Kings Acre

The Kings Acre golf facility opened in the late 1990s, when a raft of new courses were being built in Scotland, and it offers golfers a fine 18-hole course (designed by Gaeme Webster of Niblick Design) as well as a mini-course for children, a 30-bay range, short game area and two fully equipped teaching studios.

Occupying a 135-acre site that was formerly a working dairy farm, the fairways are routed across a rolling landscape where 17,000 trees have been planted around the property to add proper definition to the holes as they mature. Putting surfaces were constructed to exacting USGA standard and they’re acknowledged as some of the best in the country.

The course measures a shade over 6,000 yards and plays to a par of 70, with four par fives and six par threes on the scorecard. “Bunkered,” the second of back-to-back par fives at holes 2 and 3 is a 554-yard monster, starting with a blind drive and ending at a heavily sand-protected green that slopes markedly from front to back.

On the back nine, the 497-yard 15th (“Thro’ the Pines”) is rated stroke index 1 and for good reason is it judged to be the most difficult hole on the course, doglegging severely to the right, with out of bounds running down the same side of the fairway. A score of net “5” here will feel more like an elusive birdie than a regular par.

The 182-yard 8th (“Moorfoots”) is probably the best of the short holes on the front nine, played downhill to a three-tiered green whilst the longest and toughest of the par threes on the back nine, the 218-yard 16th (“Haugh”), is more than capable of ruining a good score late in the round so it needs to be treated with the utmost of respect.