Golfing destinations don’t get any more historic or accessible than St. Andrews, Scotland. Royalty and fisherfolk have been playing side by side on the Old Course since the 1450s, and the British Open has been held there 27 times.

The birthplace of golf saw several additional courses in town since the so-called New Course came on board in 1895. There are now seven operated by the Links Trust of St. Andrews, a public agency—none more ambitious than the par-71 Castle Course (take a photo tour), which will open on June 28. Rounds are already being booked.

Named for nearby Kinkell Castle, the Castle Course will have five sets of tees for rounds that range from 5,460 up to 7,188 yards. The $20 million project lies two miles east of the town center, away from the core of the other municipal St. Andrews courses. The green fee will max out at $240—about half the price of Pebble Beach Golf Links, but at St. Andrews second only to the town’s venerable Old Course. Since this is Scotland, where walking is standard, only a few motorized carts will be available. (Players can hire a caddie for an additional $80.)

The designer is 40-year-old Scotsman David McLay Kidd, whose work includes Bandon Dunes in Oregon and Nanea, Charles Schwab’s private course on a steep slope on Hawaii’s Kona Coast.

Kidd landed the job at St. Andrews against 16 other candidates, including Nick Faldo, Gary Player, Donald Steel, and Kyle Phillips, by convincing management that his hands-on, down-to-earth style of golf design would fit in well and appeal to a broad range of golfers, regardless of skill level. The trick at the Castle Course was to create natural-looking dunes across the untried, relatively featureless land—and to hide a two-acre municipal wastewater-treatment facility in the middle of the site.

The winds at St. Andrews routinely reach 20 to 30 miles per hour, so Kidd made the fairways wide (up to 95 yards across on the par-four sixth hole). Don’t expect a lush, green golf course. The local grass of choice is a firm, bristly, tawny-colored species called fescue that holds up well with little irrigation and fertilizer. It also has the advantage of playing firm and allowing for lots of roll—a good thing, too, given the wild-looking crumples of these fairways and greens

The heart-stopper at the Castle Course is the 236-yard, par-three 17th hole. It plays across a ravine to a green perched 75 feet above the shoreline. Like everything else at the Castle Course, while brand new, it looks like it’s been there for centuries.

Bradley Klein is the architecture editor of Golfweek and the author of Discovering Donald Ross and Rough Meditations.