The Dutch

The Dutch: "It's no' just a game", as they say in Scotland, and that's certainly true at The Dutch. With 5-star services throughout, a lavishly comfortable Loch Lomond-inspired clubhouse, and a superbly designed and presented golf course, one could not ask for more from this top-end private club.

Laid out in two nine-hole loops, the wonderfully natural course is not too roaming or expansive, but not too compact either. The interplay of the fairways and greens, plentiful water hazards and hole-lining gorse bushes, attractive mounding and stylish bunkering, creates a thoroughly absorbing and challenging course. With little to see beyond the course your attention can remain firmly fixed on the golfing job at had.

The course, with its excellent variety of well-crafted holes, has a predominantly open, inland linksy character. The generous presence of gorse bushes adds a heathland touch to what is otherwise a classy and challenging parkland course. Links afficianados will warm to the neatly square-cut tee boxes, gently rolling sculpted terrain, and tufted mounding that defines the fairways. And then there's the greens: large, fast and surrounded by beautifully contoured slick run-offs.

Here at The Dutch several small lakes and meandering water ditches play a significant part in proceedings. The middle section of the front-nine is the least impacted by water. Almost the entire, and more testing, back-nine will require careful course management and adroit ball striking if you are to stay "dry".

Pick of the holes: there are many to choose, but perhaps most memorable are the three "timber bulkhead" holes. The par-5 15th, par-3 16th, and par-5 18th, each a potential card-wrecker, have greens perched above wooden bulkheads, with significant water to be avoided on your approach. Making up the final quartet, water also features strongly at the par-4 17th.