Duff House Royal Golf Club

Duff House Royal is the quiet MacKenzie masterpiece of the Moray Firth coast. The original course at Banff opened in 1910 to an Archie Simpson design — the man who laid out Royal Aberdeen's Balgownie — and was formally opened with a match between J.H. Taylor and James Braid, two-fifths of the Great Triumvirate, Taylor's 75 winning by three. Then in 1923 Dr Alister MacKenzie saw the ground from the Hill o' Doune and wrote to the club: 'I have rarely come across a piece of golfing ground which lends itself so well to the construction of an attractive course.' All eighteen greens were rebuilt to his design, his brother Major C.A. MacKenzie constructing, and the new course was in play by late 1924 — five years before he started on Augusta National.

Those large two-tiered MacKenzie greens remain the course's signature and its defence. The card is a par 68 for men at 6,118 yards off the whites (a par 72 for ladies), on flat, beautifully kept parkland bounded by the River Deveron, which gets into the reckoning on several holes. In the middle of the course stands Duff House itself, William Adam's Georgian mansion — you are playing through the grounds of one of the grandest classical country houses of the eighteenth century, gifted with 140 acres to the towns of Banff and Macduff in 1906 by the Duke and Duchess of Fife.

The royal in the name is real and unusually placed: in December 1923 H.R.H. Princess Louise — the Princess Royal, daughter of Edward VII — became Patroness and desired the club become Duff House Royal, making it the only royal golf club with the title as a suffix rather than a prefix. The club is proudly informal with it: the published dress code is that there isn't one, jeans and trainers welcome in the clubhouse.

The money is the quietly astonishing part. The 2026 green fee tops out at £75 in high summer and falls to £25 a round through the winter — for eighteen MacKenzie greens that would headline the brochure anywhere further south. Banff itself repays the trip: a Royal Burgh since 1372 with more listed buildings than any town in the north of Scotland, and Duff House now operates as an outstation of the National Galleries. Pair it with Cullen's clifftop quirks or the Moray links to the west and you have a proper North East golf weekend that costs less than one round on the Open rota.