Top 100 Clubhouse - Golf Podcast · Top 100 Golf Courses

Episode 90: Designing Dumbarnie

September 28, 2025·1 hr 13 min·15 clips

The episode opens by putting amateur golf at the center. The host treats the game as something people spend four hours with even though the ball is only moving for a small part of that time, so the course itself deserves real attention. The new links of Scotland is the setting. Clive Clark and David Scott join the conversation and get into the practical questions of site, weather, and how a course has to answer to changing wind directions. Wind comes first. Clark explains that the prevailing breeze can reverse, so holes need to work in both directions, and the firm ground adds run that changes how every shot behaves. That is a different job. The coastline, in the episode's telling, is one of the reasons the project made sense, because the land already offered a dramatic setting for a links. The build was fast. Clark and Scott describe a start date of 28 May 2018 and a finished, grassed course about seven months later, with most of the ground seeded and some of it sodded at the end. Grow-in took longer. They say the course needed about a year and a half after construction to really settle, which separates building from making a golf course ready to play. Then COVID arrived. The opening was set for around 14 May 2020, but the pandemic hit in March, leaving a clubhouse that was roughly 90% built and a site that suddenly had to run without proper facilities. So they improvised. The fallback was port-a-cabins for offices, an outdoor barbecue, beer service, and a staged opening that began with Fife residents only before widening to the rest of Scotland. Pricing was flexible. Scott says the club always planned Fife, Scottish, and international tiers, with Scottish and Fife rates available within a 21-day window to help fill dead space. The closing note lands. The host says he arrived expecting a course designed by an ex-professional golfer to lean penal, but left thinking the layout gives higher-handicap players a real chance to enjoy the round while still making everyone think.

As heard by us

A links-course conversation where design, weather, and opening-day improvisation all matter.

Dunbarney comes across as a talk about what makes a links course function: wind, routing, run, and the long stretch between putting turf in the ground and getting the place ready to play.

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Why you'd press play

You want the story behind a new Scottish links and the people who built it.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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