The Open Championship Course Trail: Play Every Scottish Venue

The Open Championship has been contested at fourteen courses. Nine of them are in Scotland. Five of those nine are still on the active rota. Playing them all — St Andrews, Carnoustie, Muirfield, Royal Troon and Turnberry — is the golf trip that most serious visitors to Scotland are actually planning when they say they want to "do Scotland properly."

Here's what that trip actually involves: costs, booking logistics, difficulty, and the order that makes geographical and practical sense.

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The five venues

St Andrews Old Course

Eighteen Opens. The most recent: 2022. The most famous golf course on earth.

The Old Course accepts visitor bookings through the St Andrews Links Trust: standard tee times from £295 in peak season (late May to early September), reduced rates in shoulder and off-peak periods. The daily ballot — enter online before 2pm for next-day play, free to enter — gives walk-on access to visitors who plan their stays around it. Success rates: roughly one in five in peak, much better in shoulder season.

The course itself is simultaneously easier and harder than you expect. Easier because the wide fairways and absence of rough forgive wayward drives in a way that Muirfield or Carnoustie do not. Harder because the Old Course has to be understood — the invisible dips, the hidden bunkers, the putting surfaces whose undulations are only legible once you've been told what you're looking at. Playing it cold, without a caddie or a caddie's briefing, is an expensive lesson in the limits of self-guided tourism.

Book the round. Hire a caddie. Enter the ballot every evening you're in St Andrews. If it comes in, it's the best day on a golf course most people will ever have.

Carnoustie Championship

Eight Opens. The most recent: 2018. The hardest course on the rota.

Carnoustie Golf Links manages visitor bookings through the Links Trust — similar structure to St Andrews, advance bookings accepted, £265 in peak season. Unlike St Andrews, there's no ballot for the Championship Course; you simply book direct. Three months' notice is sufficient for most dates; summer weekends fill faster.

The course's reputation — "Car-nasty" in the tabloids, four-over par for the winners — is not the whole picture for visitors. From the yellow tees rather than the championship tees, Carnoustie is a long, punishing links with generous fairways and a wind that changes the character of the round every time. The Barry Burn is real; it has swallowed careers and it will swallow golf balls. The 18th hole is one of the most dramatic closing holes in the world when the pin is front-left and the wind is off the sea.

Pair it with Panmure Golf Club, four miles east — a James Braid parkland that hosted the 2007 Open qualifying and charges under £100. The Angus coast day is one of the best-value stretches on the Open trail.

Muirfield

16 Opens. The most recent: 2013 (the last before Muirfield's membership voted against women, triggering a ten-year exile from the rota; women were admitted in 2017 and the course returned for 2024).

Muirfield is the most exclusive of the five, and the logistics reflect that. Visitor play is restricted to Tuesdays and Thursdays only. Green fee is £395. The course is walking-only — no trolleys, no buggies — which on a flat course is not the hardship it sounds. Bookings open eighteen months in advance; peak visitor days fill within weeks of opening.

What you get for the restriction and the price is the most purely golf-obsessed day on the trail. No gift shop theatre, no resort infrastructure. The clubhouse is formal. The course is the point. Muirfield is a flat, firm links with visible bunkers — no hidden traps, no luck-based bounces into disaster — which sounds like a concession and is actually a design statement about strategy and shot selection. The best players in the world have won here on courses that rewarded thinking rather than power.

If Muirfield visitor day falls on a Tuesday, pair the morning with Craigielaw Golf Club (four miles, good links, takes weekday morning bookings) to make a full East Lothian day.

Royal Troon

10 Opens. Most recent: 2024. The course on the Ayrshire coast that sits between Prestwick and the sea.

Royal Troon operates visitor days on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Green fee is £475. Bookings open in January for the following year; peak summer weekday mornings fill by February. The visitor experience is tightly managed — tee times run in the morning only, with afternoons reserved for members, and the clubhouse dress code is enforced.

The Old Course runs out and back along the shoreline; the front nine plays downwind and the back nine into the prevailing south-westerly. The Postage Stamp 8th is the shortest par 3 in Open Championship history at 123 yards, and it is not a gift — the green is raised, bunkered on three sides, and the wind funnels unpredictably through the gap in the dunes. The 11th is the hole professionals dread: a long par 4 with an out-of-bounds railway line tight on the right that is precisely where the right-to-left wind pushes the ball.

Add a morning round at Prestwick Golf Club (the birthplace of the Open, £295, walks from the town centre) the day before or after. The Prestwick–Troon combination on consecutive days is the Ayrshire trip that most regular visitors do twice.

Turnberry — the Ailsa Course

4 Opens. Most recent: 2009. The most dramatic setting of the five.

The Ailsa Course at Turnberry is the only Open venue in Scotland that isn't a member-run club. It's now operated by the Trump Organisation as a resort, which means visitor tee times are available seven days a week with advance booking — no restricted visitor days, no introduction requirements. Green fee is £450 in peak season.

The 2016 Martin Ebert redesign rebuilt the holes around the lighthouse and added new routing through the dune system at the southern end. The 9th and 10th holes are now the most photographed sequence in Scottish golf — the 9th plays around the lighthouse with Ailsa Craig on the horizon, and the combination of the setting and the difficulty makes it the single best holes-of-the-trip moment on the trail.

Turnberry is the only venue on the five that benefits from an overnight stay on the property. The Trump Turnberry Hotel is expensive (£300–500 a night in peak); it is also the correct place to end the trail, for the view from the spa building at sunrise and for the particular satisfaction of having finished it.

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The order that works

The logical sequence for visiting all five, structured as a ten-day trip from Glasgow:

Days 1–3 (Ayrshire): Prestwick → Royal Troon → Turnberry. Base in Troon. Fly into Glasgow Prestwick, twenty minutes to the hotel.

Days 4–5 (Fife & Angus): Carnoustie day-trip from St Andrews base. Old Course ballot every evening. Jubilee Course as the guaranteed round.

Days 6–7 (East Lothian): Muirfield visitor day (Tuesday or Thursday). Fill the remaining day with North Berwick West Links or Gullane No. 1 for the East Lothian context.

Day 8: Drive north. Optional: Kingsbarns or Crail as a final East Neuk afternoon.

The total green fee for one round at each of the five: approximately £1,880 at 2026 peak rates. The ten-day trip including accommodation, transport and the rounds around the five: £3,500–4,500 per person depending on how the accommodation skews.

That is not a budget trip. It is, by any reasonable measure, the most concentrated experience of championship links golf available anywhere in the world.

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Helpful links

Each of the five venues has a full course review on Birdie Brae. The Ayrshire region hub covers the Troon and Turnberry logistics and the value courses around them. The East Lothian hub covers Muirfield booking and the supporting cast. The Fife & Angus hub has the St Andrews and Carnoustie planning detail.

The trip estimator will build the full cost breakdown for any combination of these venues.