Ratho Farm Golf Course

Bothwell sits in the heart of Tasmania's Central Highlands, a small Georgian-era town that holds a genuinely outsized place in Australian golf history. The game arrived here with Scottish settlers in the 1820s, and Bothwell is widely regarded as the home of golf in Australia — the Ratho Farm property is directly tied to that founding story, making it arguably the oldest golf course on the continent and one of the oldest outside Scotland itself.

The course occupies working farmland in the Clyde River valley, and that agricultural character is very much part of the experience. Expect sheep-grazed fairways, minimal artifice, and a layout that feels closer to the early linksland game than almost anything else you'll find in the Southern Hemisphere. It plays as a genuine period piece — rudimentary by modern standards, but profoundly atmospheric for anyone who cares about where golf actually came from.

Bothwell itself is a tiny highland community, cold and windswept for much of the year, with a landscape of open grassland and glacially sculpted hills. Playing Ratho isn't about scoring well — it's about touching something old.