A short note on each of the four courses — design, history, and the moments that shaped them. Read before you play; remember as you walk off the 18th.
Dundonald is the youngest of the quartet by more than half a century, and it wears its modernity well. The name — Gaelic for "Fort Donald" — comes from Iron Age fortifications dating to around 200 BC, found on the nearby hillside. A golf course existed on this land in the early 1900s, but it was requisitioned during the Second World War for the Dundonald Camp military station, where D-Day landings were rehearsed before being launched at Normandy.
The course as we know it today was conceived as Southern Gailes — a planned golf and residential development that didn't materialise. In early 2003, Loch Lomond Golf Club stepped in and acquired the property to give its members a true links to complement their inland parkland masterpiece. They hired California-based Kyle Phillips, fresh from his triumph at Kingsbarns, and the course opened in 2005 to a chorus of approval.
Phillips's signature touches are everywhere: wide and welcoming fairways that tighten on approach, deep pot bunkers placed with strategic precision, and bold green complexes that test every aspect of the short game. The course's defenders are its two burns — narrow and cunningly camouflaged — which intrude on the 3rd, 6th, 9th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 18th. Unlike many traditional links, you don't see the sea from every hole; you just feel its winds.
Dundonald hosted the Scottish Open in 2017, won by Rafa Cabrera Bello in a playoff over Callum Shinkwin, and has welcomed the Women's Scottish Open annually since 2022. It now serves as one of four Final Qualifying venues for The Open Championship through 2026. The 2021 arrival of a new clubhouse, accommodation lodges, and a £25m investment by Darwin Escapes have completed the transformation from members' winter retreat to fully-fledged destination resort.
Prestwick is where it all began. On 17 October 1860, eight professional golfers gathered on this stretch of Ayrshire links to compete for a red Moroccan leather belt with silver clasps. Three rounds of a 12-hole course. Willie Park of Musselburgh shot 174, two strokes better than the local favourite, Old Tom Morris. The Open Championship was born.
The club itself was founded in 1851 when 57 members met at the Red Lion Inn in Prestwick. They bought the two cottages opposite the tavern to serve as a clubhouse, and appointed Old Tom Morris as their first Keeper of the Green, Ball and Clubmaker. Old Tom laid out the original 12 holes — the first golf course he ever designed, and the prototype for many that followed.
Prestwick hosted the first 12 Open Championships exclusively, and the championship continued to be played here until 1925 — 24 stagings in total, second only to St Andrews. Old Tom won four times. His son Tommy — the original prodigy — won three consecutively from 1868 to 1870, earning him the Challenge Belt outright. Tommy also recorded the first hole-in-one in Open history, and a modern-day albatross on the 578-yard opening hole. The original scorecards are still kept in Prestwick's archive.
The course was extended to 18 holes in 1882, again under Old Tom's guidance, and six of the original greens are still in play today. A simple stone cairn west of the clubhouse marks the spot where the first Open tee shot was struck. The oak lockers in the smoke room date to 1882. There is no other place in golf where you can walk so directly in the footsteps of the game's pioneers.
Turnberry is golf as theatre. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Third Marquess of Ailsa owned 71 hectares of agriculturally useless coastal land at Turnberry Green. Through his position as a director of the Glasgow & Southwestern Railway, he saw an opportunity: lay out a golf course, build a grand hotel, run a train line to it. Willie Fernie, winner of the 1893 Open, designed the original 13 holes in 1901. The Station Hotel — with revolutionary electric lighting and running water — opened on 17 May 1906.
Then came the wars. In both World Wars, Turnberry was requisitioned by the military as an airfield. The First World War saw the dunes flattened for runways. The Second World War was worse: the RAF established a flying school, the hotel became a military hospital, and up to 200 personnel perished during training operations at the base. The memorial near the 12th green honours those airmen. Concrete runways scarred the links for years afterwards.
Twenty-six years later, in 1977, Turnberry hosted its first Open — and produced what many still call the greatest head-to-head in golf history. Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus played the final two rounds paired together in glorious sunshine, finishing eleven strokes ahead of third place. Watson's closing 65 secured victory by a single stroke. The Duel in the Sun.
Turnberry has hosted four Opens in total: 1977 (Watson), 1986 (Greg Norman), 1994 (Nick Price), and 2009, when a 59-year-old Watson came within a single putt of a sixth Claret Jug before losing a four-hole playoff to Stewart Cink. Since Donald Trump's purchase of the resort in 2014, Mackenzie & Ebert have overseen a transformation that has cost more than £200m. Five new holes were created along the coastal edge; every hole received new tees and bunkers. The new par-3 9th, played from a tee on a rocky headland directly toward the Turnberry lighthouse, is now one of the most photographed shots in golf. Further refinements were completed as recently as May 2025.
Western Gailes is the only true seaside links of the four. Founded in 1897 by four Glaswegians who were fed up with playing on muddy parkland courses in the city, they leased land from the Duke of Portland and recruited their first Keeper of the Green, Mr. F. Morris, to lay out the course. The result is one of the narrowest plots of golfing land anywhere in the world — Western Gailes is wedged between the Firth of Clyde to the west and the West Coast railway line to the east, never more than two holes wide.
The routing is famously unusual: a continuous anticlockwise loop from the clubhouse. Holes 1–4 head north inland, then the course turns at the 5th and plays nine consecutive holes south along the water's edge — the celebrated coastal stretch where the holes sit tight to the shore with the Firth of Clyde always on your right. The closing five holes (14–18) turn back north and run inland to the clubhouse, typically with the prevailing wind at your back. The 17th — a brutal par 4 that plays much like a par 5 against the wind — is widely considered one of the toughest holes in Scotland.
The course was modified materially in the 1970s by Fred Hawtree, particularly the 3rd, 4th and 5th holes, and more recently by Mackenzie & Ebert during the COVID period — re-siting drive bunkers, adding forward tees for shorter players, and reshaping green surrounds on the 5th, 9th and 18th. The bunkers are now a mix of the traditional revetted style and more naturalised forms. Tom Doak has called the 6th (Lappock) and 7th (Sea) "truly world class".
Western Gailes is also the most traditional club of the four. Gentlemen are required to wear jacket and tie when entering and leaving the clubhouse. There is no driving range. There is no shop selling logoed gear by the bushel. There is, instead, a club that welcomes its visitors as members for the day, a clubhouse that overlooks the 18th green, and a lunch served after your round that is included in the green fee. It is golf as it was practised — and intended — at the close of the nineteenth century, and the fact that it has survived all but unchanged is reason enough to play it.