Royal Aberdeen
- Gunnar Kobin
- Apr 23
- 6 min read
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. One minute you're in a grey northern port city and the next you're somewhere that hasn't really changed since before the Second World War.
We played it on the second day of the Aberdeen leg. Trump the day before, Murcar the day after because they share a boundary and the clubhouses are a ten-minute walk apart, Cruden Bay after that. So this was the middle round of a four-course Aberdeenshire dunes week and I was already making mental comparisons whether I wanted to or not.
A bit of history. Royal Aberdeen was founded in 1780 as the Society of Golfers at Aberdeen. Sixth oldest club in the world. The club is credited with writing down the five-minute rule for searching for your ball in 1783. Five minutes was reduced to three in recent years but for most of the modern era of golf the rule that came from this club was the rule everyone played under. The current Balgownie course opened in 1888 after the club moved across the river. Archie and Robert Simpson from Carnoustie did the original design. James Braid came along in the 1920s to add bunkering and lengthen it. Martin Hawtree did some recent work before the 2011 Walker Cup. Tom Watson won the Senior British Open here in 2005 and Justin Rose won the Scottish Open in 2014. Rory McIlroy shot 64 in the first round that week and still holds the course record. So the course has been in front of serious players for a long time.
You need to know all that because the atmosphere of the place is steeped in it. This isn't a club trying to invent a heritage. It's a club that has been quietly being itself for almost 250 years.
The 1st tee is directly below the clubhouse windows. You tee off with members watching you through the glass behind while they eat their lunch. I'm sure some people find this intimidating. I just tried not to think about it. Hit a reasonable drive that found the fairway then three-putted from the fringe for a five. Standard opening round nerves.
From the 1st green you go north into the dunes and stay there for the next eight holes. I've used up the word "excellent" too many times on this trip so I'll try a different one. The front nine at Royal Aberdeen is terrific. Every hole is different. Every hole asks a question. You work your way up through the dunes with the North Sea to your right and the wind doing whatever the wind wants to do on that particular day. The greens are raised and protected and require good shots rather than just any shot. I had three-putts on the 3rd and 5th because I kept misreading speed on greens that were quicker than they looked.
The 4th is a par 4 with a green tucked into a natural amphitheatre of dunes. It's the kind of hole that looks simple from the tee and then isn't. I hit a drive I liked, hit a 7-iron that I thought was the right club, ended up 20 yards short. The approach plays longer than it looks because the green sits up and there's often a false front. Took me a minute to figure out why my distance was so off.
The 6th is a par 3 into the side of a dune with three bunkers left. Classic. I missed right and had a downhill chip from heavy rough that got away from me. Double. Moving on.
Lost a ball on the 8th which is a short par 4 with a blind tee shot. The gorse along the right side is further from the fairway than it looks from the tee. I aimed to miss it, missed further right than I meant to, walked up expecting my ball to be in tall grass and instead never found it. Gorse is not sympathetic to a foreign visitor's golf ball.
The 9th is beautiful. Dogleg left through dunes with the sea visible beyond the green. I made par. Took a photograph. Felt like the round was peaking.
Then you turn and come back and the course changes.
The back nine at Royal Aberdeen climbs up to a plateau of flatter ground and heads south back toward the clubhouse. The drama is gone. The dunes aren't there. You're playing into what's usually the prevailing wind and the holes are narrower and harder. None of them are bad. A couple of them are genuinely good. But after what the front nine gave you the contrast is stark.
The 13th has a nice green complex. The 15th was rebuilt by Hawtree and it works. The 17th is a short par 3 with a green ringed by bunkers and I made a decent par after hitting a 9-iron that took a lucky first bounce. The 18th is a proper finisher, long par 4 into a green under the clubhouse windows, which means if you were worried about being watched on the 1st you get to be worried about it again now. I hit an OK approach. Two-putted for par. Satisfying way to close out even if the preceding hour or so had been a bit of a slog.
Honestly, if Royal Aberdeen just stopped after nine holes it would be one of the best courses I've played in Scotland. The issue is the back nine has to exist, and it drags the overall impression down a notch because it doesn't live up to what came before. I don't know how you fix this. The land is what it is. Hawtree has apparently done what can be done with the material. The front nine gets all the natural drama because that's where the dunes are. So you get a course that peaks at the turn and then finishes at a lower register.
The clubhouse is a real Scottish golf club clubhouse. Dark wood, old paintings, a display of the original red club jacket from 1828 which I spent five minutes looking at because I find that stuff interesting. Jacket and tie for the dining room, though you can eat in the bar without. Food was decent, not memorable. Service was friendlier than the reputation suggested. I'd read various online grumbles about Royal Aberdeen being stuffy toward visitors and got the opposite experience. Maybe it was just our day.
Cost was £215 for summer green fee. Reasonable given the quality. One genuine irritation though is that the club doesn't do online booking. You have to email or phone. In 2026 this feels slightly absurd for a club charging that kind of green fee and welcoming international visitors. Get a website that works. Come on.
So where does it rank for me. Hard to answer cleanly. The front nine alone would put it in my top ten of Scottish courses I've played. The back nine alone wouldn't make the top fifty. Put them together and you've got a very good course that sits just outside the top tier. It's a notch below Cruden Bay in my personal ranking just because Cruden Bay is more fun throughout the round. But it's clearly ahead of Peterhead and Murcar. I'd put it alongside Nairn actually, which is interesting because those are both classic traditional links with the same general character of being solidly excellent rather than transcendent.
If you're doing an Aberdeen-area golf trip you're going to play Royal Aberdeen. There's no question about that. It's the historic club and the front nine is world class. But if you asked me to rank Aberdeen-area courses for someone who only had time for one, it'd be Cruden Bay every time. Royal Aberdeen is the one you play because you should. Cruden Bay is the one you play because you want to.
Anyway. Good round. I'd go back. But I'm not hurrying.
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