Gairloch

Few courses in Scotland command a setting quite like this one. Gairloch Golf Club sits on the northwest Highland coast, where the fairways run along the shore of Loch Gairloch with the Torridon mountains rising dramatically behind and, on clear days, views stretching across the Minch to the Outer Hebrides. The club has been part of this remote community since 1898, making it one of the more venerable links on Scotland's wild western seaboard.

The layout is a short par 63, which tells you something important: this is not a course designed to test your driver. It rewards precision, local knowledge, and the ability to manage a coastal wind that can make even a modest pitch feel like a full commitment. The terrain is genuine links and heathland country — bouncy, firm, and subject to the kind of weather the northwest Highlands specialise in delivering without apology.

Gairloch is very much a golfer's club in the truest sense — a place where the game is secondary only to the landscape, and where the journey to get there is itself part of the experience.