Cruden Bay Review

Cruden Bay is what happens when a fine architect is handed extraordinary dunes and decides not to behave. Simpson and Fowler rebuilt Old Tom Morris's 1899 layout in 1926 and left in everything a modern committee would take straight back out: blind shots, greens sunk in pits, a hole that doglegs in the air, walks through gaps in dunes to tees you would never find alone. The eighth runs down the beach with the North Sea on your right.

The fourteenth, Whins, plays 431 yards to a rectangular green sitting fifteen feet below the dune around it, a bathtub you putt in and cannot see into from the fairway. The fifteenth, Blin' Dunt, is a 242 yard par three that is both blind and a dogleg, which should not be possible, and you wait for the group ahead to ring the bell before you hit. Above all of it stands the ruin of Slains Castle, where Bram Stoker was staying when Dracula started taking shape.

None of this is fair and the course never pretends otherwise. Judged as a championship test it would be dismissed in a paragraph, and a purist who needs every shot in front of him will hate three holes here. Judged as a day of golf it is the best in Scotland. At around 205 pounds in the main season and 140 in the shoulder months, it also costs half what the famous names charge for a good deal less enjoyment.