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Everything about the top golf courses in Edinburgh
The top golf courses in and around Edinburgh reflect a ranking shaped by verified reviews from golfers and by the strength of the surrounding golf landscape. Muirfield is the course that most serious golfers rank as the fairest and most precise of the great Scottish championship links. The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers' course at Gullane, the oldest golf club in the world by most accounts, though the argument is contested, uses a routing of two concentric loops that guarantees the prevailing wind changes direction relative to the player throughout the round. Its bunkers are architectural statements as much as hazards: deep, square-faced, positioned with a deliberateness that makes each one feel like a considered decision rather than a natural feature. The championship history, Open Championships stretching from 1892 to the modern era, has produced some of the game's most significant outcomes on this particular course. North Berwick Golf Club's West Course is the East Lothian links that most rewards the golfer who knows something about golf history. Its Redan 15th is the hole that changed how golf courses were designed everywhere in the world after its creation in 1895, the original angled-green par-3 that every subsequent designer who wanted an element of that specific challenge tried to approximate. The course's position on the Firth of Forth with the Bass Rock visible across the water and the East Lothian plain visible behind gives it a visual context entirely specific to this part of Scotland. Gullane Golf Club's Number 1 Course, on Gullane Hill with views across to Fife on a clear day, is the East Lothian links most consistently underrated relative to its actual quality. The course's hill terrain gives it elevation changes that the flatter coastal links do not possess, and the views from the higher holes are among the most panoramic on the Scottish east coast. Archerfield Golf Club's Fidra Links, on the East Lothian coast near Dirleton, is the most recently developed course in the Edinburgh circuit to reach genuine championship standard. Its links terrain above the Firth of Forth uses the natural coastal ground between Gullane and North Berwick, terrain whose quality was always evident but which was not developed as golf until the early 2000s, to produce a course that holds its own in a circuit of exceptional quality.
