★ While They Golf ★

For the non-golfer in the party.

Most Scottish golf trips include at least one person who would rather not spend the morning walking eighteen holes. These town guides are for them — what to do within thirty minutes of the course while the round is on.

How we approach it

The eight town guides on this page each cover one of Scotland's busy golf bases. Each guide is built around the same three-question test we'd apply to any recommendation we'd make to a friend: is it within half an hour of the course? Is it open to a casual drop-in visitor? And — the harder test — is it actually worth the afternoon to a person who came to Scotland with no particular interest in golf?

The answer for many of them is yes for surprising reasons. Aberlady has Britain's first nature reserve on its doorstep. Cullen is the village that gave its name to the soup. Dornoch has a 13th-century cathedral on its high street. Aberlour is a 90-minute walk through pine woods to the most-visited distillery on earth. The picks below are the things we send our own visiting non-golfing friends to.

The Towns