LETHAM GRANGE GOLF CLUB MEMBERS BID TO SAVE COURSES

Playing a shot to the 18th green on the main course with the Letham Grange Hotel building in the background (image by Cal Carson Golf Agency).

FROM THE SPORT.SCOTSMAN.COM WEBSITE
http://sport.scotsman.com/
By Martin Dempster
Golf club members of Letham Grange, which sits a few miles inland from Arbroath, are facing a race against time in a bid to take over the running of the two courses at the Angus venue after it became the second Scottish golf resort to shut down in the space of a few weeks.
Hot on the heels of the Machrie Hotel and Golf Links on Islay going into liquidation, the doors have also been closed at Letham Grange due to an ongoing legal dispute over ownership that has resulted in the resort's management being unable to secure investment to keep trading.

The two courses, one of which was designed by leading golf course architect Donald Steel and opened by Sir Henry Cotton, the three-times Open champion, shortly before he died in 1987, have lain dormant for nearly a fortnight and now the club's 450 members are actively trying to come up with a proposal to rescue them.

"They (the resort management) have already invested a lot of money and are aware it will take another substantial investment if the courses are left to rack and ruin and then have to be brought back up to the current standard," the club secretary, Gardiner Arthur, told "The Scotsman."
"We have held a couple of meetings to see if it is possible if we can operate the courses on behalf of the members, hopefully for potential visitors as well, as we have two magnificent courses here. We are polling members for ideas. To make a full commitment in terms of fees (for a year) is possibly a hard thing to do. It could be we try and support things on a monthly basis at first. But it will depend on favourable things going our way."

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+At least two representatives of clubs/parties who have made bookings for outings at Letham Grange later in the year have contacted Scottishgolfview.com, asking if they are going to lose their desposits. These bookings, of course, would be handled by the Letham Grange Hotel management not by the golf club which is based there.