Scotland vs St Andrews: Is the Old Course Really Worth All the Fuss?

The first time one of us queued for the Old Course single-player line, it was 4:32 in the morning, December. There were nine people ahead and the temperature was minus two. The starter's hut wasn't open. Nobody was talking. An American couple about halfway down the queue had a flask of coffee between them and were pouring it into lids. A Japanese golfer at the front was stamping his feet in a rhythm that looked involuntary. Nobody got on that day. The ballot didn't break that way and the walk-up list closed with three names called.

That's the version of the Old Course that doesn't make the magazine photography. The cold waiting, the not-getting-on, the sense that the whole institution is being performed slightly over your head. The round itself, if and when you get it, is a different matter, and we'll come to that. But the start of this conversation should be honest about the access question, because the access question is most of the complaint people really mean when they ask whether the place is worth it.

The case against

The Old Course is expensive. Two hundred and ninety-five pounds in 2026 is a lot for a round of golf by any measure, and it's a lot even compared to the other famous Scottish links. It's more than Carnoustie. It's more than Dornoch. It's level with Kingsbarns, which we would argue is a more consistently well-maintained course and has better sea views.

The Old Course is also strange in ways that the internet doesn't prepare you for. Seven of the eighteen greens are shared with other holes. The fairways are so wide in places that you can hit a driver miles off-line and still be playing from short grass, and then find yourself 280 yards from a green with a railway line between you and it. The bunkers are deep in a way that is genuinely funny the first time you climb into one and genuinely not funny the second. There is a cabbage patch of a hole, the 11th, where locals argue regularly about the best line. Your card will not go well if you've never played links golf before, and it will probably not go well if you have.

Add to that the weather. The Old Course is exposed — it sits on a flat promontory facing the North Sea — and the wind shifts direction halfway through the round at least 50% of the time. We've seen holes that play as driver-wedge in the morning play as driver-fairway-wood-wedge-in-the-gorse in the afternoon. Expect to be asked to restart on the 10th tee after a rainstorm. Expect to be asked to finish in the dark because your round was delayed by the one in front.

And finally: the town of St Andrews, which is genuinely lovely, was not designed for the volume of golf tourism it now receives. The streets are packed from April to October. The restaurants want reservations. The hotels go for £300 a night in June. Your £295 green fee is arriving on top of a £300 hotel, a £85 caddie, a £30 meal, and possibly a £180 hire set of clubs. The weekend rapidly gets to a £900-a-day proposition if you're not careful.

That's the case against.

The case for

And yet.

We have played the Old Course three times between us, spread across years. Every round was different. Every round contained at least one moment where the course did something so surprising that we've retold the story since. You walk up the 18th fairway — the widest finishing hole in championship golf, flanked by the Royal and Ancient clubhouse, the Old Course Hotel, the grey stone of the town — and it doesn't matter how your round has gone. You stop talking. The person with you stops talking. You are in the same piece of ground where every golfer you've ever heard of has walked, and it's an absurd feeling, and you can't engineer it anywhere else in sport.

The shared greens are strange until you realise they're the clearest living link to the 19th century, when the course was played in whatever direction suited the prevailing wind on the day. The wide fairways are there because the original course was played over common land the townspeople also used for their sheep. The bunkers are deep because they're Victorian, dug by hand, and the sand was shaped by weather before anyone invented greenkeeping machinery. You are not playing an artefact, exactly — it's a working course, the town still owns it, locals still play it on concessionary rates — but you are playing the clearest unbroken link to the game's beginnings that exists anywhere.

That matters to some golfers more than others. If it matters to you even a little, then yes: the Old Course is worth it. Once.

The quiet answer

Here is what we'd say to most visitors, in the clubhouse at Kingsbarns after they've asked.

If you have seven days in Scotland, play the Old Course on day three or four. Not day one, because you'll be tired from the flight and the wind will ruin the memory. Not day seven, because if the ballot doesn't go your way you've lost the chance. Day three or four gives you a window, a fall-back, and enough recent rounds to know what you're doing when you get there.

If you have three days in Scotland, don't try for the Old Course. Play Kingsbarns. Play Elie. Play Crail. Have a better round in less wind at a fraction of the cost, and come back next time for the pilgrimage.

If you have one day in Scotland — honestly, we would play Musselburgh Old Links in the morning and the New Course at St Andrews in the afternoon, and skip the Old Course entirely. The oldest playing course in the world, plus the St Andrews sister course that most locals prefer to the Old anyway. Two rounds for the price of half of one.

On playing it twice

A small, honest point. Of the three rounds between us, two were genuinely memorable. One was a bad round in bad weather that we don't particularly want to play again. The experience of the Old Course is not reliably wonderful. It is reliably significant. Those are different things, and most of the internet conflates them.

The people we know who have played the Old Course more than five times are, without exception, either retired within an hour's drive or independently wealthy. It isn't a course most golfers can afford to revisit. It is, accordingly, a course most golfers only play once. Let that round be as good as you can make it: the right month, the right weather forecast, the right playing partners, a caddie who knows your game, and a meal booked for after.

One round at the Old Course, played well, will stay with you for the rest of your playing life. Three rounds in a week will cost you fifteen hundred pounds and probably contain one you'd like to forget.

Where this leaves us

So: worth the fuss, yes, with caveats. Worth the money if you value the history more than the conditioning, which is a matter for your conscience. Worth doing at all costs, no — there are rounds cheaper, less windy, better-maintained, more scenic, and at least three that are more technically interesting to play. Do them too.

The queue at 4:32 am in December, by the way — a year later, the same friend went back in August and got on the first morning through the ballot. He played it in a light breeze, under light cloud, with a caddie called Gordon who had been at the course forty-two years. He doesn't talk about the December queue much. He talks about Gordon.