Trump International Scotland New Course
- Gunnar Kobin
- Apr 23
- 6 min read
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. A few hours into the round I started thinking we'd made a mistake.
Quick note on the name before I go further. Most of the golf media calls this the MacLeod Course, after Trump's Scottish mother Mary Anne MacLeod who was born on the Isle of Lewis. That's what the course was marketed as for years before it opened. But the Trump operation's own website now calls it the New Course, and that's what was on the signage when we played. So if you're looking for it online you'll see both names. I'll use New Course because that's what they call it on property.
OK. The course. Then the complaints. Then whether I'd come back.
The land itself is genuinely spectacular. Trump marketing is calling this "the largest sand dunes in Scotland" and while I can't verify that claim, the dunes are massive. 30 metres high in places. You walk between walls of sand and marram grass and the holes thread through the natural corridors. This is outstanding terrain for a links course and you can't look at it without thinking that whoever got to build here was handed a gift.
Martin Hawtree designed it. He died before construction finished, which is a thing I didn't know going in and makes walking the course a slightly poignant experience. Christian Lundin and Christine Fraser completed the work from his plans.
The day we played, the wind was blowing 16 metres per second. For anyone who doesn't think in metric, that's around 36 miles per hour. Gale force. The kind of wind where you can barely stand still on exposed tee boxes and where a 150-yard shot needs a different club in each direction. I've played plenty of windy rounds in Scotland but this was at the far end of what I'd call playable. Everyone in our group was two or three clubs off their normal yardages depending on direction. Some of what I'm about to complain about might have been magnified by the wind. I'll try to separate what was the course from what was the weather.
Here's the first complaint, and this one has nothing to do with the wind.
The greens are ridiculous. Not difficult in the good sense, where a fast true green rewards skilful reading. Ridiculous in the sense of overdesigned. There's so much undulation on some of these greens that there's hardly a straight putt anywhere. On one hole I had a putt that went over several mounds, with the ball running up and down and left and right, and I'm supposed to figure out the line on a green I've never putted before. It's not fun. It's not even fair. It's the kind of design that feels like the architect (or whoever finished this after Hawtree) was trying too hard to make a statement and forgot that a green still has to function as a green.
I've played a lot of tricky greens in my life. Augusta-style dramatic slope. The saucer greens at Royal Dornoch. The subtle slopes at Nairn. Those greens are hard but they're readable and they reward good shotmaking. The New Course greens are hard in a different way. They're random. Your approach shot can finish on the same green as your playing partner's and you can both end up putting in completely different worlds with no consistent logic. That's not good design in my book. That's a designer showing off.
Second complaint, and this one came from our caddie who had local knowledge. There are holes where even though the terrain is more or less flat, the tee box was built too low relative to the fairway. So from the tee you literally cannot see the landing zone. You're just firing blind over a crest with no idea what's in front of you. On a brand new course this is a serious design error. Blind shots can work when they're framing natural land features, like at Cruden Bay where the blind shots are part of the character. But on holes where the land itself is flat and the blindness comes from the tee being built too low, it's just an oversight. Our caddie told us the club is apparently planning to go back and raise some of these tee boxes. So they know. I hope they fix it.
Third thing. The conditioning was actually good for a first-year course. Fairways were clean. Bunkers were maintained. The turf is going to settle nicely over the next few years. This isn't a complaint, just a note for anyone reading this post in 2027 or 2028 when the course might be a different animal. Modern links take time to mature. The MacLeod, sorry, the New Course, is going to be better in five years than it is now.
Fourth thing. The wind. I said I'd try to separate this from the course design but I have to mention it because 16 m/s changes everything. Approach distances become guesses. Putts that should die at the hole keep rolling. Wedge shots balloon into the sky. We were playing a proper links course on a proper links day and the course had no mercy in those conditions. Some of my frustration is probably downstream of the weather and I want to be honest about that.
Now the positives. Because there are real ones.
The routing uses the land well. The stretch from holes 11 to 13 along the North Sea is genuinely beautiful. There are moments on this course where you stand on a tee looking at dunes and sky and sea and you think, yes, this is what links golf is supposed to feel like. The scale is impressive. You're never not aware that you're playing something big. Some of the par 5s are proper risk-reward holes. A couple of the par 3s are excellent. The clubhouse is impressive if you like that kind of American-scale clubhouse grandeur, which I'm mostly neutral about.
So the verdict. The New Course is not a bad course. It's a good course with some specific problems that need fixing. The overdesigned greens are the bigger issue and I don't know if they're going to walk those back, because once a green is built, rebuilding it is a major undertaking. The blind tee shot issues are apparently already on the list to fix. Both things suggest a course that was rushed to opening before it was fully refined. Modern links usually go through a settling-in period of a couple of years where the designers and the club make adjustments. The New Course is still in that period.
Cost. £445 in peak summer season. That's the most expensive round I've ever paid for. Given what I actually got for that money, especially with the greens issue and the blind shots, I don't think it was worth it. Some of that is weather-driven regret but not all of it. The greens problem isn't weather-dependent. I paid premium money for a course that hadn't fully worked out some basic issues yet.
Here's the thing that surprised me most. I want to go back. Not to play the New Course again. To play the Old Course, which is what we had originally booked. Everything I heard and read about the original Trump course, and every comment our caddie made during the round, suggested that the Old Course is the superior experience. Tighter routing. Smarter greens. Better hole-by-hole variety. If I come back to Aberdeen I'll book the Old Course and skip the New, at least until they've addressed the problems.
So if you're planning a Trump International visit and you can only play one course, play the Old. If you want to play both for completeness, fine, but understand the New isn't the finished product yet. If you end up with the wind I had, pack extra balls and lower your expectations for your score. And don't let the "best new course in the world" hype push you into swapping an Old Course booking for the New one. That was our mistake. Don't repeat it.
I can't remember the last time I regretted a round of golf specifically. The New Course in 16 m/s wind with those greens might be the closest I've come. Still, the land deserves better than the current state of the course, and I suspect in a few years I'll be writing a different review.
Give it time. Don't pay £445 for it now.
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