Scottish government rejects controversial links course, likely ending a decade-long golf fight

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After a decade of planning, petitions, hearings and appeals, one of the most coveted and contested pieces of golf ground in the world appears to have run out of road.

On Friday, the Scottish government rejected plans to build a golf course at Coul Links, a rumpled stretch of dunes along the Highlands coast near the village of Embo, about 45 minutes north of Inverness. It is the second time Scottish ministers have turned the project away, and those who spent years fighting for it no longer pretend otherwise about what comes next.

“Sadly, I think this is pretty much the end of the line,” Gordon Sutherland, one of the five directors of Communities for Coul, told Golf Digest. “There’s still a lot of anger floating around.”

The dream of Coul began in 2015 with two American developers in Mike Keiser and Todd Warnock. Keiser, the developer behind Bandon Dunes, had built a career on finding remote, wind-whipped land and turning it into pilgrimage golf, and Coul fit the pattern almost too neatly. The plan called for a championship links from Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, set in a corner of Scotland already thick with treasure. Royal Dornoch, one of the finest courses on the planet, sits less than two miles away. Nairn, Brora, Castle Stuart, Golspie and Tain round out a circuit that pulls golfers from every continent. Coul was meant to be the next jewel in that crown, and to those who walked it, the ground seemed to draw the holes on its own.

The trouble was that the same dunes that made Coul irresistible to golf made it precious to others. The site sits on protected land, home to rare dune habitat and the plants, insects and birds that depend on it. The Highland Council initially approved the proposal, but environmental groups pushed back, warning that a course would do lasting damage to a fragile system. In 2020, the Scottish government overruled the council and rejected the plan. Keiser didn’t bother hiding his frustration.

“The people of Dornoch and Embo were all for it, not to mention all the (area golf) clubs,” Keiser told Golf Digest at the time. “The ministers basically said, ‘That’s nice, but we’ve made our decision.’ ”

Within the industry, many believed the verdict had as much to do with another golf developer as it did with Coul itself. Donald Trump, then in his first term as president of the United States, had built his Aberdeenshire resort across protected dunes, a fight that left scars and a deep wariness of foreign developers arriving with grand plans for the Scottish coast. Coul, the thinking went, was paying off a debt it never incurred.

In 2023, with Trump out of office, the project returned wearing a different face. A group of locals formed Communities for Coul and brought forward a new application. Their case rested on jobs and investment in a part of Scotland that needed it, and on the argument that the dunes would be better cared for with a golf course than left to themselves.

“The concept came just from local people being dissatisfied with the outcome of the previous application, being a bit angry and feeling that there was a missed opportunity there,” Sutherland said.

The support appeared broad. Government reporters held a weeklong public hearing in Embo, including an evening session set aside for the community. Sutherland had no idea who would come.

“There were hundreds of people turned up,” he said, “and I would say there’d be less than 20 people who were against it.”

It wasn’t enough. The project drew opposition from a coalition of seven environmental and conservation groups in RSPB Scotland, Buglife, Butterfly Conservation, the National Trust for Scotland, Plantlife Scotland, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and Ramblers Scotland. The Scottish ministers sided with them, concluding the course would have an adverse effect on habitats and species of national and international importance, the same central objection that sank the original proposal in 2020.

“This process and outcome show how highly the people of Scotland value nature and how much they are willing to fight for it, no matter how many challenges we face,” Jo Pike of the Scottish Wildlife Trust told the BBC.

The ruling leaves the project’s backers with few options. Developers can challenge a ministerial planning decision in Scotland’s Court of Session, but only on legal grounds rather than the merits of the plan. Sutherland indicated the group is unlikely to pursue one.

The decision ends, for now, an effort that spanned two proposals, two sets of backers and more than a decade, without a shovel going into the ground.

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com