Southerness Golf Club

Southerness Golf Club is a classy links course and comfortably one of the best in the area. 

Southerness was laid out in 1947 by Philip MacKenzie Ross when he was working further north at Turnberry in Ayrshire.

This is the south of Scotland’s championship venue, its 6,728 yards from the white tees enough to provide a suitable examination for those competing in the Scottish Amateur, the British Youths and British Boys Home Internationals among many others.

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As you gaze over the Solway to the east – Silloth is on the other side of the water – you set eyes on the Cumbrian Lake District while to the west are the Galloway Hills.

A fixture in our GB&I Top 100, it is a hugely classy links which on first glance looks fairly straightforward but which quickly becomes a beast when the wind whips across its generally flat topography.

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The flat links terrain is overlooked by hills sits in splendid isolation in a manner more rare than one might expect of links courses that are often remote. Laid out in one big loop, only briefly in the middle of the front nine do holes run parallel to each other and as a result your group usually feels like the only golfers on the links.

A relatively wide fairway offers a friendly initiation to Southerness but it is not long before you are asked to avoid gorse, rough, heather and pot bunkers to find the short grass from which you must find the quick, sloping greens.

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Southerness finishes in robust finish, starting with the memorable 12th, a musuclar par 4 well over 400 yards that dog legs to the right and plays towards on a well-protected green with the Solway Firth and sandy beach beyond.

The next two are just as good and these holes would fit in seamlessly on any links in the land. Then comes the 217-yard par-3 16th; every inch an Open Championship short hole when into the wind.

You may well have kept a tidy scorecard by the time you reach these holes but, if you drive it well you have a chance of scoring well. Good shots are rewarded and there are no tricks.

The Galloway hills are a nice backdrop if not dazzling; the golf, however, most certainly is.  

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