Royal Dornoch names designer for ambitious masterplan

Golf in the Scottish Highlands is always rich in history but often short on headline happenings. These days, though, there’s a lot going on.

At Cabot Highlands, just outside Aberdeen, work is drawing toward a close on Old Petty, a Tom Doak design (and a sibling to the resort’s celebrated Castle Stuart course) that will welcome preview play this summer in advance of its grand opening in 2026. At Trump Aberdeen, just up the coast, a second 18-holer is slated for a summer ribbon-cutting.

And now, farther north, comes news from Royal Dornoch, where ambitious plans are rounding into shape.

The renowned club, whose Championship Course ranks 10th on GOLF’s list of Top 100 Courses in the World, announced this week that it has hired King Collins Dormer Golf Course Design to develop a masterplan that will include a new £13.9 million clubhouse and a renovation of Royal Dornoch’s other 18-hole layout, the Struie Course, among other work that will take advantage of 50 acres of additional land that the club acquired last year.

Though details of the masterplan are far from finalized, Rob Collins laid out a vision for the project in an Instagram post in which he acknowledged the “gravity of undertaking a plan that seeks to help one of the world’s greatest clubs secure their ideal version of the future.”

In addition to a redo of the Struie, Collins wrote, his firm has proposed building a new 18-hole course, a par-3 course and a practice facility that would feature “a members-only short-game area, a four-hole practice loop of par-3 holes, two Himalayas putting courses and a kids’ course routed into the target greens of the practice facility.”

As for the Struie itself, Collins said the goal was to create a course that would “seek to no longer live in the shadow of the Championship Course.” A course, that is, that people would stick around to play.

This is the first project in the UK for King Collins Dormer (formerly known as King Collins), a rising-star firm whose credits in the United States include Sweetens Cove, near Nashville, and Landmand, in northeastern Nebraska. And the ambitions behind it dovetail with a broader effort in the Highlands aimed at finding ways to encourage golfers to prolong their stays in the region rather than just making surgical strikes to knock off a marquee course or two.

The coming weeks should bring more news on that front, as locals await a government ruling that will decide the fate of Coul Links, a proposed course, a few miles up the coast from Royal Dornoch, that has been opposed by environmental groups in a battle that has dragged on for nearly a decade.

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