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The Castle Course sits on a 1.1-mile-long bluff above St. Andrews Bay and faces north to the Arbroath coast and Carnoustie. Construction started in March 2005 and took just over a year. Cost of the project, including land, clubhouse, course, hotel, guest cottages, and roads, is $60 million.
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The course affords a long view of the medieval university town of St. Andrews, where golf has been played since the mid-1400s. Unlike the six other municipal layouts, which sit on a sandy stretch south of town, the Castle Course occupies an isolated parcel two miles east of St. Andrews, on the only available coastal frontage.
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The dunelike shapes were created using bulldozers and backhoes. Designer David McLay Kidd and his associate, Paul Kimber, moved 200,000 cubic yards of earth in the process, a relatively small amount by modern standards. The trick was to leave the mounds and dunes asymmetrical and nonlinear so that they looked entirely natural.
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The putting surfaces have lots of contours—more than those of a typical Scottish course. The stiff, bristly greens grass isn’t cut as short (or as fast) as grass on U.S. courses and can handle bump-and-run approach shots that are hit low to the ground.
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Most traditional links layouts, like the Old Course, have well-defined, very deep bunkers with walls of sod. At the Castle Course, by contrast, the crumblier soil structure won’t allow for such pot bunkers, so Kidd and his team created shaggy, broken-edge bunkers with tall, wispy grasses.
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Kidd stuck with two local types of grass—fescue and marram. They’re needlelike, and have a tawny color and a hearty root structure. They adapt well to both heat and rain and don’t require a lot of irrigation or fertilization.
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