South Uist Golf Club (Askernish)

Askernish Golf Club is one of the most remarkable rediscoveries in the history of the game. Old Tom Morris laid out an original 9-hole course here in 1891, on the machair above Askernish beach on the west coast of South Uist. The course was used by the island's crofting community for decades, then gradually abandoned as the population declined. By the late twentieth century, it existed primarily as a memory and a few faded photographs.

In 2005, golf architect Martin Ebert visited the site to assess restoration possibilities. What he found was not a derelict course but a landscape that Morris had read correctly — the natural dunes, hollows, and burns still formed the routing Morris had identified, largely untouched by development or agricultural improvement. The restoration completed between 2005 and 2008 turned the original 9 holes into a full 18-hole links, working with the existing ground rather than imposing a new design.

The result is a course that is simultaneously one of the oldest and one of the newest in Scotland — an 1891 Morris original completed to an 18-hole format in 2008. Par 72, around 6,200 yards. Green fee is £30–40. Getting to South Uist: ferry from Oban to Lochboisdale (5 hours) or fly Loganair from Glasgow to Benbecula (45 minutes) and drive south. The journey is long; the course is worth it.

Askernish is consistently cited alongside Machrihanish and the great Hebridean links as one of the most extraordinary golf destinations in Scotland. The green fee of £30–40 for a course with this provenance — Old Tom Morris original, a century-long gap, the Hebridean Atlantic — is one of the more remarkable pricing anomalies in Scottish golf.