Moray Golf Club

Moray Golf Club opened at Lossiemouth on 30 March 1889, on a links Old Tom Morris laid out. He gave it sixteen holes to begin with; within a year the club leased more ground from Sir William Gordon Cumming and made it eighteen. Morris kept coming back and played exhibition matches here in the early years.

The Old Course is a par 71. Sources give the length as 6,592 yards from the back tees or 6,717 depending on the card, and the club also has a second eighteen, the New Course.

What it asks of you

The bunkers are revetted and deep, the fairways roll and are lined with gorse, and the greens are fast. That is a short description of a lot of Scottish links, but at Moray the three work together in a particular way: the gorse narrows the target, the roll takes you into it, and the bunkers wait where the roll ends.

The town sits along one edge of the course and the Moray Firth along another, so the wind has an open run at most of the holes. The eighteenth plays back towards the clubhouse and the town, which is a finish people remember.

Morris routings tend to be simple to read and hard to score on, and this is one of those. Nothing is hidden. That does not make it easier.

What players say about it

Moray takes visitors and is well covered by the Scottish golf press. The points below summarise what recurs. These are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course, and we name and quote no one.

What comes up in its favor

• It is repeatedly described as one of the best links in the north of Scotland and the anchor of the Moray Speyside golf coast.
• The turf and drainage mean it plays well outside the summer, which is not true of every course this far north.
• The Old Tom Morris routing is largely intact after more than a century.
• Value comes up often, with green fees below what a links of this standard would cost elsewhere.
• Having a second eighteen on site makes it worth more than a single round.

What comes up against

• The gorse punishes a wayward drive absolutely, and it is close to the line on several holes.
• Wind off the Firth can make the course a different and much harder proposition.
• It is a long way from the central belt, and visitors reach it on a Moray or Speyside trip rather than a day out.
• At under 6,800 yards it will not stretch a long hitter.

Getting there and when to go

The club is at Lossiemouth on the Moray Firth, six miles north of Elgin and about forty minutes east of Inverness airport.

The links drains well and plays year-round, but May to September gives the best conditions and the long northern evenings. Visitor tee times are booked in advance.

Green fees

Visitor rates are set by the club. See the club’s own site.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location, the club’s published history and encyclopaedic entries for the 1889 opening, the Old Tom Morris design and the extension to eighteen holes, and public course records for par and yardage. Sources disagree on the yardage, so we give both figures rather than choose one. The opinion section summarises public reviews read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we reproduce no quotations.

We have not played this course, and this page is no substitute for a round. The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say over its content. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.