The people who make the links.
This is not a brochure about yardage. It is a home for the staff, members, crofters, and champions who keep James Braid’s Highland links alive — and the village of Brora that stands behind them.
The hands that keep Brora true.
Great golf courses are not built on reputation alone. They are shaped every morning by the people who walk them before the first tee time — and by the welcome waiting in the shop and the clubhouse when the round is done.
Director of Golf
Gary Dingwall
PGA Fellow and the first face many visitors meet. Gary fits clubs, steadies a first-timer on the range, and sends you off with a word about the wind on the back nine. On royaldornochpro.com he is the featured professional — knowledgeable, approachable, and invested in the game as it is played here.
Course Manager
James MacBeath
The greens at Brora are among the purest fescue surfaces in the Highlands because a small crew treats them that way. James and the greens staff are out before sunrise, reading weather the way members read putts. Their craft is invisible when it is done well — and it is done exceptionally well here.
Clubhouse & the books
Craig Sutherland & Sue Bohlmann
Craig keeps the clubhouse — the view, the warmth, the Highland welcome after 18 holes. Sue, Accounts Manager, is one of the quiet reasons a village club can host the world and still feel like itself. Visitors notice the staff before they notice the par threes.
General Manager
David Gemmell
CCM, PGA Manager. David joined in 2023 as the club’s international reputation grew — and as the village felt that growth. He talks about a free local community membership, because a links this loved has to stay a club for Brora, not only a stop on someone else’s itinerary.
Golfers, sheep, and a historic right to graze.
From the start, Brora has leased this ground with crofters who hold grazing rights divided forty-eight ways. Each share can put five sheep and a cow on the land. The animals keep the rough honest. Single-strand electric fences keep the greens safe. Two local rules exist because of them.
Peter Thomson wrote it best: “One of my favourite links is Brora on the Moray Firth, where the golfers share a precious piece of territory with a hundred or so woolly sheep. What could epitomise nature better than such a communion.”
Come walk it yourselfWhat makes this corner of Sutherland itself:
Links, beach, river, village.
Brora means “river with a bridge” in Old Norse. The course sits where the River Brora meets the North Sea — the same shore the village has worked for salt, wool, coal, and whisky.
Braid laid it out. Thomson fell in love with it.
James Braid · five-time Open Champion
On 2 November 1891 a public meeting in the Library Institute formed Brora Golf Club. Membership was two shillings and sixpence. The course began as nine holes, grew to eighteen around 1900, and in 1924 Braid arrived by train, walked the land, and left the same day. For £25 plus travelling expenses he submitted the plan that still stands.
He was one of the Great Triumvirate with Vardon and Taylor, first chairman of the PGA, and a designer who put things where they ought to be — without earthmovers. Brora is his most northerly memorial in his native Scotland, and the home of the James Braid Golfing Society.
Peter Thomson · five Opens, one unannounced visit
In 1995 Thomson and his wife paid the green fee, played away, and by the eighteenth a small crowd had gathered. He called Brora “the most natural links course in the world,” and later: “When James Braid first set eyes on the land that is now Brora golf club he must have felt the same elation I did.”
“I pray it will continue and last as long as the world.” The club still holds the pictures and memorabilia he left behind. Tom Watson, another five-time Open champion, later joined Braid and Thomson as an honorary member.
Champions, members, and people who came back.
I had a very difficult time with it. I’d like to play it again. I’d like to challenge it again. But it was very good.
Open Champion 1975, 77, 80, 82, 83
To golf in Dornoch and not to make the 16 mile trip to Brora is to pass on one of golf’s most authentic experiences.
Made very welcome by all the staff.
Visitor
Sandy Lyle, Paul Lawrie, Craig Stadler, Hale Irwin, Ian Woosnam and Bill Rogers have all signed the book. The welcome is the same whether your name is on a Claret Jug or you have just come up the A9.
Electric City, a distillery, and a football club older than the course.
Brora is a working Highland village: once coal, salt pans, wool, bricks, and the most northerly pit in Britain. The wool mill brought the first electricity in the north of Scotland — locals called it Electric City. Clynelish still makes whisky. Brora Rangers have played at Dudgeon Park since 1922. The clock tower is a war memorial.
The golf club is one of the largest employers after the distillery. Visitors stay, eat, and drink in a place of about 1,200 people. Members pass down stories, welcome juniors, and keep a 19th-century club from becoming a postcard.
Write yourself into the next chapter