Golf in Perthshire & Stirlingshire

Perthshire has a proper season and a real winter. The heathland courses — Blairgowrie, Alyth, Comrie — are at their best from May to September, when the heather is out and the ground has dried enough to run. Gleneagles' moorland holds up longer at both ends than the heathland does, and the resort takes visitor play year-round, but spring and autumn rates exist for a reason: the King's in February is a different and much wetter course.

The Highland-edge nine-holers are summer golf, and unapologetically so. St Fillans, Kenmore, Blair Atholl and Aberfeldy are all in valleys that hold frost, and their appeal is a July evening with light until half ten rather than a January medal. If you are driving the A9 between March and October, they are the best-value stop in Scotland; outside it, check before you set off.

Stirlingshire is the all-weather half. Glenbervie, Falkirk Tryst, Stirling and Dunblane New are low-lying parkland on the Forth Valley floor, they drain reasonably, and they stay open and cheap through the winter. If a Perthshire trip gets rained off, the Larbert and Stirling clubs are forty minutes south and usually playable.

The expensive golf in this region is well documented. This is the other trip, and it is the one worth writing down: five rounds along the A9 and its side valleys that together cost less than a single peak round at Gleneagles.

Start at Dollar, half an hour from Stirling under Castle Campbell. Nine holes up a hillside, £7.50–£10, and the cheapest round on this site. It is a genuine hill course — the walk back down after the ninth is the point — and it takes an hour and a half.

North to St Fillans on Loch Earn, nine heathland holes at £15–£20 with the loch along one side and Ben Vorlich at the end of it. Comrie, another nine-hole moorland village course, is fifteen minutes further east if you want two before lunch.

Then Aberfeldy in the Tay valley at £15–£30 — compact parkland, eighteen holes, par 68, and the natural stop between Kenmore and Pitlochry. Dewar's distillery is in the same town, which is the standard reason people stay longer than they planned.

Kenmore — Mains of Taymouth, established 1903 — is nine holes on the Loch Tay shore, and Blair Atholl is nine more under the castle at the mouth of the Pass of Killiecrankie. Neither is a championship test and neither pretends to be. What they are is golf in settings that would carry a three-figure fee anywhere within an hour of a city, played for the price of lunch.

Five rounds, roughly a hundred miles of driving, and change from the cost of one peak tee time on the King's. That is the argument for this region, and no other part of Scotland makes it as cleanly.