New course in Scotland opens officially with perfectly wrinkled ground

Golf architects, of course, want to create and incorporate interesting ground for the game. But what to do when that land has been flattened by more than a century of farming? For Tom Doak and Clyde Johnson, it was all about dreaming up dramatic micro-contours for Old Petty at Cabot Highlands, which opened fully Friday at Cabot Highlands in Scotland.

Old Petty, the new course at Cabot Highlands in Inverness, Scotland, has opened for preview play and will fully open in 2026.

The site of the new course is gorgeous, with ocean views and a long stretch along a tidal bay. The site wasn’t flat, but many of the natural humps and bumps so prized in links golf were missing when Doak and Johnson started work on Old Petty. All those years of farming had left behind a tilted slate that was relatively featureless across its width.

So the architects got busy with a focus on recreating what the farming had leveled. The result for the course? A perfectly wrinkled playground packed with interesting shapes and firm turf that keeps a golf ball rolling in all kinds of directions. What happens on the ground after a ball lands is more important than what that ball does in the air.

“The most important thing you can have in golf is a difference between where the ball lands and where it winds up,” Doak said after a preview round at Old Petty last year. “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 article originally appeared on Golfweek: New course in Scotland opens officially with perfectly wrinkled ground