Long before anyone thought of a railway hotel here, a ballot box bore the words "Cruden Golf Club 1791." It is an authenticated object, and it hints that golf may have been played on this stretch of Aberdeenshire coast as far back as the eighteenth century. The club as it stands came more than a century later. In 1899 the Great North of Scotland Railway Company opened a course laid out by Old Tom Morris and Archie Simpson. The same railway raised a luxurious hotel of pink granite, known as the Palace in the Sandhills. The railway hoped for another Gleneagles. It did not get one. The hotel came down in 1952. Money was tight through the 1950s, and the club and course nearly fell by the wayside until three local businessmen stepped in and saved Cruden Bay from extinction. A clubhouse rose in 1961 on the hotel's footprint, then gave way in turn to the present one in 1998. It stands on the bluff, with tall upstairs windows looking down over a valley of golf bordered by a line of dunes along the North Sea. The old wooden clubhouse survives below, refurbished beside the first tee and now a golfing museum, reached by a path finished in 2020. It is well worth stepping inside before you play. Cruden Bay sits only twenty miles north of Aberdeen, yet it feels remote and raw. The dunes seem more Irish than Scottish, huge, craggy and fearsome, some as tall as three-storey buildings. In 1926 Tom Simpson and Herbert Fowler reworked the layout but left many of the original green sites and much of the routing intact, and little has changed since. The holes wind in a figure of eight, and many are tucked into separate pockets of sandhills, so the round feels intimate. Tees are cut high into the dunes, fairways hump and hollow toward punchbowl greens nestled in dells, and the steely sea is never far away. The fourth, Port Erroll, tells you what kind of place this is. It is 193 yards, played from an elevated tee carved out of one sandhill, across a deep grassy hollow, to an elevated green carved out of the next. It plays straight toward the sea and often into the wind. The Water of Cruden runs along the left, with the old fishing village of Port Erroll on its far bank and the harbour visible beyond. The shot must carry straight and all the way. Somewhere near the third or fourth, Trygve Gran took off on 30 July 1914 and flew to Norway, the first person to cross the North Sea by air. Some call the course quirky. Others call it a masterpiece. The short par 4s at three, eight and fourteen, the trio of par 3s at four, fifteen and sixteen, the blind drives and back-to-back short holes all make for entertainment. Yet the two intricate par 5s, the sixth and thirteenth, and the vexing seventeenth with its towering center-line mound and plateau green, reward a slower kind of attention. In 2014 Tom Mackenzie of Mackenzie & Ebert moved the ninth to the left, out to the edge of the cliff. He relocated the tenth tees for a new diagonal carry, softened the front surrounds of the sixteenth green and reshaped some bunkers in a naturalized style. The work may be thought a major upgrade or a modest one. To some eyes its twenty-first-century shaping sits a little out of step with the simply constructed greens and old-fashioned fairway turf around it. Then there is St. Olaf, a nine-hole loop of 2,463 yards with four par 3s and five par 4s. Its greens were shaped by Simpson and Fowler in 1925 and are more interestingly contoured than those of the main course. It meanders through the wrinkled central valley before a striking pair of par 3s in the eastern dunes. Play it, or at least walk it. Then climb back to those upstairs windows and spend the rest of the day looking down on the sandhills.