INVERNESS, SCOTLAND – Imagine taking a piece of newspaper, for those of an age to remember such antiquities, and wadding it up into a tight ball. Then imagine unraveling that ball, lightly pressing the paper slightly flat. It would be covered in a wide assortment of wrinkles and ridges.
That sheet of newsprint would closely mimic in miniature a perfect variety of land for links golf. Think not of a course’s location next to the sea or as some parcel in far-off lands. Picture the ground itself, wrinkled and misshapen in all its glory. A golf ball could bounce anywhere across such turf.
Scotland’s coastline is dotted with such courses, typically the older layouts built with lay-of-the-land designs from an era before mechanized equipment could help smooth out the rough patches. The Old Course at St. Andrews is a perfect example: Without much elevation change at all, the perfectly wrinkled ground is ideal for golf. That’s the type of ground game loved by architects Tom Doak and Clyde Johnson: firm, fast and sometimes frenetic.
At Cabot Highland’s Old Petty, their sparkling new course built atop long-used farmland in the Scottish Highlands, Doak and Johnson went to great extremes to recreate such a crumpled surface. They had to, because though the course is set tight to the Moray Firth, the land was by and large smoothed over after centuries of farming.
Cabot Highlands is home to two courses
The result of their attention to detail: An incredibly fun golf course that serves as a perfect complement to Cabot Highlands’ original course, Castle Stuart.
Built by Gil Hanse and developer Mark Parsinen and opened in 2009, the original Castle Stuart layout features almost a mile and a half of waterfront golf holes perched high on bluffs, where even the slightly inland holes offer tremendous water views. Created atop similar farmed land as Old Petty, that first course features long and more gradual shapes designed to offer ground-game variety. Castle Stuart has proved incredibly popular, ranked by Golfweek’s Best as the No. 6 modern course in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Constructed with several beautiful but shorter stretches along the waterfront and sitting lower down with most holes playing more inland, Old Petty couldn’t compete with Castle Stuart’s runway of views.
“This was kind of a tough assignment, because there’s a really good golf course already here that used up a lot of the most spectacular views in parts of the property,” Doak said after playing his first round on Old Petty. “And I know, even some of my clients would say, ‘Oh, that’s a hard job because you’ve got to compete with that other golf course.’ And I don’t think of it like that. I mean, I think we’re trying to complement the other golf course, and whichever one of them that people like the most, at the end of the day, you want to have built something that they want to play.”
That meant a focus on the details, the micro-shaping, the bounce of the ball at Old Petty. The course features even more requirements in the strategic angles than its older sibling, especially from the tee. Old Petty offers fewer holes where distance alone is the prerogative, with plenty of perfectly placed single bunkers intruding on the line of play. Its defining characteristic is the sometimes funky bounces of the ball that are such a vital part of links golf.
Small details matter on Old Petty at Cabot Highlands
“The most important thing you can have in golf is a difference between where the ball lands and where it winds up,” Doak said. “Here, it’s because of the firmness of the ground and the wind. And you don’t get that in every place that you work. But when you have it, it’s much more interesting.”
This writer’s personal favorite example of such required thinking at Old Petty might come on the 15th hole. The par 5 features a low ridge in the center of the fairway that begins dozens of yards short of the green and runs lengthwise all the way to the putting surface. It perfectly affects every shot struck at the green, be it from 100 yards or 250. Such wrinkly perfection was the goal for Johnson, the founder of Cunnin’ Golf Design who at Old Petty served for the first time as the on-site lead for a Doak project.
“I was very conscious about that, and that was probably the one place where I was a little bit more conscious in terms of trying to vary from the first course, Castle Stuart, you know,” Johnson said of the micro-shaping of Old Petty. “I felt that was really important to help make the golf course feel old, as well as differentiate from the existing golf course.”
Johnson explained that the site is quite large, but the devil was in the details on a piece of land where every internal dune and crinkle had to be introduced. Johnson also said he and Doak made the conscious approach to limit the number of bunkers, especially pot bunkers. They were happy to allow one bunker to do the job when needed, instead of introducing rows of sand traps.
“A lot of the courses built in the last five to 10 years are quite flashy and full of features,” Johnson said. “You know, we always want the site to dictate what we build. …
“We originally talked about building a completely bunkerless golf course, but we realized quite quickly that the best sites for those are normally kind of quite constrained, quite tight, full of quite severe features and full of texture to kind of provide the contrast and interest. And really out there (at Old Petty), it’s a pretty big and broad landscape. But being by the sea and being exposed to the wind, we really wanted to make the ground come to be the most interesting part of the design.”
The course – named for an old church adjacent to the course – begins inland of the resort’s original 18. Right off the opening tee, players are introduced to an old-school quirky design decision: Old Petty’s first and 18th fairways crisscross each other. Don’t worry, there’s no great danger of players hitting into each other, as each hole’s landing area off the tee is downrange of the crossing point – the starter on No. 1 also will entertain players until their fairway is clear.
After crossing a small road to the church after No. 2 then passing the 400-year-old Castle Stuart on the downhill, par-3 third hole, the front nine and the early holes of the back nine wander mostly away from the coastline. The short and downhill par-4 13th takes players back toward the waterfront, where Nos. 14 through 16 hug and cross a small tidal bay stretching in from the Moray Firth. From there it’s back across the narrow access road to the testy par-3 17th with its green set into a tall dune to the right, then the closing par-18th playing back toward Cabot Highland’s iconic white clubhouse.
Still in preview play with the official opening planned for spring of 2026, Old Petty has time to mature and settle into its environment. Doak envisions the turf becoming even bouncier over time, allowing all the small ground features to take on an even greater role.
As Doak mentioned, at Old Petty there’s a difference in where a golf ball lands and where it stops rolling. And as this course matures, all the wrinkles he and Johnson introduced will become even more meaningful – and beautiful.
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