You reach Brora by the A9, about twenty miles north of Dornoch, after a drive that skirts the westerly edge of Loch Fleet, passes through Golspie and offers a glimpse of Dunrobin Castle before the coast opens out again. By the time the village appears, the road has already done some of the course's work. You arrive half-convinced that the Highlands owe you something, and Brora pays. The club was founded in 1891 with nine holes. John Sutherland, Secretary of Royal Dornoch, stretched it to eighteen about a decade later, and J.H. Taylor made changes after a visit. Then came James Braid, commissioned in 1923 or 1924, who spent a single day on this ground and drew up plans for a new course. Little has changed since. There is something moving in that economy: one day of walking, and a design that has endured for a century. Brora has kept faith with what Braid saw. What he saw was rumpled linksland, the ground heaving in folds of two to ten feet, exactly the scale at which golf becomes interesting. His routing is the old out-and-back. The front nine runs along the beachside ridge, hugging the North Sea with nothing tall enough to obscure it, and no other course in Scotland puts so many holes so close to the water. That is the glory and the cost. When the wind blows, you hold on to your hat. The 2nd tee announces all this. It sits on a small promontory right beside the beach, and from it the whole coastline unrolls in one arresting sweep. Concentration becomes the real hazard here. The course measures only 6,211 yards from the back, no championship length, yet playing to handicap is an achievement, because the greens are hard to hit, harder to read, and fast. The sea keeps pulling your eyes away from them. The outward half ends at the 9th, the Sea Hole, a 162-yard par three with the North Sea as a rather large lateral hazard. Then the round turns inland, and the character of Brora shifts. For some the homeward holes feel quieter, solid rather than dramatic. For others the land grows richer here, and the round climbs to its peak at the 16th, which mounts a large knoll, and the 17th, which tumbles off it. The finish is a par three demanding a carry over a deep gully to a green that seems too close to the clubhouse for comfort. Braid's greens throughout have just enough contour to sharpen each hole's strategy while still feeling at home in the terrain. Then there are the animals. Brora is also a crofting site, and sheep and cattle have long shared its fairways. Since the 1960s electric fences have ringed the greens, with plastic sleeves on some sections so golfers can step over safely. Visitors love the livestock. Members, weary of trampled bunkers and drops from dung, have felt otherwise. The club bought the land in 2019 and later voted to remove the grazing herds. The crofters, who hold a historic right to graze here, took the matter before the Scottish Land Court. So the course's oldest charm is also its deepest quarrel. Peter Thomson, five times Open champion, fell for Brora in the mid-1990s, long before it was widely recognised, returned regularly, and called it his favourite course in the world. "When James Braid first set eyes on the land that is now Brora Golf Club," he said, "he must have felt the same elation I did, many years later, when I first saw what he had designed on this precious piece of linksland." Anyone driving north to Dornoch should keep going a little further.