Scottish golf is sliding into the sea
Coastal erosion, possibly spurred by climate change, threatens Scotland courses, including St. Andrews
Mike MacDonald sizes up his opening tee shot at Fortrose & Rosemarkie Golf Club, and takes aim at the right side of the fairway. Anything left and he’d risk hitting his ball onto the beach, or worse, into the cold waters of the Moray Firth off the Scottish coast.
“It didn’t use to be this hard,” the club’s general manager says. “The recent storms hit our first couple of fairways and we’re spending a lot of time trying to work out how to pay for all the repairs.”
MacDonald isn’t alone with this dilemma. Clubs on Scotland’s eastern seaboard — where the land is more sandy and prone to flooding than in the West — are now factoring in the cost of erosion as most projections show storms are set to slam into the coast with increasing savagery, possibly triggered by climate change. Ten named storms hit the UK this season, in what the nation’s Met Office called a more intense barrage than average.
While land is slipping into the surf along Britain’s eastern flank, golf on Scotland’s internationally renowned links courses faces an uncertain future.
According to a 2021 survey by the government-funded Centre of Expertise for Waters, 34 clubs have a coastal erosion problem, with a further 11 acknowledging they’re at risk. By 2050, that total is set to jump to 109, more than half of which are currently up to 10 miles inland. And the potential economic hit is significant — the industry supported the employment of more than 20,000 people a decade ago.
For smaller northern clubs, after more than two years of withered revenue thanks to Covid, it’s a battle they can ill afford. They’re often on the periphery of the established vacation trail popular with North American visitors, drawn by the allure of hitting a small white ball on undulating turf where golf has been played for centuries.
Premium venues such as Royal Dornoch, Cabot Highlands and Trump International near Aberdeen figure
highly on the list of go-to venues at vacation organizers such as Golfbreaks. But away from the tour-guide limelight, courses often rely more on word of mouth or recommendations from their wealthier brethren.
Different priorities
Take Golspie Golf Club. It has 400 adult members, lies four hours north of Edinburgh and sits on the same longitude as the Alaskan peninsula. After a succession of bad weather events in the past decade — the club had to temporarily shut in 2012 and 2014 — the combination of Storm Babet in October, Storm Ciaran a couple of weeks later and the ensuing spring tides flooded the fifth and 17th holes. Water from the North Sea now laps the rail ties on one side of the course.
Fixing the defenses won’t come cheap. The local government has other priorities, hundreds of miles of coastline to worry about — including work on the sea wall at the local town of Golspie — and not much cash to spare.
Repairs tend to start with rock armor — big chunks of stone designed to dissipate the power of the waves. But the tides try to pull them away from the shore, according to Golspie captain William MacBeath. A contractor has quoted three-quarters of a million pounds to get the work done.
“We’re quite well off as a wee club with a small membership but there’s just no way,” MacBeath said. “We really have to do something. It’s a huge, huge concern for our future.”
One potential solution came in the form of a takeover offer from Joe Masterson, a former chairman of Masterson Foods and now based in Naples, Florida. Members rejected his proposal at a special meeting in December, saying they didn’t want to give up control of the club. An external spokesman for Masterson declined to comment.
Livestock on course
A short hop even further up the coast lies Brora Golf Club. A favorite of Australia’s five-time British Open champion Peter Thomson, one of its quirks is that sheep and cows roam the course, and electric fences surround the fast-running greens. (Disclaimer: The reporter is a member of Brora Golf Club, and claims to have once carded a 74.)
Dunes shield the southeast-facing links so it wasn’t hit as hard by the latest storms, but the club identified climate change and coastal erosion as twin threats to its recent three-year strategic plan. Increasing annual membership income to £300,000 by 2026, boosting visitor revenue to more than double that and raising sponsorship money all figure largely in the management’s vision.
Brora has advertised a suite of potential sponsorships — from getting a message on each flag to funding the course’s fleet of golf carts. It’s no stranger to raising money. During Covid, it sold 10 platinum memberships at £10,000 each, entitling the person to unlimited golf, plus 42 cheaper, lifetime memberships — one unidentified American bought 25 of them.A big part of general manager David Gemmell’s thinking is that local players shouldn’t be priced out — annual subscriptions in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh tend to cost hundreds of pounds more because more members play than visitors.
Trouble at Fortrose
Back down at the 100-acre peninsula of Fortrose, where golf has been played on the links since 1793, MacDonald is wrestling with how to set up the course for future success.
He’s offering lifetime membership to new overseas and non-local members. And after spending £140,000 on new locker rooms and a patio area, the focus is on defending against any water surge — in some places, as much as 6 meters slid into the waves after the autumn storms.
“We were doing really well and then this bomb hit us,” MacDonald said.
Adding a hefty strip of rock armor along the first and second fairways will cost the club about £100,000. Scottish Water, which has an outflow pipe by the opening hole, will pay £43,500 for the first tee only. And the Highland Council wants to reinstate a pathway that was washed away in the storms.
“Getting everyone to pull in the same direction hasn’t been easy,” MacDonald said, adding that a GoFundMe page has raised more than £22,000 so far. “We just want to protect the course for future generations to come.”
Dune development
Even St. Andrews, known as the home of golf, isn’t immune. Half a million cubic meters of sand was shifted during the Babet onslaught, and as much as seven years’ work of developing the dunes was wiped out, according to Alistair Rennie at NatureScot, a body charged with improving Scotland’s natural environment.
The St. Andrews Links Trust is seeking grants to pay for nature-based repairs such as planting grasses but, again, the money isn’t enough.
“There’s no way with the revenue we generate that we can pay for all the works ourselves,” said spokesman David Connor.
But for some courses, it’s about harnessing the whims of nature.
If sand gets swallowed up by the sea, it reappears at some point down the shoreline. At Dornoch, for instance, the trailer park next to the course was a few steps off the beach 50 years ago. Now, it’s a 200-meter walk to get your feet wet.
The club teamed up with St. Andrews University and NatureScot to work out how to stop erosion without resorting to rocks and gabions. After trialing chestnut fences, they used biodegradable rolls of coconut fiber to mitigate the high tides, break up the waves and encourage the repopulation of saltmarshes. As a result, Dornoch won the Sustainable Project of the Year accolade at the Golf Environment Awards in February.
“The erosion risk is getting managed in a nice, soft, natural way,” said general manager Neil Hampton.
And as Rennie at NatureScot explains, since the storms are very probably here for good, clubs need to come up with strategies to cope.
“If the weather is going to stay the same, we need to change.”