The (Adopted) Home of Golf

Our first round at Lundin Golf Club was played in the afternoon on a 36-hole day, following a nap in the parking lot to sleep off the previous night’s pints. Expectations and energy levels were low. My husband, Nick, had heard of Lundin on a podcast months before, but, besides the basics (half Old Tom Morris, half James Braid; once an Open qualifier track), even he was in the dark.

We were in Scotland on a recon mission. Having spent the majority of our three-plus years together in various stages of lockdown, we’d made a pact to make up for lost time when the world reopened. Nick rejected the idea of quitting our jobs and backpacking, so I made the one pitch I knew he couldn’t refuse: What if we planted ourselves in Fife for a golf season?

Lundin marked the sixth of seven rounds planned that week (not counting a sleep-out for the Old Course) as we searched for a club near St. Andrews to join for the months ahead. We had so far struck out on membership options and were trying to come to terms with the Fairmont St. Andrews as a backup—not exactly the classic links we had in mind.

Nos. 1 through 5 and 15 through 18 at Lundin are from the original Old Tom Morris out-and-back design that’s now shared with neighbor Leven Links. When we asked the head pro about it, we expected to hear some drama about a local feud but instead learned that in 1909, about 40 years after the original layout had been completed, golf saw a boom in the region. The villages of Leven and Lundin Links agreed to split the course and hire Open champion James Braid to build each side an additional nine holes. At Lundin, the par-3 fifth plays along the uneven rock wall dividing the courses, which bobs along from a foot and a half to 4 feet high as you approach the green.

As we made our way around the front, we kept looking at the inland holes Braid had added—at the top of a steep embankment, along the A915—with skepticism. Surely they would feel gimmicky. A pair of par 3s crammed into the corner of the property just to make it work? We were surprised when we got to the sharply uphill 12th and discovered that if you can keep the ball in play, you’re rewarded with a view of the entire golf course stretched out beneath you. Not to mention two more extremely fun holes after that.

We both got beat up by the course that day, but, walking off the 18th green, we agreed that it was the kind of track you immediately wanted to try again. We were confident that once you understood the playground in front of you, birdies were waiting.

We went into the clubhouse for a quick pint of Tennent’s. There, we got to chatting with the bartender, who asked what brought us to Lundin. Next thing we knew, we had international membership applications in our hands. When we arrived, we’d each paid £120 to play. Suddenly, for £475 and a home address outside the country, we could play Lundin Golf Club as often as we wanted the next season. 

A rocky start

We spent the next six months planning our wedding, not our move to the U.K. A week before our Scottish journey began, we got around to packing up and cramming everything from our 1,000-square-foot apartment into storage. On our last morning at home, Nick logged into work and found shocking news: His position had been eliminated in a round of layoffs. Just like that, five hours before our flight, the mandate that this adventure not impact our careers was blown to pieces.

We’re both big believers that planning anything takes as long as you let it. Which is why we landed in Edinburgh in April with nothing booked besides one round of golf—our first Lundin reciprocal, at Royal Burgess—and one week in an Airbnb. We agreed to sort out the rest as we went. We would train up to Fife each morning to look at flats, then get back down in time to log into our tech jobs. We’d promised to work roughly 12 to 8 p.m. to give us ample crossover with our Toronto-based teams.

Since Nick had suddenly found himself very free—and with both of us a bit more price sensitive—we pivoted. Nick instead got on the 90-minute bus to St. Andrews each morning, using the onboard Wi-Fi to apply for jobs, shop for used cars on Facebook Marketplace and coordinate apartment viewings.

On his second day in St. Andrews, Nick wandered over to the caddie pavilion and asked the caddiemaster if he needed any help. When asked about his experience, Nick offered little outside of carrying my bag in a few Canadian Mid-Amateur events and club championship rounds. But when asked about his golf knowledge, Nick proved himself an encyclopedia. The caddiemaster directed him to the Castle Course, a 2008 addition to the St. Andrews Links Trust by David McLay Kidd, saying it needed the most help. The veteran caddies didn’t like the slower rounds and tougher walk.

Nick drove back down to Edinburgh that Friday afternoon in a used Audi A4, with a signed sublease, a promised job and—as a reward to himself—a second round at Lundin Golf Club under his belt.

Daily rhythms

“Lundie,” as the locals affectionately call it, is 20 minutes down the road from the famous home of golf—nothing by our Canadian standards, and every bit worthwhile for a classic links home base, 11 reciprocals around the country and an affordable means to bring our plan to life.

We quickly fell into a rhythm: Join the ball chute at 7:30 a.m. on weekdays—the first hour behind the mowers was first come, first served—then whip through a three-hour round and get back home by noon to start our workdays (me at my computer, Nick on his feet).

We spent our Saturdays competing in the weekly medal, an individual stroke-play event that, until the 2019 World Golf Handicap changes, was the main way locals kept a handicap. Historically, Scots posted only competitive rounds, attested by a signature. Today, even though the rules have been updated to accept casual rounds, few enter their non-tournament scores.

This was a major cultural shift from our North American golf lives, where Saturday golf was almost always casual, scorecards were rarely exchanged (and certainly never signed) and groups were planned independently in text threads. We soon learned that it also meant that the locals were a serious threat. An 8 handicap in Scotland was really a tournament 8—something many of our low-single-digit friends back home couldn’t claim. That the majority of the Saturday tee sheet was blocked for the medal was mind-boggling, but it left us no choice: If we wanted to golf, we had to compete.

A few months into our trip, we would learn that our first competition sparked some local chatter after I posted the low score, but we only ever felt welcomed by the membership. They seemed to like our story, and, as they got to know us, they were generous with their invites for a beer, a meal or a late-night whisky. 

Scots are best described as humble—something many North Americans misread as cold. In that first medal round, Nick struggled to make small talk with the rest of his group, who were uncomfortable answering questions about themselves. After a flurry of double bogeys, the most reserved among them pulled a chocolate bar from his golf bag, handed it to Nick and said, in the thickest brogue, “For energy.” It was their only interaction—and one we joke about to this day—but it proved there was genuine warmth beneath the reserved Scottish exterior.

Caddie life

Nick had two shadow rounds before he was trusted with his first bag on the Castle, but no one noticed he’d never seen the back nine. Deep into interviews for tech jobs back home, he’d had to peel out of both shadow rounds early.

His first group was a foursome from South Africa, each of whom wanted a caddie but had to settle for sharing Nick when numbers were tight. That left Nick scrambling to give each player a complete caddie experience, translating yardages to meters for the first time in his life and desperately studying the yardage book to figure out what the back nine was all about before they got there. 

To make matters worse, he’d let both his range finder and his GPS device die on the front side.

When the group asked how long he’d been caddying, he replied, “It’s my first season” rather than “First time ever.” It seemed a wise massaging of the truth. He didn’t breathe easy until he had successfully navigated the group from 17 green to 18 tee without making any disastrous wrong turns and giving himself away.

Nick learned two major lessons over his 10-plus weeks looping. No. 1: Nobody knows (or at least admits) how far they actually hit the ball. His greatest challenge was convincing people who thought they hit their 7-iron 165 yards to pull 6-iron from 150. No. 2: People’s reactions to a Canadian caddie depended on where they were in their trip. If the Castle was at the start of someone’s itinerary, they could be disappointed; they wanted the “true” Scottish experience, not a fellow North American on an extended honeymoon carrying their clubs. But if they were further into their trip, they were a bit more open-minded. Having learned by that point that many caddies didn’t actually play golf themselves, Nick stood out as a good chat and an empathetic course-management guide.

Nick also learned a thing or two from the local caddies—mainly how much more abuse they could dish to North American tourists. His favorite line came when his player duck-hooked a tee shot into long fescue. “That’s lion country,” another caddie in the group warned. “If you find it over there, you’re lyin’.” 

The big stage

As the summer wore on, Nick learned through the grapevine that the Old Course ran out of caddies by around 3 p.m. every day. There’s a strict hierarchy for jobs on the Old: Caddies belong to one of eight lists, prioritized by experience and reviews. The higher on the list, the earlier in the day you get a bag, and the greater your chances for a 36-hole day.

But even with more than 240 caddies on the roster, summers are hard to staff. By midafternoon, the double loopers were already back on the course and singles were done, leaving a few more hours of bucket-list tee times caddie-less.

Nick had been up front with the caddiemaster at the Castle: He was looking for three to five bags per week, nothing full time and almost never a weekend job. When we took a week off in early June to play golf in Ireland, he found himself in the caddiemaster’s bad books. More and more days started to go by without a job.

So, instead, Nick would plant himself in the Old Course caddie shack and wait. He’d always be warned that there were no promises he’d get a loop. And, without fail, he’d be hired within an hour of sitting down. 

After our trip, someone asked us about our favorite on-course snack, and we were quick to name the Links Trust’s famous macaroni pie. It’s as decadent as it sounds: a savory handheld pie filled with “macaroni cheese,” as they say in Scotland. It became a central part of Nick’s daily caddie routine—hard-earned, as he walked more than 25,000 steps per day.

Tricks of the trade

At first, it felt like our time was endless. But as June rolled into July, our October return flights started to loom over us, and our mindset shifted from “We have forever!” to “How can we fit it all in?”

We increasingly spent weekends away: a ferry to Belfast to squeeze in Royals Portrush and County Down; a trip down to Edinburgh for the Scottish Open; a trek to Campbeltown to play Machrihanish Dunes and Machrihanish Golf Club—two courses seemingly so far from civilization that we half-expected them to be a myth; a jaunt up to Cabot Highlands to meet a friend for a round at Castle Stuart; a few nights in East Lothian to squeeze in Gullane and North Berwick.

We learned to get creative with our budget. With a bare-bones monthly bill in Scotland and as many reduced expenses back home in Vancouver as possible, we were able to handle the affordable one-time charge at Lundin and carve out about $1,000 Canadian each to play with every month.

The first trick was to take advantage of our reciprocals. We knew little about Dunbar, Montrose and Blairgowrie when we arrived, but now we would highly recommend them on any itinerary. These are courses that would cost anywhere from £90 to £150 to play as a visitor, but were only 20 to 30 quid as Lundin members.

Next, we stalked the BRS Golf website to learn which courses were hosting mixed open tournaments throughout the season. Most courses do so once or twice per year, welcoming non-members to compete for a next-to-nothing greens fee.

Our trek to Campbeltown was strategically timed around a mixed open at Machrihanish Dunes that brought our cost per player down from £130 to just £18. (We actually made money when I walked away with a £150 prize.) Months later, a Highlands weekend was planned around a similar event at Nairn—just £50 to enter, compared to the usual £200 greens fee. Saving cash on those days made the pricey ones, like the £495 greens fee at Muirfield, more palatable.

And we made friends. This wasn’t a tactic to save money; it was part of the goal of planting ourselves abroad for a season and opening ourselves up to new opportunities. But it did have golf benefits. In Scotland, just about every club operates on a semi-private model. Even Muirfield will take your money on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when they open one of the greatest clubs in the world to the general public. The benefit of knowing a member isn’t access—it’s price. We could bring friends to Lundin—regularly £120 off the street—for just £20. And we were lucky to make some incredible friends who invited us to the likes of Royal Portrush, Gullane, Crail and Luffness New for a fraction of what those rounds could have cost us. 

The closing stretch

Most of our takeaways from our time in Scotland revolved around just how much better the model is there—and how much North Americans have messed it up since importing the game from across the pond. Thanks to the combination of two- to three-person golf-shop teams, relatively basic but reliable restaurants, and resilient course designs that require so many fewer human inputs, just about every villager can afford to belong to their local club. As North Americans, we associate a trip to St. Andrews with a $6,000 to $10,000 price tag and assume that golf is as expensive and exclusive for the Scots as it is for us at home. But that’s not entirely the case. While tourists pay up to $2,000 to guarantee a round on the Old Course, every taxpaying resident in St. Andrews is eligible for a Links Ticket for less than £500 per year. Our caddie at North Berwick went so far as to apologize when he told us what it had cost him to join what has become a favorite of visiting PGA Tour players.

We also learned that the Scots treat golf like a sport. Rarely does a course have a halfway house, let alone serve beer away from the clubhouse. Most everyone with a handicap plays competitively.

Golf aside, we learned that Scottish food’s bad rap tells only half the story. We were repeatedly blown away by the fresh produce—the aisles at M&S stocked with the biggest organic strawberries we’d ever seen, from right within Fife, and broccoli from down the road in Perthshire. When our friends came to visit and got sick of the cliché beige pub food, we took them to Cambo Gardens for a farm-to-table brunch that replenished our greens in one sitting. 

We were also reminded of how life’s biggest curveballs and disappointments can open other doors. Nick’s untimely layoff added stress to our early weeks in Scotland but led to a true bucket-list experience—caddying on the Old Course—and the line on his résumé of which he’s most proud. That said, not everything left us wanting to pull up our Canadian roots for good. We learned the hard way that St. Andrews’ reputation as a resort town is true. Nick and I each had been there a handful of times on vacation, but we didn’t experience just how transient the population is until we saw cycles of the place over six months. As golf geeks, closing our laptops at night and walking into town for a pint at the Dunvegan never got old. But as extroverts, going six months without forming a local community started to become a challenge. We found out that we’d have been better off planting ourselves in Lower Largo, Crail or Cupar, or farther afield in East Lothian’s Aberlady—smaller villages where we were able to make real connections quickly.

And we discovered that Scots only drink espresso. The best any coffee shop along Market Street could do to satisfy our French-press cravings was an Americano. In a late-to-open, early-to-close culture, even Starbucks didn’t serve coffee before 8 a.m.

On our last day in Scotland, it rained more than 3 inches. All of ScotRail flooded, as did the Old Course and Carnoustie in the midst of the Dunhill Championship. It hit home that we needed our friends and family (and our coffee machine) through the darker months. We left feeling ready to go but knowing that after a winter in Vancouver, we’d be ready to come back.