St Andrews

The Castle Course opened in 2008 as the first new public course built at St Andrews since 1914, designed by David McLay Kidd on what had been flat, featureless farmland two miles south-east of the town. It takes its name from Kinkell Castle, which once stood on the same clifftop site five hundred years earlier, and is operated as part of the St Andrews Links Trust alongside the historic Old Course and its neighbours. Its dramatic, heavily contoured greens split opinion among golfers — some of the most talked-about in modern course design — but there's little argument about the setting: a clifftop position looking straight out over St Andrews Bay. The course marked a turning point for Kidd himself, who has since said the project pushed him toward designing for playability over pure difficulty.