A Drambuie Round at Peterhead
- Gunnar Kobin
- Apr 22
- 6 min read
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 out the routing, and I think that's the most honest summary I can give it.
A bit of background. The club was founded in 1841, which makes it the 18th oldest golf club in the world. Willie Park Junior, who won the Open Championship in 1887 and 1889, designed the original 9-hole layout in 1892. Archie Simpson extended it to 18 holes in 1908. There used to be a second 18-hole course called the New Course built in 1923 but it fell into disrepair during the war years and has been a 9-hole loop ever since. The Craigewan plays par 70, around 6,150 yards, which is short by modern standards but plenty when the wind is up. Which it almost always is, because Peterhead sits on a peninsula bounded by the River Ugie on two sides and the North Sea on the third. There's nowhere for the wind to hide.
The clubhouse is on the north side of the river. The car park is on the south side. You walk across a footbridge to get to the first tee. That's a small detail but it set the tone nicely for what felt like a slightly old-fashioned, slightly out-of-the-way kind of golf experience. Peterhead is not on most international visitors' radar and you can feel that the moment you arrive. Members were friendly. The starter was friendly. The whole place had a low-key proper Scottish golf club atmosphere that I really liked.
Now, the course itself.
The 1st hole is called Ugie and it's a very good opener. You play across the river itself from the tee, which is not something you see every day, and the fairway is a slight dogleg left with a single bunker guarding the green. Into the wind you're hitting more club than you expect and onto a small elevated green that rejects anything off-line. I made bogey, which I considered acceptable.
Then the course gets boring for a while.
The 2nd through 5th holes loop around the 9-hole New Course area on relatively flat, meadow-like ground. The holes are fine. They're properly maintained, the greens are fast, the bunkers are where they should be. But they don't feel like a top Scottish links. They feel like the kind of holes you'd find at any decent regional club. After playing Cruden Bay's opening five the day before, where every hole has character and the dunes are dramatic from the start, Peterhead's opening stretch is a real letdown. I spent most of these holes wondering if the entire course was going to be like this.
It isn't.
The 6th is a very good par 3, uphill, well-defended by bunkers, and you can feel the course starting to wake up. By the 7th you've gone from flat meadow into proper rolling duneland and it's like you've walked onto a different golf course. The 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th are the heart of Peterhead and this stretch is genuinely world-class links golf. Big dunes, valley fairways, plateau greens, traditional bunkering. Holes that ask you real questions. The kind of golf that justifies the trip.
The 9th is called St Fergus, a 460-yard par 4 with no bunkers, just a fairway running through a valley between dunes to a green that requires a precise approach. I three-putted from forty feet because the green has subtle slope I didn't read. Walked away thinking that was probably the best hole on the course.
Now here's where the round actually became something I'll remember forever. There was a caddie in our group who'd been carrying a small picnic basket all morning. None of us had asked what was in it. We'd assumed sandwiches, maybe a flask of tea, the usual. When we got to the 10th tee, which is the par 3 where you turn back toward the clubhouse, he set the basket down on the bench, opened it up, and started laying out shot glasses on the wooden plank. Then he produced a bottle of Drambuie and poured one for each of us.
If you've never had Drambuie at the far point of a Scottish links course on a windy morning, with the North Sea behind you and another nine holes to play, I can only tell you this is exactly how it should be drunk. Sweet, warming, the heather honey doing its work against the cold. The caddie said something about it being a Peterhead tradition and toasted us. We toasted him back. I have no idea if any of that is true about the tradition or if it was just his personal touch, and I don't really care. It was one of the great moments of the trip and the kind of thing you only get when you play golf in places that haven't been completely sanitised by the modern game.
The 10th itself is a 133-yard par 3 with a burn in front and five bunkers around a green that slopes back to front. Short hole, no margin for error. Beautiful. I made a par I didn't really earn because my tee shot took a lucky bounce off the false front and finished six feet from the pin. Whether that putt dropped because of skill or because of the Drambuie I leave to the reader.
After the 10th the course calms down again. The middle holes are perfectly serviceable but they don't have the magic of 7-10. You're playing decent golf without anything memorable happening. This is the structural problem with Peterhead, in my opinion. The really good stuff is concentrated in two short stretches and there's a lot of middling material in between.
The closing four pick things up. The 16th is a tricky par 3 with a green sloping hard to the right, where if you can't stop the ball it'll feed into thick fescue and you'll lose it. I lost mine. The 17th is a short par 4 of about 260 yards from the yellows, drivable in the right wind, with a blind tee shot over a hill to a green protected by mounds. I tried to drive it. I did not drive it. But the hole is fun and that's the point. The 18th is a par 5 that brings you back along the water with one last sea view and a green guarded by four bunkers. A satisfying enough finish, even if not a memorable one.
Compared to Cruden Bay, Peterhead is a step down. I want to be honest about that because the two clubs are only twenty minutes apart and any visitor doing the Aberdeen circuit is going to be making a direct comparison. Cruden Bay has more sustained quality across all 18 holes. Cruden Bay has more drama in the dunes. Cruden Bay has the eccentric quirks that make it unforgettable. Peterhead has a few really excellent holes (especially 7-10), a fine opener, a decent finish, and a lot of holes in between that are just OK. If I had to pick one to play on a tight schedule, it's Cruden Bay every time.
That said, Peterhead has its own identity and its own appeal. The club is welcoming. The setting on the peninsula is beautiful. The 7-10 stretch is genuinely worth the trip on its own. The value used to be excellent though I see they've now got a tiered pricing system where Scottish residents pay £60, rest of the UK pays £80, and international visitors pay £125. I don't love the price gouging on tourists. It feels like the wrong way to run a club that wants to build a reputation among visiting golfers, and I'd guess the international rate is going to put off some of the people who'd otherwise discover the place.
Practical notes. Walking only, of course. The wind is constant so bring a windshirt and be ready to play punch shots. The clubhouse has a good bar and decent food, with views over the links and out to the North Sea. The pro shop has the basics. There's no real practice range to speak of beyond a chipping area and putting green, which is unusual for a course of this stature.
If you're building an Aberdeen golf trip and you've got five rounds in you, add Peterhead. The 7-10 stretch alone makes it worthwhile and the club itself is a pleasure to visit. If you're only doing three or four rounds in the area, Trump and Cruden Bay and Royal Aberdeen are the priorities and Peterhead can wait for the next trip.
I left thinking I'd play it again if I was up that way, but I wouldn't drive across Scotland for it. That's about right for a course that's solidly in the second tier of Aberdeenshire links. But I'll always remember the round, and not because of the golf. I'll remember it because of a caddie with a picnic basket and a bottle of Drambuie at the 10th tee. Sometimes the best thing about a round of golf has nothing to do with the course at all.
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