The course features 360 degree views in addition to being a great layout
Durness Golf Club is known as the most northwesterly golf course in the United Kingdom. That may be, but all we knew was that it took 4 1/2 hours north of Inverness, already the furthest north any of us had previously been in the Highlands. The deceiving part of it was that Multimap indicated it was only 104 miles, we thought there must be a mistake, and we’d breeze right up there in 2 hours. We soon discovered why it would take 4 1/2 hours as we edged on past Bonar Bridge, where we played a quick 9 holes on their parkland course. We ran into the world’s original road systems, the One Lane Road for fully 50 miles of the trip. This is a road which is hardly the width of a car, and the cars in Scotland are small! It has a widened out area every 1/2 mile where one of the approaching cars pulls over to let the other pass. Here’s where we found the courtesy of the Scottish people shine, not once did we find an opposing car try to cut us off, or beat us past the pull-off area. It became a leisurely drive through some of the most beautiful scenery we’d ever experienced in Scotland, including one area known as the “Millionaires View” up Struie Hill on the road from Inverness to Bonar Bridge with views across the Moray Firth and a stunning river valley.
Durness is routed over high ground on Balnakeil Bay
We’ve all been fortunate to have played some of the more beautiful and famous golf courses in the world, and to a man thought Durness’s setting ranked in the top 5 of any course we’ve ever seen. The course is routed over high ground about the white sandy beaches of Balnakeil and Sandlewood Bay with it’s bright, blue shallow waters ringing the crescent beach. There’s cliffs up towards Faraid Head to the north and to the south, and the setting is surrounded by the mountains of the Northern Highlands for 180 degrees. The name Durness is from the Norse Drya-ness meaning Deer Cape or Deer point and has been referred to as an oasis in a barren land, the last resort or the last outpost. The population is 386, and the main industry here is crofting, a cooperative form of farming the land, a tourist attraction the Smoo Cave, and also a memorial to John Lennon who spent summers in Durness in his youth. There’s two decent “hotels” worth staying in, Smoo Cave Hotel, and Mackay’s.
The course was designed and built by the “locals” in the late 1980′s. It’s not technically on links-land, but it does have some links characteristics with mounded and undulating fairways, and greens open at the front, and is devoid of trees. There’s just nine holes at Durness but set up with two different sets of tees such that some of the holes really do feel quite different when playing them for the second time round. The first couple of holes are dramatic walks uphill, and in fact until 8/17, it didn’t seem you came back down much. There’s three signature holes on the layout IMHO. The 6th is a 450 yard three shotter, that looks to be 800 yards long from the tee box. We noticed that most of the holes looked longer than actual, possibly due to being dwarfed by the scenery surrounding the course. The 6th is a mirror image of the 6th at Bay Hill, or Waterloo at The Dunes in Myrtle Beach, where a lake borders the hole from tee to green, inviting you to bite off as much as you can chew.
The 9th and th 18th at Durness, a 100 yarder over a piece of the Atlantic on Balnakeil Bay
The eighth\ seventeenth is spectacular, a long par 4, heading back down the hill, to a green tucked in on Balankeil Bay, just a stunning journey down the hill, blind fairway and blind shot to the green, guided by two fairway markers. You really have to play the course twice, because the first time, especially on this hole, you’re blinded by the scenery. The final hole is special as well, a 110 yarder across a corner of the the rocky cliff of the Atlantic to a two tiered green. We found every hole to have a good bit of character and interest, the course to be in excellent condition, and the rate very fair, 25£ greens fee to be deposited in the honor box at the clubhouse.
We had an interesting experience, which I think says a lot about the people of the community at Durness. We arrived into Durness late and headed out to the course to play a quick 9 holes. The clubhouse was just closing up, we paid 15£ twilight rate and headed out. Upon finishing, one of our guys realized he had lost one of his headcovers, and quite frankly we didn’t have the energy to trek across the course to retreive it. The next morning on our way out of town, we stopped at the local mart, The Spar, to load up on water and junk food for the long trip back, and a young man at the checkout counter asked me if we’d found the headcover we’d lost! He said he’d heard it was at the clubhouse, someone had found it on the course later that evening. I guess with only 386 people in town, and the golf course being the second major attraction, that word got around that some Americans playing the course last evening lost their headcover, and that if you see them in town, let them know it’s been found. We spent the next evening in Inverness where one of the stories on the front page of the newspaper was about a chicken dying in a man’s back yard, so comparatively speaking an American loosing a headcover in a small village is big news!
