East and Southeast Scotland - Top 50 Golf Courses 2017
This is the second of three Top 50 regional listings that we’re publishing for Scotland. Two years ago, we produced an individual news release for each of our fifteen Scottish district charts when we re-ranked our Caledonian courses but this time we’ve decided to streamline the process by arranging the districts into three regions – West & Southwest, East & Southeast, and North – then producing a Top 50 feature article for each one.
We also expanded our pool of local knowledge by asking four well informed Scottish panellists from a leading golf magazine to help with our ranking process so we thank Alan Ferguson, John Fraser, Alan McPherson and Neal Stewart for their highly-valued contributions which now supplement those of our existing team of in-house reviewers.
East and Southeast Scotland – comprising the four districts of Lothians, Fife, Borders and Central – is such a strong golfing area it should come as no surprise to learn that nearly forty of the courses in this new regional listing also occupy positions in our Scottish Top 100 chart.
Because we’ll be writing about the revised national standings in the next few weeks, we’re concentrating this article on four of the better layouts to be found in the lower reaches of this new regional table, offering a little exposure to courses that are rarely given much recognition.
At number 35 in our Top 50 chart, we have Glenbervie, which also rises one place to become the number one course in our revised Central Scotland district rankings, ousting Stirling from the top spot. The former home of the PGA in Scotland before the professionals’ HQ moved to Gleneagles in the late 1990s, Glenbervie is a fine James Braid-designed parkland track which has tested elite and recreational golfers alike in the Falkirk area for more than eighty years now.
John Panton, the club’s former long term professional, is credited with thirty-nine career victories, and he also qualified for three different Ryder Cup teams, as well as representing Scotland at the World Cup on thirteen occasions, the last of which occurred in 1968.
A Lothians club associated with another of the country’s golfing greats is Duddingston (number 38 in our chart), where Ronnie Shade played as an amateur, winning five consecutive Scottish Amateur Championships in the mid-1960s before he turned professional in 1968.
Duddingston lies close to Edinburgh city centre, on land that was once owned by the Duke of Abercorn and used as a deer estate. Willie Park is credited with the design of the layout in 1895 and, apart from the lengthening of a few holes in the 1960s, the modern day course is the same one that’s been in play for more than a hundred and twenty years.
At number 39 in our East and Southeast region, the course at Cardrona is a new millennium Dave Thomas layout which lies a little bit in the shadow of The Roxburghe, another of the architect’s Borders designs. Situated just outside Peebles and operated by MacDonald Hotels, the Cardrona course is a big 18-hole layout that’s characterised by its bold bunkering and USGA-spec putting surfaces so bring your “A” game when playing here.
At number 41 in our new chart, Dunfermline sits near the foot of our Fife Top 20 listings but it must be borne in mind that such a relatively lowly position is due to the very strong ranking competition from some of Scotland’s best links courses which are located in that part of the country. In fact, disregard all the links layouts in the Kingdom of Fife and the Pitfirrane course would be third best in the district, behind only the Duke’s and Ladybank, which is high praise indeed.
The club dates back to 1887 but the course was fashioned by John R. Stutt, James Braid’s old design associate, in the early 1950s, when the club acquired the old Halkett family estate. The rather grand, 15th century Pitfirrane tower house now forms part of the modern day clubhouse structure, with newer buildings annexed around this magnificent old multi-storey building.
