VisitScotland Drive it Home golf campaign launched

VisitScotland today launched a campaign to bring golfers to Scotland – Drive it Home.

The neat title for the campaign links to a series of target audiences:

• golfers from the Scottish Diaspora
• golfers from the UK
• golfers form anywhere the campaign is run – flagging the attractions of the home of the sport.

According to VisitsScotland, golfers are particularly valuable visitors, spending more that any others. The figure quoted is that for every £1 spent on green fees, a golfer spends £5 in the wider Scottish economy.

The promotion, timed to draw attention to the 150th anniversary of the Open and running until the end of April, has a few special carrots in its bag – people can win 250 free tee times, play with Sam Torrance and play at  St Andrews Old Course.

Golf is said to bring £220m in to the Scottish economy and to support around 4,400 jobs.

Golf Argyll

Anyone setting out to Golf Argyll has the best of golfing challenges ahead of them. Many of the renowned course designers from Old Tom Morris onwards have left their mark in Argyll.

Kintyre offers two side by side links courses, spanning course design from Old Tom Morris at Machrihanish golf Club to David McLay Kidd with the unique Machrihanish Dunes Course, built – with involvement from Scottish Natural Heritage from the outset-  in a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Here, with environmental issues to the fore, a flock of black Hebridean sheep graze the fairways.

These courses sit on the Atlantic west coast, on the long white crescent of Machrihanish surfing beach, with views to the Isles of Islay, Jura and Gigha and to the North coast of Ireland.

Argyll has courses from the grandest and most expensive (Loch Lomond Golf Course – host of the annual Scottish Open which brings the world’s top golfers to the area), to a series of 9-hole links courses scattered across the islands: Bute, Coll, Colonsay, Gigha, Iona, Islay, Mull, Seil, Tiree.

The ‘course’ on Iona is something of a DIY experience. Forget about Golf carts and caddies – unless you bring your own. You walk three quarters of a mile up a hill to get there. It’s a stretch of machair (special grasses and wild flowers planted to bind and protect against erosion of the sand dunes) that doubles as a free course, with grass kept short by the cattle and sheep that graze it. You can guess the hazards.

There are the long established courses like Helensburgh’s moorland course with input from historical figures like Old Tom Morris and James Braid. There are new ventures like the Isle of Eriska Golfing Centre, with an emerging 9-hole parkland course.

Everywhere you go in Argyll  – from Helensburgh and Lomond, to Cowal, to Mid Argyll, to Kintyre, to Oban and Lorn,  and to the islands – there is a golf course of some description. The variety is challenging.

The one thing that is common to all the Argyll golf courses is the view. Golfing here is something else.

Argyll – with Islay once the seat of the Lords of the Isles, dominating the west coast waters of the British Isles from the Isle of man to Orkney – is about water, glens and hills.

With the Atlantic, the sea lochs, the inland freshwater lochs, the seenmingly endless reach of the Firth of Clyde, the Mull of Kintyre, the Arrochar Alps, Glen Etive to Glencoe, the mass of Mull, the Papa of Jura, the sea snake of Gigha and the sunshine isles of Tiree and Coll hanging together three hours out into the Atlantic – golfers find it hard to keep their eyes on the ball.

Anyone golfing Argyll should plan a tour of types of courses, taking them across the territory and bringing contact with the quite astonishing scenic diversity that characterises Argyll – Scotland’s best kept secret (the positive take on poor-to-dreadful marketing).

If anyone responding to the possibilities of this golfing adventure – which would include ferry journeys and could even involve a seaplane – would like specialist insider information on the courses and the places – contact us through the link in the top menu on this screen. We’ll get you well connected and we’ll give you suggestions from the grandest and most cossetted to the best value experiences of a golfing lifetime.

But Golf Argyll.

Websites for Argyll’s Golf Clubs and Courses

ForArgyll’s Links Directory – accessed in the main site menu at the top of the screen – lists pretty well all of Argyll’s Golf Courses (let us know of any we’ve missed). These richly reward a browse.

A word of warning to site visitors and an urgent prompt to some Golf Clubs – some websites are way out of date.

For visitors – the courses are still in the same place.

For the clubs and courses – get to it. Dead websites make visitors doubt whether facilities still exist and they certainly don’t impress.

If you can’t update your websites regularly, make sure that they don’t carry any date specific information – like annual tournaments and AGMs.

And a major note for VisitScotland

At the time of writing, the VisitScotland website’s home page makes no mention of Drive It Home.

What does it take to get joined up marketing? A campaign is a campaign. It’s in your face or its nowhere. It’s never a secret.

The photograph at the top shows the signature first tee (with its carry over the beach and the river estuary), at Machrihanish Golf Club in Kintyre, designed by Old Tom Morris. The image is by Warbeck and is in the public domain.