If you know golf, you know it’s a dream trip to scotch it requires the logistical instincts of a wedding planner and the budget to match. Tee Times book 18 months in advance. Multi-course itineraries are choreographed to the minute. Hotels and transportation close before the first ball is bowled. Golf tourism it’s big business, and to play title appearances in the birthplace of the game, you work within the system and spend accordingly.
At Lybster Golf Club, you can forget all that.
The nine-hole course is located in a Highland village of the same name, about an hour up the coast from Royal Dornochon a course that few visiting golfers take. The salt spray juts out from the harbour, once teeming with trawlers when Lybster had one of Scotland’s biggest herring fisheries. The herrings are long gone, and most of the boats with them. But the local course, which marks its centenary this year, remains largely unchanged.
There is an honor system checkout and a clubhouse, but no pro shop because there are no employees. Locals volunteer their time, tending bunkers and mowing grass. If you want a cup of coffee, feel free to fix yourself up in the kitchen. Need clubs for rent? Lybster’s has them too, although it doesn’t “rent” them. The club will lend you a set free of charge.
This is the course Magnus Ryrie grew up on and one he would like to help preserve.
Born and raised in Lybster, Ryrie took up the game at the age of 9, using a set of jigs from his father, an ex-fisherman who became a policeman as the fishery dwindled. As a child, he played every Saturday and Sunday afternoon, but avoided Saturday mornings because that’s when the “old men” came back from the sea to do it.
“And by ‘old,’ I mean they were maybe 24 or 25,” Ryrie says.
Ryrie left the village at 18, part of an exodus of Highland youth looking for work, and built a career in the semiconductor business, a path that took him around the UK and Ireland and to Arizona for a year. He liked the desert golf there, although it was no more like his childhood course than football in the UK with the NFL. He and his wife retired to Lybster five years ago, and he became club secretary a few years later.
The course he helps care for will not disappoint in length, clocking in at just over 2,000 yards, with par-3s and -4s and no par-5s, but with North Sea views on every hole and a rich variety of shot demands. Wind can wreak havoc. Local knowledge is important.
Lybster’s logo is a train engine, billowing smoke, a nod to a bygone railway line that once transported herring to wider markets. As roads improved, the railroad fell into disuse, but the path it ran through continues, serving a strategic role. Several holes play through it. The clubhouse is the old train terminal. The former railway gramophone forms the small practice ground.
The clubhouse was once a train terminal.
Angus Mackay
Lybster is golf in its bare form, the kind of game that sends purists into fits of terror and delights anyone who happens upon it. It’s a community center and an outlet for golf’s great gifts: fresh air, exercise and camaraderie. Like the game itself, the course houses the space of a lifetime. Some of those “elders” Ryrie once avoided on Saturdays remain members, and a new program just started now counts 20 participants, a number that sounds bigger when you consider that the entire membership is only 100 people.
Everything at Lybster goes to scale. A day pass costs £30, for both locals and visitors. No out-of-towner price increases, no rate structure, no summer weekend price increases. Leave your money in the box – in a concession to modernity, you can also swipe a credit card – and play as long as you like.
Lybster will mark its centenary without the pageantry and fanfare that often attends such occasions elsewhere. Instead, the celebrations will be in character, with some low-key tours in June, and a merchandise release later this year, featuring hats, ball markers and headgear.
However, the club is using the historic moment to quietly spread the word about what it has to offer. There is a modest request for donations on the website and an invitation to join as an overseas member for £120 (or about $165). The goal is not to increase revenue by raising prices; is to attract more golfers. In 2023, the club welcomed 220 visitors. In 2025, this figure almost doubled. The club isn’t looking to make money, Ryrie says, just to make ends meet. Funds raised will go towards improving the practice grounds where the youngsters play their games and to upgrade the clubhouse with insulation and some other creature comforts.
The drive to draw more attention to the Lybster is part of what Ryrie describes as a wider push for “slow tourism” in the Highlands: encouraging travelers to stop mid-journey on the North Coast 500, Scotland’s famous coastal route, and stretch a day-and-a-half sprint into a four- or five-day stay. There are worse places to linger than a village of 600 with sweeping views and a golf course that offers far more than it bargains for.
No advance planning required. No proof of membership. On the great cathedral courses of Scotland, you book a year in advance and pay a lot.
;)
