“The best golf course in Lanarkshire.” Probably not.
Price Paid: £10 for 9 holes, senior rate.
Current Price (2026/27): Seniors: weekday 9 holes £18, weekend £22. Adult weekday £20, weekend £30. GolfNow for 18 holes about £25.
Value Rating: 3/5 at £10 paid; 2/5 at GolfNow (~£25 for 18); 2/5 at £22 current senior weekend; 2.5/5 at £30 current adult
Moly’s Score: 39 gross
Carlsberg had the sense to at least say “probably”. Dalziel Park’s website does not. Its heading declares itself “The best golf course in Lanarkshire”.
Dalziel (pronounced ‘Deel’) Park is a nine-hole course in North Lanarkshire, about two miles north-east of Motherwell and 15 miles from Glasgow.
The land was the Cleland Estate, mined for coal in Victorian times. In 1947 Sir John Colville, later Lord Clydesmuir, sold it for £6,000 to the Dalziel High School War Memorial Trust. The Trust wanted playing fields as a living memorial to former pupils killed in both world wars. In 1990, facing rising maintenance costs, the Trust turned the estate into Dalziel Park, including housing and a hotel on the site of the demolished Cleland House. The golf course opened in November 1997. The Trust’s own website calls the result “one of the finest facilities in Scotland”. The hyperbole may be in the title deeds.
The course has been bigger. A second nine was added at some point, but by 2012 only the original nine were in play. In 2011 the club was bought by the leisure company of former Celtic striker Harry Hood, and it is now part of the Lisini hospitality group. Today it’s a par 35 of 2,775 yards from the yellow tees.
Credit where it’s due. The greens were good, and some of the greenside bunkers are well shaped. The club calls the course ‘a stern test for all golfers with its tight fairways’. In truth, much of it is open parkland with no fairway bunkers. The 7th, Far Easter, is a 431-yard par 4 and stroke index 1, and it cost me a double-bogie 6. I still went round in 39. It’s a decent course to learn the game on. That’s a real compliment, and a very different claim.
The tees were poor, and the ladies’ tees were worse. On the 5th, Fran teed up on bare earth. In 2023 the price list offered a “Father + Child” rate, not a parent and child rate. The hotel had a nice quarterly magazine, but its club diary listed no ladies’ events that I could see. Together these suggest a course that hasn’t given much thought to half its potential customers.
Overclaiming is not harmless puffery. A 1978 study of 903 consumers concluded that exaggeration which leaves expectations unmet does not help the seller. A 2010 study in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science went further: customers who feel misled become distrustful, and that distrust spills over onto other businesses. Claes Fornell, the customer-satisfaction researcher, puts it simply: exaggerate, and you may win one sale at the cost of a long-term customer. Lanark (Blog 165) is ranked 33rd in Scotland and doesn’t need to tell anyone it’s the best. Nobody playing Dalziel Park will think it is.
Further credit: there was a seniors’ discount. At £10 for a senior on a Saturday, nine good greens were fair value: 3/5. Today the same senior pays £22, a 120% rise, and an adult pays £30 at the weekend. At those prices, 2/5. Would I go back? To learn the game, maybe. To play the “best course in Lanarkshire”, no chance.
Facts:
Course Type: Parkland
Par: 35 for 9 holes (1 par 5, 6 par 4s, 2 par 3s)
Distance: 2,775 yards (yellow tees)
Course Rating / Slope: CR 33 / SR 121
Course Quality: 2/5
Moly’s Gross Score: 39
