If the Old Petty logo is any indication, the people behind the Cabot Collection are bullish (okay, Highland cow-ish) on the newest entry to its remarkable portfolio of golf courses. The Doak design is kin to Top 100 fixture Castle Stuart.
There are no signposts to mark the start of the Scottish Highlands. But there is a shift. Golfers sense it in the lilt of the land and the coastal scenery of the courses they play. The roots of the game here run centuries deep, and new layouts don’t come around often. But one has just arrived with the second 18-hole course at Cabot Highlands, a destination resort within 15 minutes of the Inverness airport.
It’s called Old Petty, a new Tom Doak design that joins Castle Stuart, a Gil Hanse-Mark Parsinen collaboration that ranks among GOLF’s World Top 100. Like its sibling, Old Petty occupies prime ground beside the Moray Firth, though it works farther inland, tracing a routing that turns through every point of the compass. The sea makes several cameos, but the ground steals the show — broad, heaving fairways and restless greens that bear the imprint of both Doak and his lead design associate, Clyde Johnson.
Castle Stuart, the 400-year-old landmark that lent its name to the original course, looms in the backdrop of several holes and within a stone’s throw of the par-3 3rd, a feature so prominent that Cabot founder Ben Cowan-Dewar says, “We could have called the course Castle Stuart if the name hadn’t already been taken.” Instead, it borrows from Old Petty Church, a stone relic that also peeks into view early in the round.
Doak has never been captive to convention, and his routing includes a quirk. The 1st and 18th crisscross on land once given over to the driving range, a fanciful flourish that serves a double function: It is safer than having two holes running side by side, and it allows the 18th to finish closer to the clubhouse.
Just as the new course loops back on itself, so does the story of Cabot Highlands: Cowan-Dewar first toured the property in 2008, when he walked Castle Stuart with Parsinen, who died in 2019. “Mark was a visionary,” Cowan-Dewar says. “It’s an honor to carry on what he started.”
Cowan-Dewar now envisions Cabot Highlands as both tribute and gateway — a first stop on excursions that extend to Nairn, Royal Dornoch and other great courses around the region. If the Highlands can’t be mapped by border, Cabot Highlands makes a case for where they should begin.
