CONTROVERSIAL plans to build a golf course on a protected Scottish beach could generate millions for the Highland economy while helping to combat depopulation problems that have persisted since the Clearances, one of Scotland’s leading economists has said.
Speaking to the Sunday National, Professor David Bell said SNP ministers should give the green light to proposals to develop a course at Coul Links, near Dornoch, in order to create an economic “cluster” that could benefit the whole of Scotland.
US golf developer Mike Keiser initially proposed a golf course on the Sutherland coast near the famed Royal Dornoch club in 2015, but concerns about its environmental impact led to its rejection by Scottish Government ministers in 2020.
Locals concerned about the loss of opportunity for the area then organised under the Communities for Coul (C4C) banner to submit a renewed proposal, which was approved by Highland Council but is now once again before SNP ministers for a final decision.
If approved, Keiser would step in to construct a course designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore, two of the world’s most renowned golf architects.
Bell said that the co-location of a Coore & Crenshaw course at Coul Links (which would be their first joint project in Europe) and the Royal Dornoch club (which is consistently ranked in the world’s top five courses by Golf Digest) would create a major draw for international golfers to stay longer in the area, boosting hotels, restaurants, and other local businesses.
“[At Dornoch], there's serious excess demand for tee times during the summer, but what tends to happen is that because there isn't another high-quality course in the immediate vicinity, people come up, play, and leave,” he said.
Bell said a pay-to-play golf course at Coul Links could create an economic “cluster” with benefits across the whole country – including for golf education at the University of the Highlands and Islands’ Dornoch base.
“Let's say you start off at something like 15,000 rounds [at] just over £300, that will generate about £5 million,” he said. “That's a completely new injection into the local economy [that] would have immediate economic benefits and create opportunities for young people, which is one of the key concerns about the area.”
The Stirling University professor, who has advised the Scottish, UK, and Irish governments over more than 40 years as an economist, was born and raised in Dornoch and moved back there six years ago.
He went on: “Sutherland has the lowest population density in the whole of the UK. It's 2000 square miles and 13,000 people. Its population was double that way back in the 1840s, before the Clearances.
“There has been a tradition of young people – like me – leaving the county after the end of school and going to seek their fortune elsewhere.
“The community is getting older and older and older, and it seems to me that unless we provide more jobs for younger people, eventually it would be difficult for the area to be sustainable.”
“As an economist, I tend to always see things in trade-offs,” he added. “If you value preserving the site exactly as it currently is, then you are implicitly saying the revenues that would have been generated don't matter that much.”
Gordon Sutherland, a director of the C4C campaign group, made a similar argument.
“The way I see this is if you go to Florida, you have Universal, and you've got Disney right next to each other,” he said. “There's a reason why, because two world-class businesses next to each other attract more people collectively than splitting it between two different locations.”
Like Bell, Sutherland has worked on the campaign without payment because of what he sees as an unmissable opportunity for the Dornoch area, where he used to run a B&B. He quips that he is “fully retired – apart from this, which has taken up six years of my life”.
Sutherland said that C4C had only launched after polling run by election management firm Civica showed that around 70% of locals were in support of the proposal.
“We physically sat in the Dornoch library handwriting all the names and addresses of everybody who lived in East Sutherland, from Brora down through to Dornoch,” he said. “Almost 5000 names were handwritten to make sure that the ballot, when we did it, had legitimacy.”
The proposals have met stiff opposition, however, with more than 20,000 people backing an RSPB petition calling for ministers to prevent it going ahead.
Sutherland conceded that he may feel differently about the development if he were not so close to it – but insisted that the national campaign groups had it wrong.
“If I had read this in the newspaper, a golf course that's going to be built on a triple-protected area, I probably would be saying ‘that can't happen’,” he said.
“But the devil's in the details, and it's the deterioration of the condition of Coul Links … It's obvious to local people. You can see it with the naked eye.”
Sutherland said he had seen the habitat change in his lifetime, and that it needed more protection than the government’s environment agency, NatureScot, currently provides.
“I've been going there every year since I was born, and there was actually a rock that you used to dive off that is now under the sand,” Sutherland said.
“The developer – which is not us, by the way, I hadn't even met the landowner when I started this – is committed to working with NatureScot to restore the whole of the area at Coul Links, not just the periphery of the golf course, the whole 317 hectares.
“The golf course will generate a lot of income, and that income can be used to fund the restoration project, whereas at the moment NatureScot are doing their best, but they can only spend about £20,000 a year on the whole site.
“The golf course footprint [is 14.7 hectares and] includes the roughs, the pass, the fairway, everything – but in return you get effectively a 20 times multiple of that area being restored.”
Leading environmental charities, including the RSPB, National Trust for Scotland, and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, have grouped together under the “Conservation Coalition” banner to oppose the development.
Sutherland said that “very few, if any, of these groups have actually visited Coul Links”, and argued that using some of the site for a golf course in order to preserve the rest was “better for the environment than the status quo”.
Scottish Government ministers are expected to make a decision on the Coul Links site in the coming months. Earlier this year, a Freedom of Information request revealed that planning officials had recommended that the application be refused.
