It’s golfers vs sand dunes in a Scottish planning fight

A yearslong saga pitting environmentalists against plans for a remote Scottish golf course targeting rich Americans is just weeks from a verdict, with one issue dominating the debate: how best to look after a few hundred yards of sand dune and a small, grass-like plant.

It’s the sort of real estate showdown being played out across the globe as investors seek to monetise sparsely populated sites and deep-pocketed tourists look for somewhere niche to spend their time and money. Standing against them is an often-powerful lobby of nature watchers and scientists.

It’s also a story not unfamiliar to Scotland after the government cleared Donald Trump to build a premier course on a protected area near Aberdeen almost two decades ago, well before he became US president. Should the conservationists prevail this time, it would be a significant victory for them and a major setback for an expanding golf tourism market, estimated by Fortune Business Insights at about $3 billion in the UK.

Rejecting the golf development plan at Coul Links, which is part of the Loch Fleet Site of Special Scientific Interest, or SSSI, a diverse ecosystem next to the chilly waters of the North Sea, would probably kill the project for good.

The landowner, Edward Abel Smith, has an initial £20 million ($27 million) in US-based financing ready for release as soon as he gets the green light, a large part of which would go toward preserving the wetlands, grasses, and dunes next to the proposed site. The Keiser family, whose résumé includes top-ranked resort Bandon Dunes in Oregon, would develop a championship-level course designed by golfing royalty in the form of Bill Coore and two-time major title winner Ben Crenshaw. The land to be developed on the SSSI amounts to just 1.5 hectares (3.7 acres).

There would be no members, only people wanting to knock a small ball around a chunk of land with heather-clad mountains in the background and the sound of the sea not far away. Another £30 million would go toward a new hotel and bolstering local infrastructure. For anyone wanting to make a weekend of it, Royal Dornoch Golf Club is about a 10-minute drive away.

Royal Dornoch Golf Club, the world’s most northerly championship links, in Dornoch. Image: Michael Vince Kim/Bloomberg

Golf has been played at Dornoch, hailed as one of the finest courses in the world, for over four centuries. Image: Michael Vince Kim/Bloomberg

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But on the face of it, Communities for Coul, or C4C, the not-for-profit group backing the project, has an uphill task convincing Scottish ministers that its proposal is for the general good.

A previous iteration in 2020 was turned down, and government advisers aren’t in favour of this latest update. Even so, it emphasises how the course would preserve, rather than damage, the area’s ecology, create 400 sustainable jobs, and boost a region losing young people to bigger cities and abroad.

The timeline has accelerated in recent weeks, with a decision possible as soon as this month. Following a government request for more information on how the proposal aligns with regulations governing protected wetlands, C4C filed an update noting that invasive species pose an existential threat to the entire dune complex if the status quo continues. Plants such as meadowsweet and creeping thistle have almost doubled their spread in the past five years, hampering the wind’s ability to sculpt and mould the dunes, the report says.

“We can’t just step back and say ‘leave it to nature,’” said Andy McMullen, a botanist commissioned by C4C. He calls the group’s approach to the dunes “holistic.”

As for the elusive Baltic rush, the grass-like vegetation that forms a centrepiece of the opposition to the plan, McMullen said his team struggled to find any. That’s a point vigorously opposed by Not Coul, lobbying against the project.

The group says its submission highlights that the Baltic rush is on several greens and fairways of the proposed course. It also states that the plant, while commonplace in the US, is found at only one other location in the UK. In a counter-submission that Not Coul filed at the end of July, the Baltic rush was mentioned on more than 100 occasions.

C4C emphasised that land management may also benefit such plants. Its report points to how the flora thrives in the long, grassy rough and away from the tended fairways on the Struie course at nearby Royal Dornoch. A key part of the study also notes that the course’s proposed footprint would occupy only a minuscule fraction of the total protected site.

The real question, McMullen said, is not about the different species which are at risk but rather, “whether or not it’s worthwhile having that small 1% loss to look after the other 99%.”

It’s an argument given short shrift by Tom Dargie, an ecologist for Not Coul whose house overlooks Loch Fleet and who first surveyed Coul Links in the late 1990s for an earlier proposal. It never went to the planning stage.

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“I went down to Coul for two days to reflect on whether it would be a good site for a golf course,” said Dargie, who began studying Scotland’s sand dunes in 1971 while at the University of Sheffield in England. “I decided there and then that it was not.”

The pile of submissions and counter-submissions bears more than a passing similarity to President Trump’s project farther down the eastern coast. The government rejected the official advice and gave Trump its full approval to unleash his bulldozers on protected sand dunes. He called the site Trump International and opened a second course last year. The Trump Organisation didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

At the time, then Finance Minister John Swinney hailed the complex’s social and economic benefits as reasons to approve it. Now, he leads the government set to judge on Coul Links.

But there’s one key political shift from when Trump’s Aberdeen course was approved in 2008. The Greens have a stronger voice in Scotland’s parliament after this year’s election. They may play an integral role in helping the ruling Scottish National Party’s drive for the nation’s independence from London.

It’s a conundrum for the SNP. Reject the plan and stand accused of undermining a fragile economy; back the project and wreck the party’s environmental credentials.

Maggie Chapman, a Green Member of the Scottish Parliament for North East Scotland, has long opposed Trump’s developments in Scotland and said his second golf course near Aberdeen was “not welcome” after the original site lost its special status.

“I see the same drive for economic profit and complete ignorance of the ecosystem,” she said of the plans for Coul Links.

In Coul’s immediate neighbourhood – a former fishing village called Embo with about 300 residents – support for the project isn’t hard to come by. There are no shops, no schools and not much else beyond a trailer park for vacationers. Many of the nearby roads are single track with passing places every 100 yards or so.

A holiday park overlooking Embo and the coastline. Image: Michael Vince Kim/Bloomberg

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Creels in Embo. Like the entire region of East Sutherland, the village has seen the collapse of the fishing industry. Image: Michael Vince Kim/Bloomberg

Gayle Mackay, a schoolteacher who commutes to nearby Dornoch, says she hopes the project will breathe life into the community. Looking at the two young children in her home, Mackay said she supports the plan because she hopes it will “keep the young people here.”

Official figures support her concern. The population of rural Scotland is ageing rapidly, with the number of residents aged 65 or more having doubled since 2001, according to government figures.

Adding Coul to a broader area that boasts courses like Brora to the north and Cabot Highlands beyond Inverness to the south would add heft to what is already developing into a prime leisure portfolio in the Scottish Highlands. Having several golf courses in proximity isn’t always a negative, according to David Bell, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Stirling.

“Agglomeration is central to economic development,” said Bell, a former captain at Royal Dornoch who assessed the project’s economic impact for C4C.

But some Dornoch residents aren’t so sure the area needs another course that charges several hundred pounds for 18 holes of golf. “The only people that will benefit are a small percentage of already rich people,” said Morna Taylor, who works in a charity shop in the town.

The Dornoch Pipe Band’s Highland dancers during a parade in Dornoch. Image: Michael Vince Kim/Bloomberg

If the government goes against its scientific advance and backs the plan, Dargie at Not Coul said they’re prepared to take it all the way to the Supreme Court. Abel Smith, the landowner, was less forthright. “I don’t think I’d have the energy or the willingness to do it again.”

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