Helensburgh Golf Club

Helensburgh sits on the north shore of the Firth of Clyde in Dunbartonshire, a planned Georgian town of grid-pattern streets, birthplace of television pioneer John Logie Baird and within sight of Loch Lomond to the north. Helensburgh Golf Club was founded in August 1893, with a nine-hole layout in play by that October; the course was extended to eighteen holes by 1905 under club professional Tom Turnbull, who went on to serve the club for fifty years. James Braid visited in the 1920s and made changes to the layout still in place today. The course is moorland, gently undulating, with views over Loch Lomond and the Clyde Estuary, and draws membership mostly from the town itself. The first clubhouse was a corrugated tin hut costing around £350, later sold to Vale of Leven Golf Club for £35 in 1910; the present clubhouse opened in October 1909, formally by the Duke of Argyll. Additional ground was purchased in 1978 and is kept for maintenance rather than play. The course measures 6,104 yards against a par of 69 and a standard scratch score of 70; the record of 62 was set by Simon Barras, aged sixteen, on 3 July 2005, improving on Alan Scott's 64 from June 1985.