NEW PARTNER COURSES
Dundonald Links, Ayrshire
We are pleased to welcome Dundonald Links as an Open Fairways course partner.
Dundonald Links near Troon might be a product of the 21st century but it looks as if it has been there for years.
Scotland is renowned for its rich reservoir of links courses but there is no doubt the new Dundonald Links in Ayrshire deserves to be ranked right up there alongside the very best of them.
PGATour.com staff writer, David Brice compared Dundonald Links to a fine vintage wine:
"Most new golf courses are like wine, they often require time to mature and develop,” he wrote in 2004. “But also similar to wine, there are some new courses that can be experienced young and are filled with character from the moment they are first opened. Dundonald Links is such a course and the most recent addition to Scotland’s already links rich Ayrshire coastline.”
Those words will be like music to the ears of Dundonald Link’s Californian-based designer, Kyle Phillips, who intimated from the outset that it was his intention “to create a championship Ayrshire links that felt and played as though it was an old, rediscovered course.”
Phillips, a traditionalist and also the designer of Kingsbarns near St Andrews and The Grove in Hertfordshire, moved some earth around while constructing Dundonald Links but only where it was necessary to enhance the existing contours. The result is a thoroughly natural test of golf, one that is comparable to nearby Royal Troon and Turnberry, but with a character all of its own.
Dundonald Links, it should be recorded, was built on land that was briefly used as a golf course between the years of the First and the Second World Wars. That long-forgotten original course was dug up to aid the war effort in the 1940s and nothing of it survives today. Instead, Philips used his own vivid imagination and the same light, sandy soil to build a traditional 7,100-yard masterpiece that lingers in the memory long after a visit is over.
