Machrihanish Golf Club

The club is older than the name it plays under. Old Tom Morris set the first tee where it stands now, when he extended the links to eighteen holes in 1879. The club began in 1876, in the Argyll Arms Hotel in Campbeltown, as the Kintyre Golf Club, with ten holes played under the rules of Prestwick Golf Club; Prestwick's professional, Charles Hunter, redesigned it to twelve. J.H. Taylor made changes in 1914 and Sir Guy Campbell settled the present configuration after the Second World War. Golf Digest placed it 57th in its World's 100 Greatest Golf Courses list in 2015.

Battery, the first hole, is 424 yards from the white tees, and the drive is played diagonally across the corner of the bay. The club's local rules make the beach a penalty area, marked with red stakes down the left of the fairway; take on too much of the corner and it costs you a stroke and a drop. Jack Nicklaus has called it the best opening hole in golf. From there the course runs out and back around the bay, par 70 over 6,226 yards, with only two par fives and both early in the back nine. The clubhouse burned down in December 2018 and a new one opened in early 2021. You get here by road down the Kintyre peninsula, or by air into Campbeltown.