We had originally booked a tee time on the Old Course. Then the New Course opened in August 2025 with a marketing campaign calling it the best new course in the world for the year. Reviewers fell over themselves to praise it. Golf Digest, top 100 lists, the whole machine. We changed our booking to the New Course well in advance. That's what you do when something is being called the best new course in the world. You want to see it.

Royal Aberdeen sits just north of Aberdeen across the River Don, on a stretch of coast called Balgownie. You drive out of the city centre through some slightly grim industrial outskirts, past a sewage works if I remember right, and then suddenly you're at a proper old Scottish golf club with gorse and dunes and a clubhouse from another century. The transition is jarring in a good way.

Tom Watson said Royal Dornoch was the most fun he ever had on a golf course. Herbert Warren Wind said no golfer has completed his education until he's played it. Andrew Carnegie said if there's a heaven on earth it's here. I played Royal Dornoch toward the end of our Highlands trip and my honest reaction was simpler than any of those. Good course. I enjoyed it. I don't feel qualified to rank it among the great spiritual experiences of my golfing life the way the Americans see

Founded 1887. James Braid did most of the bunkering and greens around 1909. Mackenzie & Ebert did a renovation between 2018 and 2020. Walker Cup hosted here in 1999, won by GB&I against an American team that had Matt Kuchar on it. Curtis Cup in 2012. Amateur Championship has been here twice. Fine. The pedigree is real and you can keep reading about it on their website if you care. What matters is what it's like to play.

Peterhead is one of those courses I'm glad I played but probably won't be making a special trip back for. We'd done the proper Aberdeen-area itinerary already on this trip. Trump International, Royal Aberdeen, Murcar, Cruden Bay. Peterhead was the fifth round and at that point in the week I was both physically tired and spoiled by what I'd already seen. The Craigewan Links is a perfectly good course with a few genuinely outstanding holes and a few that are just there to fill

There are courses where the architecture is the star and there are courses where the land is the star. Cruden Bay is both at once. You walk off the 18th green and you can't tell whether you've just played one of the most brilliantly designed courses in Scotland or just spent four hours on the most spectacular piece of duneland nature ever handed to a golf course architect. The honest answer is both. Old Tom Morris laid out the original course in 1899.

Let me get straight to my conclusion. After playing both courses at Cabot Highlands on the same day in the first week of September 2025, Old Petty in the morning and Castle Stuart in the afternoon, my honest verdict is that Castle Stuart is the better course. By a clear margin. Old Petty is excellent and Tom Doak has built something that will rise up the rankings as it matures, and I covered all of that in a separate post.