St. Andrews’s astonishing new Castle Course is the year’s most highly anticipated debut.

Six years ago, when golf architect David McLay Kidd vowed to land the contract for The Castle Course — the eagerly awaited seventh layout at the St. Andrews Links — he was hardly alone. This was, after all, the first new championship golf course in 95 years at the hallowed ground of St. Andrews. But like Carl Icahn on a bad hair day, Kidd just wanted it more.

“For me, it was personal as much as professional,” says Kidd, who made his mark in 1995, at the wee age of 27, when he designed the now legendary Bandon Dunes Golf Club on the coast of southern Oregon. A native Scot, he had learned the business at the side of his father, who himself had spent a quarter-century overseeing the golfing grounds at the exquisite Glen­eagles resort. For Kidd, the chance to work in Scotland, at the fabled “Home of Golf” no less, was too good to be true — literally.

The budget for the job, you see, turned out to be meager. And the chosen spot for the course was a derelict potato field, smack in the middle of which sat the town’s sewage-treatment plant. “We haven’t got crap,” Kidd lamented to his lieutenant, Paul Kimber, the first time they walked the plot. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “that’s all we’ve got.” Then there was the gorse-like thicket of red tape that threatened to strangle the project. Still, the St. Andrews Links Trust eventually navigated the political potholes. And Kidd, by dint of his passion for the project, ultimately landed the course.

It’s fair to say that the resulting layout, when it opens this June (greens fees: £84–£120), will be the year’s most anticipated new course — one that should serve as a thrilling testament to Kidd’s uniquely artisanal ­approach. He began by assembling a team of talented earth-shapers who conjured the golf holes not on ­paper, but by creating wild and woolly landforms upon which Kidd fashioned tees and greens. Set against 1.1 miles of beautiful coastline, these towering mounds deliver vertiginous views of St. Andrews Bay from all 18 holes — a full seven of which play hard along the water. The finishing holes, with their suicidal clifftop surfaces, are destined to become classics.

Interestingly, although it looks every bit a true classic links, unlike its six sister courses at St. Andrews, the Castle is not. Built on loose soil as opposed to sandy linksland, it will offer a more airborne, more heathland experience — making it less Ballybunion than, say, Bandon Dunes. Still, that investment continues to pay dividends for Kidd and for anyone fortunate enough to play it. And the same will ­surely be said, years from now, of this outstanding new venture.  standrews.org.uk

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