Royal Aberdeen (Balgownie Links)

Royal Aberdeen is the sixth-oldest golf club in the world, founded in 1780 — and for its first thirty-five years it went by the wonderful name of the Society of Golfers at Aberdeen, admitting members by ballot. It was this society that, in 1783, gave the game one of its most enduring rules: the five-minute limit for searching for a lost ball. The club became the Aberdeen Golf Club in 1815, on the eve of Waterloo, and received its royal title from King Edward VII in 1903.

The members first played over common land between the Don and the Dee, and later the Queen's Links beside the city, before moving across the River Don to the dunes at Balgownie — the links they have called home ever since. The course was laid out by the Carnoustie brothers Archie and Robert Simpson and later re-bunkered and lengthened by the great James Braid, and it runs in the classic old fashion: out along a magnificent valley between towering dunes, and back over higher, more open ground with the North Sea always in view. The outward nine, threading through that dune range, is widely rated one of the finest stretches of links golf anywhere.

It plays to par 71 over about 6,900 yards, and its championship pedigree is real — Royal Aberdeen hosted the 2011 Walker Cup and the 2014 Scottish Open. With Aberdeen Airport twenty minutes away and Cruden Bay and Trump International up the coast, Aberdeenshire is a serious, and far less crowded, links destination.