It came down to a house or a maintenance shed. Andy Burnett had the plans in place for both but the money for just one. So, he went to his wife, Angela. Living up to her name—just drop the a at the end—she agreed. They could keep living in the caravan by the car park. The shed had to come first.

Any golf course architect or developer will tell you that success is born of good partners. They’re usually referring to deep pockets or an aligned vision or hands-off trust, but in Andy’s case, it was the woman who would go on living with him in a home on wheels for seven years to help bring her husband’s dream to life. Throughout their shared struggle in creating the links at Covesea—fire, money trouble, burrowing grubs—sacrifice went from a choice to a modus operandi.

They met at a party in Aberdeen, on the northeast coast of Scotland, more than 20 years ago, a “leaving do” for a superintendent friend of Andy’s whom Angela knew as well. Andy was working as a turf contractor, hired to top-dress, spray and aerate greens around the area. He built backyard tracks for oil-wealthy locals and learned the course construction trade as he went, doing bunker and green remodels for established architects between jobs building lawn-bowling and football pitches. Meanwhile, Angela was a support worker for young people with autism. When they married in 2009, they brought five kids to their new family. And after a nine-year courtship, Angela knew exactly what she was going in for.

In 2004, a colleague of Andy’s told him about a piece of land on the Moray coast, east of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. “When I came around the corner, I just fell in love with the place,” Andy says about his first visit to the 52 acres that would become their Covesea Links. “The sandy soil profile was perfect. I thought about turning it into a turf nursery for my business, but I’d always wanted to build my own golf course. That was the dream. My business wasn’t big enough to build [a full course]—it was just me and a couple of the boys. But the land here could be a bit of a course, I thought, so I would just come up with my staff over the winters and do a little work whenever we could. I lived out of the caravan and did that for 10 years before the course was finally ready for play.”

It doesn’t take long to understand what kept Andy coming back every winter. If you’re lucky enough to spot the turn off the coastal road from Lossiemouth (home to Moray Golf Club, an Old Tom classic known to many links wanderers), a short gravel driveway crests a sea cliff from which you can spot pale links fairways crisscrossing an idyllic beach cove, plus a white lighthouse standing sentinel in the distance, off to your right. From there, it’s a slow, steep drive down to a small car park, a shop made from shipping containers, and the maintenance shed that Angela and Andy chose over hot showers in a master bath. When the project began, they went all in on building the course and refurbishing a small restaurant that already existed in the cove. The Tea Shack was a seaside draw for tourists and visitors and became the base from which they attracted golfers. Andy plotted green sites around the property and shaped them with a shovel. He kept his day job, restoring and maintaining an estate course 20 miles inland called Ballindalloch Castle, splitting his time between their fairways and his.

After a decade of borrowed sweat from Andy and his friends and their sons, Covesea finally opened for play in 2014. Angela could daydream about a ringing till and moving out of the caravan into the on-site home for which they’d received rare planning permission. Homes weren’t allowed to be built so close to the sea on such delicate soil, but the presence of an old salmon bothy with a house in the cove grandfathered their petition, and the community turned out in full to support their variance, appreciative of the commitment their new neighbors had brought to their coastline. The nine-holer would be a natural stop for golfers on their way from Lossiemouth to Nairn, and the Burnetts’ dream was now as real as the fairway beneath their feet.

And then, the fire. They were left once again standing on unsteady soil.

***

Andy Burnett has a bushy white beard that touches the top of his chest, and a glint in his eye that hints at a bit of greenskeeping mischief—a man with new ideas and projects spinning around his mind. He has the thin build of a worker, a doer, and he knows how fortunate he is to have found a partner in Angela, who can endure nonstop discourse about his turf. The links could be losing money by the bucket, but you’d meet Andy and guess he was the most successful course owner in Scotland. It’s the love and passion of someone who would do his job for free—and, for the most part, he does.

His golf infatuation started early. Andy’s parents were stewards at Hazlehead Golf Club outside Aberdeen—“Dad was doing the bar, and Mom did the food,” he remembers. He and his family lived in the clubhouse. He’d run home from school to hit balls or play a few holes, and after that sort of childhood, one can imagine how homesteading beside your own golf course becomes a must rather than a luxury. Camper living was a small price for stepping out of his bed onto a golf course, same as he had done as a child.

It might be hard to be married to such drive—some might call it obsession—but Angela found herself fitting into a role she cherished in the Tea Shack. “I like being around people,” she says. “When we got the Tea Shack, there was a question of who was going to cook the food, so I said, ‘I can try that.’ And so I was doing all the cooking, and I really enjoyed that. We had theme nights and steak night and a big deck where people ate outside beside the water. When we were busy with a lot of people around, I just loved it.”

In June of 2014, Andy was away, working another site, and Angela was at a family funeral in Glasgow when she received a call from a young woman who’d once worked at the restaurant.

“Her dad had smelled the smoke and had come down from the village, and she’d come down with him,” she says. “She phoned me and said, ‘Angela, it’s on fire.’”

One of Covesea’s charms is that it’s tucked away; you have to want to find the greens and buildings set far down below the cliffs. But that hideaway quality cost the fire brigade 20 minutes driving the road, looking for their emergency. Once they found it, the Tea Shack was beyond saving.

“It was all wood. It went right up in flames,” Andy says with a grief that still sounds fresh. It looks unnatural on a face that otherwise seems bent into an inflexible grin. The cause of the fire was never resolved—likely something electrical—and the lack of a verdict caused complications with their insurance. They wouldn’t be compensated for the fortune they’d invested into a sewage treatment plant to get the restaurant up to code, and would receive only a fraction of their Covesea spend.

“We lost most of our money,” Andy says. “It was a tricky time for us for a couple of years. We didn’t know what to do. The course wasn’t a success. It wasn’t looking great.”

“We lost the income from the restaurant, and the people who would find the course because of the restaurant,” Angela explains. “We were just starting to see some success with group bookings for golf and the hospitality we had. We had employed a chef, and it was going in a good direction, and then it was the rug pulled out from under us.”

The first tee sat quiet beside a concrete pad where the restaurant once stood. Angela worked out of the caravan, handing out scorecards to the few golfers who stumbled upon the course. Selling their land and moving on would have been a reasonable choice, but Andy wasn’t interested in alternatives. He was set on making their dream course as good as it could be, and for a couple who had already made some very hard choices, doing that would require another one.

“I didn’t have a lot of machinery,” Andy says. “I just had a little wooden shed, so I couldn’t buy machines, because I knew they would just rust down here with the salty air, and they cost, you know, hopeless amounts of money. So I went back to saving up. And I said, ‘I can’t make this work without a shed. I need somewhere for the equipment.’ And Angela said, ‘What about the house?’” Andy cracks a smile, that “watch out” grin returning to his face. “I’m like, ‘We’ll never get the house without a shed, because I won’t be able to do my work on the course.’ So we agreed. And I built the shed. Thanks to Saint Angela.”

***

Wee Andy isn’t wee at all. Andy’s namesake is a few inches taller than his dad, with broad shoulders and a workmanlike countenance. He’s 33 and moved to Moray with his wife, Lesley, to labor alongside his dad and help Covesea recover. Their white terrier, Maggie, minds the pro shop and sniffs around the chairs outside, a watchdog waiting for crumbs from the cookies Angela bakes for visitors.

Family help has been a godsend for Angela and Andy, and the chance to make this a family business has kept Angela inspired through the tough times. Andy needs no such inspiration. If you daydream of someday building your own golf course, be sure you’re made from the same stuff as Andy Burnett. Ask yourself if you and your son would spend years battling grubs, the way he and Wee Andy did every evening.

When the chemical for suppressing leatherjackets (crane fly larvae, which emerge through black, leather-like tubes from eggs laid in greens, destroying a putting surface) was banned in the U.K., Andy was forced to improvise a solution for his Covesea infestation. Every evening, he and his son would spray the greens with wetting agent, soak that layer with water, cover it with a tarp, and pin down that tarp with a ring of sleepers (railroad ties), then come back in the morning to peel it all up and mow up the grubs that had emerged overnight. They did this every day. For years. On a nine-hole golf course that saw relatively little play. And the result? A gift from the Burnett family to anyone with a golfing soul.

With a par of 32 (five par 4s, the rest par 3s), the course isn’t long, but it feels like a friend has invited you to their magical backyard where they’ve mapped out a golf fantasy for you to follow. The terrain ranges from flat to furious, with early holes bordering the beach and a finish that has you launching short irons up out of the cove toward an unknown horizon, then driving through mounded corridors and closing with a wedge punched from a washed-out seawall, the stone curling overhead like you’re a surfer pulled into the barrel of a wave. There are blind shots over strange rock formations, and tight turns of unreasonable angles. There is fun in every step and shot. It’s quirk meets quality, organic meets intentional, serendipity meets scheme. The edges are rugged, and it doesn’t have a slope rating, but if you’re thinking about that as you go around Covesea, you’re likely missing the point.

Covesea isn’t the greatest golf course in Scotland. It’s not the king of Highlands golf, nor was it intended to be. What Andy built is, perhaps accidentally, an antidote. A remedy to golf boredom, golf sameness, golf convention. It makes conversations about driver distance and Stimpmeters and course rankings feel insignificant and remote. As you go around your second time—and you will—you’ll find yourself connecting with both a very old kind of golf (here’s a wild field—go move your ball around it) and a new one as well, where any academic pursuit of the sport surrenders to the joys of a game. And if you meet Angela and Andy, or spot the caravan in which they’re still living, you’ll feel love and madness in each meter and yard. You’ve been invited to a dinner for one, and the chef lives right over there. Our best golf can have a dreamlike quality, but at Covesea, the dream is underfoot and everywhere. You’ll say goodbye convinced of the unlikely, which can be a very hard feeling to leave.

If there’s magic here, its practitioner has laid bare his tricks: hard work. Hope. An unwillingness to yield. And the rewards are not about money, or even golf. They are the chance to say you pursued life as you chose, with the ones you most wanted to be living it alongside you.

“It’s been a journey,” Angela says. “A good journey. We’ve faced adversities, but we’ve gone through it together. It’s made us strong. Strong today. We’re doing alright, aren’t we?” she says, turning to her partner. He looks at her and nods, a quiet smile on his face.

“Aye,” Andy says. “We’re doing alright.”

Yardage Book: No. 7 at Covesea Links

Words by Andy Burnett

Covesea is basically a raised beach. You can see that in the caves at the back of the ninth tee and how they were eroded by the sea long ago. That was where the sea was, and the entire course would have been under water at one time. What was left to us by nature was 52 acres, so we’re quite tight for space. This rock at the center of it had to be used, so it made sense to play right over it to a receptive green behind. I knew I wanted the eighth to go through the gap on the other side of that rock, so, to get back to the eighth tee and maximize the distance for that hole, it’s over the rock you go for the seventh.

That hole really starts as you’re playing down the sixth, because you’ve got to understand that there are three levels to the green. Have a look and remember where the pin is, because that makes a difference to which side of the rock you play over from the seventh tee. The green is set at a gentle angle, so the pin location determines which direction you want to take.

It’s uphill, usually an 8- or a 9-iron. And it’s just hit and hope, because you won’t know where your ball is until you walk around the rock and see the green. There’s a sleeper (railroad tie) with an arrow painted on it at the top of the rock. If the pin’s in the middle, it’s straight over the top of the sleeper. If the pin is back, you’re playing over the left side of the rock, because of the green angle. If the pin’s down front, you want to go a little right of the sleeper.

The green is so receptive. If you hit it, you’re staying on it. That is basically why I came up with that back-to-front shape and design. It’s a very fun hole. I’ll be out working on the course, watching people play it, and as soon as they see the green, I can see them thinking, “Fucking hell, I’ve never seen anything like this.” They’ll throw six balls down at the top of the green, and I’ll just see them pitch one after the other. If the pin’s in the middle, they cannot stop the ball, and it will end up on the bottom. But if the pin’s in the bottom, they think they’re Jack Nicklaus, because they’ll watch the ball roll down the contours of the green to 6 inches. It’s all very enjoyable to watch, especially the good players who know how to use the land.