Last week I had the pleasure of playing the wonderful Anstruther Golf Club. This is the story of how a round of golf should be.
On a trip with some of the team from The Links Diary, we set out to get some images of this quirky little course for a story in our upcoming third edition. We had no idea the fun that awaited us.
At £20 for 9 holes, it is great value and when you arrive you can’t see the drama that is about to unfold during your round. You just stand facing a wall of links turf that has a strange tower at the top.
Once you get up the first fairway you’re on a tabletop, you still haven’t seen the magic this course is about to bring you. Like a Netflix series that your friends tell you, “takes a few episodes to get great” this course makes you wait.
Then you feel it start to heat up. The 4th hole has you playing toward a green surrounded by bunch of abandoned buildings, some of which were used in the war. The smile on your face begins to grow.
The 5th is just plain mad. It makes you smile, but it is mad. The locals will ask you what you got on that hole before they ask you anything else. I got a bogey here and I was delighted to walk off with that on the card.
Standing at the tee, the Firth of Forth is on your left, obviously that’s a no go. On the right you have the tabletop portion of the course, high above the green which, by the way is tucked away from the tee in a semi-blind dogleg of sorts.
Yeah, the hole is mad but it just makes you laugh. The 6th is a painfully beautiful par 3 with a postage stamp green cut into the hill and a rocky outcrop decorating it for good aesthetic measure. From there you play some solid holes back to the clubhouse where you can tee it up to make it 18.
What struck me about this course is how close it is to St Andrew, how fun it is, how cheap it is to play and yet how few golf tourists will have played it. You leave Anstruther GC with a smile on your face, and that’s how golf should be.
Next time you are booking a trip to Scotland for golf, take time to find out about the unsung heroes of our golfing landscape. The gems like Anstruther that will warm your heart and delight you.
It’s great to play the world famous classic, no doubt, but is it not also cool to be able to brag about courses you’ve played that only really the locals know about? This is how golf should be.
