This would-be golf course sits on dream linksland. Inside the fight to build it

Edward Abel Smith is not a golfer, but he owns seaside land in the Scottish Highlands that many people see as ideal for the game.

One of those people is Mike Keiser, the developer of Bandon Dunes and Sand Valley.

About a decade back, Keiser and Todd Warnock, an American businessman and Highlands hotelier, pitched Abel Smith on the prospect of turning a portion of his acreage into a golf course, adjoined by a clubhouse and accommodations. Abel Smith liked the idea.

His land, which sits near the village of Embo, about a mile up the coast from the celebrated links at Royal Dornoch, has been in his family since the 1950s and has long operated as a sheep farm. Over the past decade, Abel Smith says, the farm has mostly broken even or lost money

A self-described survivor of a corporate career, Abel Smith, who is 34 and divides his time between the Highlands and his primary residence in London, has other sources of income as a podcaster and writer (his work includes a biography of James Bond creator Ian Fleming). But he also has a young family, and the farm, he says, had become unsustainable. 

On a personal level, a golf course made sense because it stood to turn a profit. But Abel Smith believed, as did other Coul Link backers, that a course would provide a broader economic boost by creating jobs in a region shy of them while adding to the area’s tourist draw.

“From the start, I’ve looked at this purely as a matter of trying to create the best possible course while providing benefits to the region,” Abel Smith told GOLF.com recently. “We already have one of the world’s greatest courses just a stone’s throw away in Royal Dornoch. We have a chance to turn this part of the Highlands into a destination in itself.”

In 2017, a group including Keiser and Warnock put forth a proposal for a layout called Coul Links, with a routing drawn up by the architect Bill Coore. Within golf circles, no one doubted that the wherewithal existed to create a world-class course. The question that arose — and which has lingered ever since — was whether a course should be built at all.

Its suitability to golf aside, the Coul Links site is designated as an SSSI, or Site of Special Scientific Interest — an ecologically sensitive area, safeguarded by a slate of government protections. No sooner had plans for the course gone public than environmental groups, ranging from Scottish Wildlife Trust to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, spoke up in opposition. The course, they warned, would do irreparable damage to a fragile dune system and myriad species that inhabited it, and no economic jolt could justify that cost. The developers countered that the project they had in mind would enhance the site environmentally through stewardship of terrain that they said was degrading from erosion and the incursion of invasive species. 

As controversy grew around it, Coul Links entered the bureaucratic grind. Approved by the local Highland Council in 2018, it was rejected a little more than a year later by Scottish government ministers. A revised plan was then submitted, aimed at addressing the government’s environmental concerns. Once again, the green light was given at the local level. But opponents of the project remained steadfast and, this past fall, following an objection by NatureScot, the government’s environmental advisory body, Scottish ministers stepped in again, convening an inquiry in Embo in which both sides pleaded their cases before returning to their respective camps to await word on Coul Links’ fate.

BATTLES OF THIS TYPE PLAY OUT around the world over all kinds of real estate projects: golf courses, hotels, ballparks, highways. But while the themes are familiar — economic opportunity vs. environmental impact, and the quest to find a balance between the two — the particulars vary from place to place. Politics differ. The protagonists do, too.

In the Coul Links dispute, another prominent figure is a Highlands neighbor of Abel Smith. His name is Tom Dargie, he’s an environmental scientist and he lives alongside the proposed site. He has also been a driving force behind Not Coul, an organization committed to blocking the project. Dargie did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this story, and a person identifying himself as spokesperson for Coul Links declined to answer questions by email. But in press releases, petitions and other public campaigns, Not Coul has sounded the alarm over what it regards as a dire threat to an ancient coastal ecosystem. A statement on the organization’s website lays out its mission to gather evidence on the environmental consequences of developing Coul Links and to “expose developer spin.”

“Despite the resounding rejection of a previous proposal . . .” the statement reads, the “same jet-setting US billionaire and a London-based absentee landlord persist in their efforts of foisting a near-identical proposal upon these protected dunes.”

Dargie, who runs an environmental consultancy, has served as an advisor on a range of coastal developments, golf courses included. One of those projects was Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, a Martin Hawtree-designed course some 150 miles southeast of Dornoch. That course, which opened in 2012 on SSSI-designated land, polarized public opinion from the start and is seen by many in Scotland as a poster child for the perils of golf course development in ecologically sensitive areas. Shot down by the local council, the project wound up being pushed through by the Scottish government on the grounds that the economic benefits would outweigh environmental harm. 

As the course was being developed, Dargie, according to testimony he gave in a public inquiry on the project, advised the Trump organization to route holes away from the dunes. That recommendation, Dargie testified, was ignored, but he opted to stay on as a consultant in the hope of mitigating the project’s environmental impact. 

A measure of that impact came in 2020, when NatureScot stripped the site of its specially protected status after determining that the property’s dunes no longer possessed features which merited that designation. Those features, the government’s eco-watchdog concluded, had been “partially destroyed.” Trump International decried the decision as “politically motivated.” But critics of the project maintain that the property has also failed to deliver on its promised jobs and other economic upticks. According to published reports on Trump International’s financial filings, the Aberdeenshire property, where a second course is slated to open this summer, has lost money 11 years in a row, totaling around $20 million. 

In the Coul Links debate, opposition groups have cited the Aberdeenshire course as a cautionary tale. The Scottish press, in its coverage of Coul Links, has often mentioned both projects in the same breath while describing Mike Keiser in terms — “a Trumpian climate denier,” another “billionaire American developer” — that conflate him with Donald Trump.

“It’s a ludicrous comparison,” Abel Smith says. From a public relations standpoint, he adds, “it has been one of the biggest hurdles for us.”

Officially, Keiser is no longer behind Coul Links. Neither is Warnock. When the project was rejected by Scottish ministers, both men withdrew their names, and the revised proposal was put forth by Communities for Coul, or C4C, a group of locals who joined forces for the sole purpose of shepherding the project through the approval process. They have promised to disband when that goal is met.

C4C’s director and founder is Gordon Sutherland, a 64-year-old retiree who moved to Dornoch from Edinburgh with his wife in 2014, a migration route that younger people are less likely to follow these days. This is a key point for C4C.

“Young people are the truly endangered species around here,” Sutherland says.

Between 2002 and 2021, the county surrounding Coul Links saw a 38-percent increase in its 65-and-older population, according to statistics from NHS Highland, the government’s regional health board. Over that same period, the population under 16 decreased by 27 percent. The local population is aging—and, according to NHS projections, expected to decline.

Proponents of Coul Links say the course and a proposed 80-room hotel (permission has already been granted for a 20-room hotel, on land not designated as an SSSI) that would adjoin it, would help counter that trend. Drawing on estimates by David Bell, a prominent Scottish economist and Dornoch resident, C4C asserts that Coul Links would generate upwards of 400 jobs, mostly for young people, while injecting around £8 million a year into the local economy.

“One of the arguments we hear is that tourism jobs bring tourists who damage the beautiful scenery that we are so well-known for,” Sutherland says. “But there’s also a popular local saying — you can’t eat scenery.”

How to best protect that scenery is another matter. Sutherland contends that Not Coul and other groups opposed to the project have set up a “false dichotomy” between golf and nature when, in fact, the two can and should be mutually beneficial. There is evidence in Scotland to support this claim. One notable example is Machrihanish Dunes, which was built in 2009 on an SSSI-site and has been hailed by Scottish Natural Heritage—the governmental body that later changed its name to NatureScot—for its environmental sensitivity.

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IN ITS REVISED FORM, the Coul Links proposal takes a page from the Machrihanish playbook by scrapping plans to strip the fairways and plant them with new grasses, calling instead for the native grasses to be mown — an approach that would eliminate the need for fertilizer. Only tees and greens would treated fertilizer or pesticides. Several holes have also been broken up to create wildlife corridors, and another has been rerouted to avoid an eco-sensitive area and take an alternate path through ground that C4C says is currently given over to invasive gorse and birch.

Little of which has softened the opposition. In the eyes of Not Coul, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and other groups, the new proposal is essentially the same as the old one, posing as grave — if not a graver — threat to birds, invertebrates and the integrity of the dunes themselves. Relatedly, Not Coul also contends that proponents of the course have overstated the problem posed by erosion and invasive species — that, to the contrary, the dune system stands to do just fine on its own — to help justify development, and that the project’s promised economic benefits have been exaggerated, too.

Few conflicts are free of heated words. The kerfuffle over Coul Links has strained some local friendships. It has also given rise to pointed charges. Not Coul has accused C4C of being a Trojan Horse for wealthy overseas developers. (Sutherland refutes that claim. “In truth,” he says, “[we] don’t care who ultimately owns the golf course, as long as the benefits that have been promised have been delivered.”) C4C, for its part, has objected to Not Coul’s characterization of Dargie as an “independent” expert, when he has what C4C considers conflicts of interest including but not limited to the fact that he lives alongside the proposed site. Among other evidence, C4C cites a 2021 email, which was reviewed by GOLF.com, that Dargie sent to the developer of another proposed golf course near Dornoch, offering his services as a paid environmental consultant and pledging to cease all comment on other golf course projects if he were hired.

So it goes it drawn-out disputes: the claims and counterclaims could fill volumes.

MANY, IF NOT ALL, OF THEM had ample time for airing at the Scottish government inquiry, which unfolded over four days this past November, culminating in a lively public hearing in a restored Embo schoolhouse packed with a largely pro-Coul Links crowd.

Edward Abel Smith was in attendance, but he didn’t testify. He has, however, inscribed his word into the public record. In a letter addressed to the “people of Dornoch Firth” that was published the county newspaper, Northern Times, Abel Smith pledged to donate £5 of every £100 of profit from Coul Links to the community while prioritizing local people in his hiring and making walking and cycling paths on the property accessible to all. He also promised that the hotel would have such eco-conscious features as solar arrays and a wildflower meadow for bees and butterflies, and that a privately run electric bus service would shuttle visitors from Coul Links to other area courses. These and other commitments (including the promise to help create a career center focused on the hospitality sector), Abel Smith wrote, reflected his aim to see the area “develop socially, economically and environmentally.”

For now, though, all he can do is wait. The government’s decision is expected in April.

If the project is approved, Abel Smith says, investors are prepared to fund the construction of Coul Links. It would operate as a high-end daily fee course, open to the public, and could be ready for play within three years. And if it the proposal is rejected? Abel Smith has considered other possible uses for the property, including a caravan park and a nature preserve, though the latter, he says, would not come close to generating the revenue needed to support the necessary stewardship. Another alternative would be to sell his land.

“I’ve devoted the better part of my life over the past 10 years to this,” he says. “At this point, if there were a better option, I think I would have come up with it by now.”

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