The family and I are attending our niece's wedding in London next weekend and my wife and I decided to spend a few weeks surrounding the event in the British Isles. After a few days in London to overcome jetlag issues, we headed for Crail, Scotland, which is located on the Firth of Forth or, more familiarly to most of us, the North Sea. Crail is about a 90-minute drive north of Edinburgh and just nine miles south of St. Andrews. On the way to St. Andrews from Crail, you pass four outstanding golf layouts -- the two at the Fairmont Resort, Kingsbarns and the relatively new Castle Course, part of the St. Andrews Trust portfolio of layouts. The Crail Golfing Society maintains two golf courses overlooking the water, and I had the chance to reacquaint myself with Balcomie Links, the 7th oldest golf course in the world, and to be introduced to Craighead Links, a modern layout done in a classic style by Gil Hanse, who is designing the 2016 Olympics course in Brazil.
The first major building you face on your way into Crail town from St. Andrews is the Golf Hotel.
Our hosts, George & Dorothy, have become fast friends since we swapped golf homes with them in 2008; they spent two weeks in Pawleys Island, SC, at our condo and my son and I spent one glorious week later that year in Crail, playing Balcomie, the Old and New Courses at St. Andrews, and other classic links courses in the area.
Crail's Craighead Links was closed for renovations in 2008, which created great expectations for me on this trip. I was not disappointed. Hanse did a fabulous job in 1999 of blending classic linksland touches (walls across fairways and behind a green, the standard sod bunkers, sweeping vistas to the sea) with just enough modern affects to make Craighead a complement, not an entirely different experience, to the old course next door. I found Craighead a little more fun and not quite as much work as Balcomie Links, although the former is a good 400 yards longer in total. The wind blows equally capriciously on both courses, and during the middle of our second of two rounds at Craighead, George pointed out to the fog offshore and said "Get ready." Within five minutes, we were enveloped, the temperature dropped about 20 degrees, and we were sending approach shots to greens with pins only dimly seen. I loved it!
On the Gil Hanse designed Craighead Links at Crail, pot bunkers and other touches give a nod to centuries old links golf. The adjacent North Sea (Firth of Forth) is everpresent from the course.
For camera buffs, or for anyone with two good eyes for that matter, the fishing village of Crail is a feast. Its narrow cobblestone streets rise and fall to the harbor, and on the outdoor patio at the combination tea shop and gallery where my wife and I stopped for an afternoon cup overlooking the crashing waves five stories below, it had to be 15 degrees colder than the town's main street, just 50 yards away.
The fishing village of Crail is pretty as a picture, and just nine miles south of St. Andrews.
I was also able to play a bit of golf in the London area, a different experience than Crail -- pretty much the difference between parkland and linksland golf -- but nevertheless still different enough from the Stateside golf experience to make the English rounds both interesting and fun. I'll have a bit more to say about them later. In the meantime, enjoy a few photos from my excursion to Scotland.