Coul Links Final Reckoning + St Andrews Tee Times

Bill Coore and Mike Keiser always dreamed of leaving their legacy in Scotland — the home of golf. After years of searching for a place worthy of standing alongside the great courses that inspired their life’s work, they found it: Coul Links, just two miles from Royal Dornoch.

For more than a decade, this proposed community-led, sustainable 18 hole links course has endured one of Scotland’s most demanding planning processes — despite being backed twice by overwhelming local support. Now, its future hangs in the balance.

This is the last chance for Bill Coore and Mike Keiser to leave their fingerprints in the linksland, on the very ground that inspired their greatest work and immense contribution to the game. Their legacy. The very men who alongside Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and others brought links golf to America and who will continue to inspire thousands of golfers to make the pilgrimage home to Scotland to play the original.

Communities for Coul, the community planning application believe they have a good chance. After an independent ballot in Summer 2021 asking local people if they should resurrect the first failed planning application, results showed almost 70% of local people in favour of Coul Links and the economic and social impact it would bring to this fragile economy.

Their revised application has taken golf holes away from the most sensitive areas of the site which would see just 0.023% of the environmentally protected site modified and offset by the regeneration of a depleted site full of non-native species including gorse and birch trees.

Mike Keiser, founder of Dream Golf has on record shared that his favourite golf course in the world is Royal Dornoch and the rationale for his first golf resort, Bandon Dunes was seeing hordes of golf tourists filing off a coach outside Royal Dornoch‘s clubhouse. If these guys could travel to the Scottish highlands to play the same golf I love, they would travel domestically to the Oregon coast, he thought. I find this particularly profound. The early 1900s saw golf professionals and golf course designers leave Dornoch and other Scottish towns and jump on a boat. After several weeks bobbing around the Atlantic Ocean, they shared golf with America and the world. The game’s growth ever since has been extraordinary and now in the proceeding century, a new generation of golfers are inspired by golf experiences like Bandon Dunes and in turn, the people, places and golf courses you find in Dornoch. The cyclical nature of much of the good things in golf tying to something here in Scotland fills me with immense pride.

Like many of you reading this, I truly hope that Mike Keiser and Bill Coore get their wish and I thank them for their contribution. Scotland would be better for it and as history shows, so would the game.

Reads, Links and Listens

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Cheers, Ru Macdonald