An Edinburgh Day Trip: Golf in the Morning, Glenkinchie in the Afternoon

Field notes from the day-trip version of this cluster — the one-day Edinburgh itinerary that doesn't require a hire car, doesn't require an overnight stay outside the city, and still gets you a round at one of the great East Lothian courses and a tour of Glenkinchie before dinner. Tested several times with visiting friends. Works best in late spring or early autumn. Allow nine hours, door to door.

Why this works

Edinburgh has the rare combination of being a city with proper international connections (airport, three trains an hour to Glasgow and London, ferries within reach) sitting fifteen miles from one of the densest concentrations of championship golf in Europe. Eight East Lothian Open-rota courses are within a 30-minute taxi drive of Drem train station. The Lowland whisky region, meanwhile, has its visitor-flagship distillery at Glenkinchie — a 35-minute drive south of the same East Lothian coast. Both can be done in one day from a city-centre hotel.

This is not the trip you do as the headline of a Scottish golf holiday. It is the trip you do on the day before you fly home, or on the spare day in the middle of a business trip, or as a sample of the cluster's premise to show whether the longer version is for you.

The shape of the day

Time	Activity	Mode
7.45am	Breakfast at the hotel	—
8.30am	Train, Edinburgh Waverley to Drem	ScotRail
9.10am	Taxi from Drem to the course	Pre-booked taxi
10.00am	Tee off	—
1.30pm	Round complete, lunch at the clubhouse	—
3.00pm	Taxi or hire-car to Glenkinchie	Pre-arranged
3.30pm	Tour at Glenkinchie	90 min
5.00pm	Tasting + shop	—
5.45pm	Drive back to Edinburgh	35 min
6.30pm	Back in city centre	—
7.30pm	Dinner	—

The day works because none of the moves are tight. Twenty minutes' slack in the morning before tee-off, an hour for lunch, fifteen minutes' slack between the round and the distillery. If the round runs long, the distillery tour at 3.30pm can be moved to 4.30pm without difficulty (Glenkinchie runs hourly tours through the afternoon). The only fixed point is the final train back to Waverley if you came in from elsewhere.

Picking the course

The right answer depends on how aggressively you want to play. The five sensible options:

North Berwick West Links — visitor green fee £140–£190 in 2026. The most picturesque of the East Lothian courses, with the par 3 16th ("Gate") played to a green tucked behind a stone wall and the firth filling the entire view. Visitors welcome all week with online booking.

Gullane No. 1 — visitor green fee £165 in 2026. Old-style links climbing the hill east of the village, with views across the firth on every fairway above the 4th. Visitors welcome midweek with member-priority weekends; book ahead.

Craigielaw — visitor green fee £85–£105 in 2026. Modern (2001) Donald Steel links between Aberlady and the bay, materially cheaper than the older neighbours. The right answer for the value-conscious version of this day.

Longniddry — visitor green fee £75–£105 in 2026. Heath-and-links hybrid, a par 68 at 6,170 yards, well-paced for visitors. The best-value Open-rota-quality round on this list.

Dunbar — visitor green fee £125–£155 in 2026. Old Tom Morris (1856), running along the cliff path east of the town with the firth as the boundary on every cliff hole. Quieter than Gullane and more rewarding than its reputation. The right choice if you want the sea immediately on the right.

For a first attempt at this day, Craigielaw is the right answer. It is wider and more forgiving than the older courses, the round will play in three and a half hours rather than four, and the lunch in the Craigielaw Lodge clubhouse is a comfortable place to start the afternoon.

For a more committed attempt, North Berwick West Links is the photograph. Allow longer for the round (deeper rough, more strategic placement required), and book the lunch at the Marine Hotel rather than the clubhouse — the food is better, the views are equivalent, and the walk back from the 18th fits the route.

The taxi question

There is one practical wrinkle: you cannot easily walk from the East Lothian train stations to the courses. Drem station is a 5-minute drive from Gullane, a 10-minute drive from North Berwick, a 15-minute drive from Craigielaw. North Berwick has its own train station; the course is a 5-minute walk from the platform. Longniddry has a station within walking distance of the course.

The right move for this day is to pre-book the taxis at both ends. East Lothian taxi drivers are reliable but a small fleet; on a busy summer day you can wait 30 minutes for a return ride, which breaks the timing of the day. Eve Cars (01620 893383) and East Coast Cabs (01620 824444) both serve the area; book the morning ride a week ahead and the afternoon ride a day ahead.

For a slightly more expensive but more flexible version, hire a car at the airport before the morning — Avis, Hertz and Enterprise all have desks at Edinburgh Airport accessible from the Edinburgh Waverley Airlink bus or the tram. The car hire is £45–£60 for the day, and removes the taxi friction entirely. For solo or two-person trips it is the better answer; for groups of four the taxi route works fine.

Glenkinchie — what to expect

Glenkinchie is one of Diageo's "Classic Malts" distilleries — six visitor-flagship distilleries the company developed in the 1990s as a heritage tourist proposition (Talisker, Oban, Cragganmore, Dalwhinnie, Lagavulin, Glenkinchie). The Glenkinchie visitor centre is the most architecturally classical of the six — a converted 1837 grain mill in the Tyne valley, with a working still room visible from the visitor route.

The standard 90-minute tour takes you through the malting (no longer practised on site — most distilleries source malted barley from regional maltings), the mash tun, the wash and spirit stills, one of the warehouses, and ends with a tasting of the 12-year-old, the Distillers Edition, and a third dram that varies seasonally. £25 per visitor for the standard tour; £45 for the deeper "Whisky Connoisseur" tour that adds two warehouse drams.

The 12-year-old is the Glenkinchie bottling most worth taking home. Light, grassy, slightly floral. The Distillers Edition (matured in Amontillado sherry casks) is the bottling that adds depth without leaving the Lowland house style. Both are available at the Master of Malt website at distillery-comparable prices, with delivery to UK addresses within a week — so do not feel obligated to buy at the shop unless they are featuring a single-cask bottling on the day.

Booking notes

• Course tee times — book online up to 30 days ahead at most East Lothian clubs. Some require 7 days; some allow 365. Check each.
• Glenkinchie tours — pre-book on malts.com (Diageo's central system). Tours from 10am to 4pm; the 3.30pm slot is the right time after a 10am tee-off.
• Trains to Drem — ScotRail runs three trains an hour from Edinburgh Waverley. The 8.30am train (35 minutes' journey) is the right one for a 10am tee-off.
• Taxis — pre-book; the local fleet is small.
• Dress — the East Lothian clubs all enforce smart casual; collared shirt and tailored trousers expected. Glenkinchie has no dress code beyond common sense.

What you bring home

A round in the diary; a dram in the system; a 12-year-old Glenkinchie wrapped in tissue paper in the boot of the hire car; the dim awareness that this is the version of the trip that lasts exactly nine hours. Most visitors who do this day-trip variant ask, on the train back to Waverley, what the longer version looks like. The longer version is in the Lowlands itinerary elsewhere in this cluster, and is the answer.

The day-trip version is the introduction. It is intended to be small. If it has worked, you will already be planning the longer version.