost of Edinburgh and Treasurer to the young James V. The Douglases’ castle stood behind Aberlady kirk. So two Dundonians spent the morning on a links named after berry lands near Dundee. I like that.
Blog 204 tells the story of the Luffness club division in 1894, into Luffness and Luffness New, the latter moving to its current course. The Aberlady-based Luffness members remained on the old course until it’s lease ran out in 1898, and the Earl of Wemyss offered the club links land across the Aberlady Bay. Some histories, Scottish Golf History among them, say it became Kilspindie that year, but the clubhouse wall tells a different story. A notice setting caddie rules from 16 January 1899 is signed for “Luffness Golf Club”, and so is a rifle-range notice dated 16 March 1899. The club’s own date of 1899 stands, and the renaming came no earlier than spring.
The caddie notice has a further twist. Four links are named and four clubs sign it, so the old club’s new ground was the Craigielaw links. One golf history says just that: the members “moved to the Craigielaw Links in 1898”. The club had already lost the name Luffness to its own breakaway. A century later it lost the second. In the late 1990s Kilspindie set out to build a second eighteen on the ground next door, its landlord’s ground, and members paid handsomely for the privilege. After two years of fractious negotiation, the Wemyss and March Estates pulled out in 2001. The estate then built the course itself, with Donald Steel, and called it Craigielaw (Blog 182). So, the landlord that rescued the club in 1898 had become its competitor next door. As far as I can tell, Kilspindie still leases its links from the same estate. The two clubs now name a hole after each other: Kilspindie’s 17th is “Craigielaw” and Craigielaw’s 6th is “Kilspindie”. Make of that what you will.
The Wanster, the ground under the 9th to 11th is “perhaps the oldest golfing ground of the lot”. I’ve checked. Aberlady golfers played there sometime before 1867, and the club says before 1850, sharing the ground with the Aberlady company of the Haddingtonshire Rifle Volunteers. Gullane, however, has seven holes on record by 1840, plus a legend of 1650 matches in which Aberlady’s weavers walked over to Gullane to play. The verdict is that very Scottish one: not proven. When the golfers came back to the Wanster in 1898, the riflemen were still there, and members were told to “turn at the Third Hole” whenever the Volunteers were shooting. The 4th, The Target, and the 11th, The Magazine, are named after the range.
The golf is a delight. The 2nd to the 7th run along the coast, and water is in play on several of them when the tide is in. The greens were the best of the week, which is saying something after Luffness New and Gullane No 2.
Keep your ego in check, though. From the yellows it’s 5,209 yards, and several par 4s are almost drivable. My 82 was exactly my handicap, 36 points, and it was not half as good as my 86 in the wind at Luffness New. Lloyd Cole’s caveat applies in reverse: here, even a mediocre game can look good.
The clubhouse is a time capsule. The members’ lockers line the bar and dining room, next to the whisky cabinet. I’m told that in years gone by, members thought nothing of changing there while other people ate their lunch.
Value? At £100, Kilspindie costs half Luffness New’s summer rate (£210, Blog 204), and the same as a weekday round on Gullane No 2 (Blog 205) and less than Craigielaw’s £125 (Blog 182). It’s short, but the setting, the greens and the history are first-rate. That’s 4/5.
Gullane No 3 that afternoon: Blog 207.
Facts:
Course Type: Links
Par: 69 (1 par 5, 14 par 4s, 4 par 3s)
Distance: 5,209 yards (yellow)
Course Rating / Slope: 65.7 / 106
Course Quality: 4.5/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 82 (36 Stableford points)
