Aerial view of world-class links golf course

Links Magazine Series

Great
Destinations

The world's most spectacular and storied golf venues, selected by the editors of Links Magazine

Some courses reward skill. The greatest courses demand imagination. In our annual Great Destinations series, Links Magazine travels to the venues that define what golf can be at its most exhilarating — where landscape, history, and design conspire to produce something that transcends sport and approaches the condition of art.

These are the pilgrimages every serious golfer must make.

Scotland

Turnberry

Ailsa Course · South Ayrshire

On a clear day at Turnberry, the world feels exactly the size it should be. The Ailsa Craig sits on the horizon like a contemplation, Arran stretches north along the Firth, and the lighthouse at the headland stands where it has stood since 1873. Golf here is inseparable from landscape — the fairways press against cliff tops, the greens sit exposed to whatever the Atlantic chooses to deliver, and the entire experience feels both earned and improbable.

Four Open Championships have been decided here, most famously the 1977 Duel in the Sun between Watson and Nicklaus. The £200 million renovation led by architect Martin Ebert has returned the Ailsa to championship condition while pressing it harder against the sea than ever before. Turnberry is, again, one of the defining examinations in world golf.

Getting There

Airport Glasgow Prestwick (30 min)

Best Season May – September

Stay Trump Turnberry Hotel

4Open Championships

Par 70Championship Layout

#9World Ranking 2025

Read the Feature

California

Pebble Beach

Pebble Beach Golf Links · Monterey Peninsula

Pebble Beach is America's answer to the links ideal — a course built at the sea's edge on the rugged Monterey Peninsula, where the Pacific arrives in earnest and holes hang over cliffs that drop sixty feet to the rocks below. The 7th is the shortest par-3 in major championship golf; the 18th, playing along Stillwater Cove to a green hugging the rocky shore, is the most dramatic closing hole on earth.

Six US Opens have tested the game's best here. Jack Nicklaus played what he called his finest ever round on these fairways. Tom Watson chipped in on the 71st hole in 1982 to deny Nicklaus a sixth US Open title. History is not decoration at Pebble Beach — it is the ground beneath your feet.

Getting There

Airport Monterey Regional (15 min)

Best Season April – October

Stay The Lodge at Pebble Beach

6US Open Championships

Par 727,075 yards

#6World Ranking 2025

See Course Review

Northern Ireland

Royal County Down

Championship Links · Newcastle, Co. Down

Consistently ranked the finest golf course in the world, Royal County Down sits in Dundrum Bay with the granite peaks of the Mountains of Mourne rising behind the 12th green. The course has a quality of total naturalness — as if the holes were discovered rather than designed, the fairways carved between sand hills that have stood for millennia. Blind tee shots demand nerve and local knowledge in equal measure.

Old Tom Morris laid out the first nine holes in 1889 for the sum of four pounds. The course that exists today is largely the work of nature, gentle revision, and a century of play into the turf. There are no weak holes at Royal County Down — merely holes of varying severity, each demanding precision, courage, and imagination that most courses simply do not require.

Getting There

Airport Belfast International (1 hr)

Best Season May – September

Stay The Slieve Donard Resort

1889Year Founded

Par 717,218 yards

#1World Ranking 2025

Georgia, USA

Augusta National

Augusta National Golf Club · Augusta, Georgia

Augusta National is not a public course — the 300 members guard their privacy and their fairways with equal determination — but its influence on every golfer who has watched the Masters on television is total. Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie built it in 1932 on the site of a former indigo plantation, and the combination of elevated tee shots, sloping fairways, and near-impossible putting surfaces have produced more dramatic final-day theatre than any other course on earth.

Amen Corner — holes 11, 12, and 13 — represents the most famous stretch of golf holes in existence. The 12th, a par-3 over Rae's Creek, has destroyed more aspirations and transformed more obscure golfers into champions than any other hole in the game. The azaleas bloom every April, the pines stand perfectly spaced, and the leaderboard tells a story that golf has been telling, in various iterations, since 1934.

Getting There

Airport Augusta Regional (10 min)

The Masters First full week, April

Access Members & invited guests only

91Masters Tournaments

Par 727,555 yards

#5World Ranking 2025

Scotland

St Andrews Old Course

The Old Course · St Andrews, Fife

Golf has been played on the links at St Andrews for more than six centuries. The Old Course is not so much a designed golf course as a geological and cultural fact — the sea receded, the ground dried, and golfers began walking these fairways in the fifteenth century, long before anyone had thought to call it a game. The Swilcan Bridge has been crossed by every great champion; the Road Hole 17th has ended more Open ambitions than any other single obstacle in golf.

To play the Old Course is to make a pilgrimage. The course itself is not conventionally great — some of the par-4s are reachable with driver; the vast shared fairways create unusual strategic problems; the famous double greens can seem almost comically large. But none of that matters. You stand on the 18th tee, the town of St Andrews curving around you on three sides, the North Sea somewhere behind you, and you feel the weight of everything that has happened here. It is irreducible.

Getting There

Airport Edinburgh (1 hr 15 min)

Best Season May – October

Tee Times Ballot system (advance entry)

30Open Championships

Par 726,721 yards

#4World Ranking 2025

North Carolina, USA

Pinehurst No. 2

Pinehurst Resort · Village of Pinehurst

Donald Ross spent decades refining Pinehurst No. 2, and the course is as much a philosophical position as it is a piece of architecture. The crowned greens — which reject approach shots that aren't played precisely — reward accuracy over power in a way that feels almost anachronistic in the modern game. Miss the green and the ball rolls away into the native wire grass surrounds; get up and down from there and you've earned it.

The 2024 US Open and US Women's Open were both contested at Pinehurst No. 2 in the same week — an unprecedented experiment in equality that worked magnificently, the two fields sharing the same stage and producing entirely different competitions. The course is America's golf heartland, a place that understands what the game is for.

Getting There

Airport Raleigh-Durham (1 hr 15 min)

Best Season March – May, Sep – Nov

Stay The Carolina Hotel (resort)

10US Open Championships

Par 707,588 yards

Top 15World Ranking 2025

GreatDestinations

Turnberry

Pebble Beach

Royal County Down

Augusta National

St Andrews Old Course

Pinehurst No. 2

More Great Destinations Await

Great
Destinations