North Berwick Golf Club

North Berwick is a unique golf links that ranks among the very best you’ll find in the world. The West Links placed inside the top-10 in our most recent Golf World Top 100 Links Courses in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Rankings editor Chris Bertram explains why…

In 2016 the European Institute of Golf Course Architects held its annual conference in North Berwick. They understandably tend to host their yearly get-together at high-calibre venues but nowhere attracted a bigger turnout than North Berwick.

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Its reputation precedes it and despite the enormous expectation that brings, the architects talked of the West links with child-like enthusiasm. 

North Berwick is tremendous fun, with holes that are occasionally bewildering but always entertaining.

If you want to know what the oft-repeated phrase ‘quirky links’ looks and plays like, this would be a good example. A unique links, it is a course that its fans would happily play every day for the rest of their lives.

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It is not hole after hole of landmarks, a full-scale crazy golf course – it is stringent enough to host Open qualifying, so you won’t breeze round and comfortably play to your handicap.

The bumps and humps of the front nine would be described as exceptionally characterful if it was paired with almost any other course in the land but, when it precedes the back nine here, it is relatively mundane.

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For come the closing third of this mesmeric links, you savour nothing but seminal holes.

From firing over the drystone dyke hard to the 13th green to the blind glory of the 14th, aptly named ‘Perfection’ to widely-copied short 15th, Redan, it is an education in golf as the game began.

Beneath the windows of the Marine Hotel is the 16th, arguably golf’s most exacting green complex with two raised plateaux separated by a trough that has its own name, Biarritz.

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North Berwick’s West links is gaining more exposure these days and while that will possibly rub against the hipster, the connoisseur and the historian, we are glad it is receiving the acclaim it deserves.

It is one of the most entertaining and memorable courses in the world and East Lothian, Scotland Great Britain are fortunate to call it one of theirs. There is no more fun course on this island.

British golfers are equally as fortunate that we have such a course so accessible to us. Make sure you make time to play it – you won’t regret it.

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