Marchrihanish Golf Club - Scotland

Machrihanish Golf Club is one of Scottish golf's last undiscovered treasures, spread out on the dunes below the green mantle of the Mull of Kintyre at the tip of the long Kintyre Peninsula. A long trip by car from the mainland, Machrihanish is as Siegfried Sassoon once wrote a "rather ungetatable golf course" but this makes getting to Machrihanish something of a holy pilgrimage. It is a pilgrimage that inspired Michael Bamberger's book To the Linksland. The front nine gives the course its essential charm, with the holes ducking through the dunes overlooking the distant Hebridean islands of Islay and Jura, and Gigha, or "God's Island," closer to shore. The course dates from 1876, and five years later Old Tom Morris arrived from St. Andrews to recommend improvements, declaring the land "specially designed by the Almighty for playing golf" Old Tom apparently was responsible for the design of the famous first hole, with the tee shot over the broad bow of the Atlantic beach, though one version of events perhaps unfairly attributes Tom's placement of the tee in that particular spot to the fact that it was near the local pub.

Machrie Golf Club - Scotland

Machrie Golf Club is a wild and wonderful links, full of old-fashioned blind holes and wind-lashed sand dunes, located on the Isle of lslay in the Hebrides, a two hour ferry ride from the west coast of Scotland. To one side of the links are the peat bogs with their palette of somber browns and purples that give Islay's world-famous single malt whiskys their distinctive flavor, leading out to the green hills that form the backbone of the island. To the other side are the towering dunes overlooking Laggan Bay and the Atlantic that frame the seventh, eighth, and ninth holes. The course dates to 1891, when Willie Campbell of Prestwick laid out the original 18, shortly before embarking for Boston to become the first pro at The Country Club. British architect Donald Steel created five new holes in the late 1980s, the second and 10th through 13th. Few courses can boast such overpowering and haunting isolation, with the only building in sight the white­washed hotel adjoining the course that was once an old farmhouse. The main village of Bowmore lies 20 minutes down the road, with its brightly painted houses running down to the sea from the church built in the round so that the devil would have no place to hide.