Any serious golfer knows of the trophy courses: St. Andrews Old, Muirfield, Carnoustie, Troon and Turnberry. They’re likely familiar with the bucket-list destinations, old and new, from Royal Dornoch to Cruden Bay to Kingsbarns to North Berwick. Maybe they’ve even heard of a few artisanal outliers such as Machrihanish, Brora, Panmure or Crail.
Few, however, could ever know all of the more than 550 golf courses that Scotland has to offer, from championship links to parkland beauties to nine-hole tracks. They may not know their Angus from their Ayrshire or Perthshire from East Lothian. Most who make the pilgrimage to the home of golf try to hit all the high notes, crowding the tee sheets at championship venues while neglecting the many gems scattered in every little corner of a country that distills golf with the same fervor it does whisky.
When putting together a travel itinerary has never been harder with all the obvious choices overbooked in the near future, there is a new tool for adventurers willing to seek out the off-book places. Where any golf trip to Scotland should begin is the website Scotland, Where Golf Began.
ScotlandWhereGolfBegan.com is a digital platform that aims to introduce willing travelers to the full breadth of opportunities that the country offers both on and near the courses. With eye-catching photography, well-produced videos, colorful stories and its insightful “1457 Podcast,” it has all the ingredients to inspire golfers around the world to make the visit to the birthplace of the game.
Conceived and produced by public relations experts Allan Minto and Jamie Darling – and supported by directors Malcolm Duck, who owns Duck’s Inn in Aberlady, and Neil Hampton, the general manager at Royal Dornoch – the web destination that officially launched in June 2021 is growing into a one-stop shop for any golfers interested in taking their game – and perhaps even non-golfing partners – to Scotland.
“We’ve got an ambition to try and spread the value of golf tourism wider across the whole of Scotland,” said Minto. “It really focuses at the moment on these hotspots of St. Andrews and Carnoustie and Troon and Prestwick and the East Lothian courses. So we’d like to spread that a little bit further, particularly this year, because the capacity is such a challenge in some of the trophy courses, you know, a lot of them are already fully booked with bookings rolling over from 2020, ’21 all into ’22.
“We’ve been really pleased and we’re managing to showcase some of those lesser-known courses which are great experiences, although people have never really come across them and it might fit nicely to a wider range of budgets as well. … We’d like to be recognized as the number one resource for planning a golf trip to Scotland in the future.”
Minto is a lifer in the golf tourism game. His keenness for the game prompted him to leave school early in 1976 and become an assistant pro at Musselburgh Links, where he was a junior member. He soon became head assistant at Gullane before getting a head pro job at Royal Musselburgh. But by the late 1980s with recession plaguing the golf industry, Minto grew weary of being a “glorified shopkeeper” and went back to college to study languages and tourism in Edinburgh.
That led to what was supposed to be a seasonal job with the Edinburgh Tourist Board.
“I stayed there for 10 years,” he said.
During that time, Minto started merging the golf and the tourism together. He joined Golf East Lothian in 2003, which promoted “Scotland’s Golf Coast” – the glorious 30-mile chain of 21 continuous links courses from Musselburgh to Dunbar that includes the likes of Gullane, Muirfield and North Berwick.
After 10 years he moved over to set up the same kind of promotion for Perthshire, aiming to capitalize on the Ryder Cup at Gleneagles in 2014. That change of scenery to the picturesque parkland hills gave him a different perspective and new appreciation for the variety that Scotland has to offer beyond its famous links.
“It’s not quite a strain looking for golf balls; you’re not worried about bad shots,” he said of the parkland game. “It really brought me back to thinking this is a fun, fun way to play golf.”
“People in the U.S. – in fact I would even say that people two or three hours drive across the English border – wouldn’t know what Perthshire is or Ayrshire is or East Lothian. They’re scratching their heads when we went to an exhibition in Birmingham or London.” – Allan Minto
This prompted the idea that there might be a better model than the seven or eight independent regional golf tourism groups funded for a few years each by the Scottish Enterprise. Minto and Darling – who was managing a similar project in Ayrshire, which includes Troon, Prestwick and Turnberry – sought to develop a more inclusive and sustainable model.
“We thought there must be a more effective way to do this – something longer term where we don’t need to rely on the public sector to keep funding it,” Minto said. “And we also thought, although these regional groups had achieved something quite good, there was still a lot of potential to do better.
“People in the U.S. – in fact I would even say that people two or three hours drive across the English border – wouldn’t know what Perthshire is or Ayrshire is or East Lothian. They’re scratching their heads when we went to an exhibition in Birmingham or London. When they see Golf East Lothian, they knew Muirfield and Gullane and North Berwick, but they didn’t associate them together as a region.
“So we thought it’d be much more effective to promote Scotland. We’ve structured the website in a way that we can do national campaigns and we can also do regional campaigns.”
Their first collaborative effort was a competition under the “Home of Golf” banner called “World’s Best Golf Job.” The prize was to come to Scotland for 14 days and play golf every day and just blog, make videos or post about it on social media.
“The idea was that at the end of the two weeks, they would go back home and put together a little video, which was going to be a sort of guide to playing golf in Scotland,” Minto said.
Among the application submissions was one from American videographer Erik Anders Lang, who’d done a series with United Airlines called “Adventures In Golf,” that included an episode on Askernish in western Scotland. Erik won the job and managed to play 26 courses in 15 days, producing video dairies along the way.
“Instead of doing one video at the end, he went home and got a guy to work on editing with him and they produced sixteen 20- to 30-minute episodes,” Minto said of the shorts that collected millions of views on YouTube.
That success inspired them to build ScotlandWhereGolfBegan.com on a shoestring budget. It is a marvel of ingenuity and diversity. The photos are first class, as they refuse to put up anything that paints a course in a poor light. The videos are sharp and compelling, and include an archive of all of Erik Anders Lang’s “Un/official Golf Guide to Scotland” videos.
The site comes up with creative ideas for developing unique golf itineraries – a feature it calls the Trails Where Golf Began. One such trail is dubbed “The Perfect Match,” pairing golf courses with whisky distilleries across all of the Scottish regions for those interested in combining tastings with the tee times. Another offers similar itineraries around craft breweries. Others profile lesser-known places, inner-city venues or courses that require ferry rides to reach. One called “Honest & Short” illustrates some of the more than 150 nine-hole courses (or a 12-holer in Shiskine), some of which simply ask for donations dropped in an honesty box.
Scrolling through these trails provides suggestions for places to stay, eat and visit. SWGB.com doesn’t book anything for you, but it does partner with a handful of tour operators should travelers prefer someone else arranging the details for them instead of building itineraries on their own.
“The idea there is to bring in both courses with non-golf activities,” Minto said. “Again, we’re just trying to reach a wider audience and spread the benefits of golf tourism a little bit wider across the country. It doesn’t necessarily need to be your people who are coming just to play golf all day every day like your typical golf traveler. It can widen out to couples who are interested in doing a little bit more – visit a distillery or a brewery or an attraction. You can just appreciate a little bit more in the country rather than just rushing out to play golf all day.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI18HmRjZ_g
Coming up with a marketable name was tricky. The St. Andrews Links Trust owns the copyright to “Home of Golf,” so they needed to emphasize Scotland’s historic value without infringing.
“ ‘Where Golf Began’ actually in some ways is even more meaningful, in that we tell the story of 1457 when golf was first documented,” Minto said, adding they are developing new concepts that could bring people together and help sustain the brand.
The storytelling and building a community will be key going forward as they build upon the initial success of Scotland, Where Golf Began.
“Quite proud of what we’ve actually achieved,” Minto said. “We’ve produced, I think, over 60 videos in the last 18 months. We’ve done about 50 articles, short stories, and we started up a podcast. One of our main pillars going forward is that we want to focus on storytelling – some way of trying to inspire people to either travel to Scotland or even people who have been to Scotland many times just to see some other opportunities to play golf in different places.”
Its latest series of videos is called “Open To All,” showing off Scotland’s seven historic Open Championship venues, including the original rota courses Prestwick and Musselburgh, building up to the 150th Open at St. Andrews.
“I think the message we’re trying to get across there is that golf is one of the few sports in the world where you can actually play on the venues where history’s been made,” Minto said. “We play soccer over here but you cannot go down to Wembley in London just to have a game of football. You can play the Old Course and walk in the steps where these legends walked.”