The first Major of 2017, the ANA Inspiration, gets underway today on the Dinah Shore Tournament course at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. Next weekend the focus will return to the revered Augusta National for The Masters, which heralds the start of the season for many amateur golfers.

Headline news for March is that we have brand new national number ones for both Canada and New Zealand. These No.1 courses (Cabot Cliffs and Tara Iti) only opened for play in 2015, so we’re sticking our necks out by rating each of these ahead of other well established and World Top 100 ranked household names in our 2017 Canadian Top 100 and 2017 New Zealand Top 50.

Our Editor has been rubbing shoulders with many golf course architects while attending two separate conferences this month, one in the Scottish Highlands and the other in Spain’s Costa del Sol. We’ve published his Scotland report and next month we’ll detail his Spanish exploits, where he’ll compare a few layouts from the RTJ stable with a few designs by the little-known Spanish architect, Francisco Javier Arana.

Also in this month’s edition, our Editor-in-Chief takes a look at the West course at Wentworth and ponders whether or not love will ever return to the once highly rated Burma Road layout that has fallen from grace in the last decade despite multiple renovations costing tens of millions.

Two years ago, when we last reviewed our Canadian Top 100, we mentioned that St George’s had only just held onto its No.1 ranking position and we hinted that Cabot Links might displace it this time around. Well, it just shows you should never try to predict these things because both of these courses have been toppled from the top two chart positions by the latest layout to appear on Cape Breton Island’s west coast.

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Much has happened within the New Zealand golfing landscape since we released our last Top 50 two years ago. The big news is that we have a new Kiwi number one. Tom Doak’s creation at Tara Iti has proven to be far more popular with raters than his other high profile New Zealand design at Cape Kidnappers. Tara Iti will no doubt find its way into our next World Top 100. The question is how high will it debut?

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The ball soars against a vivid backdrop of blues, with the pale blue sky dropping like a curtain onto a deeper blue ocean and the raised sloping green. Drama and beauty meld happily in one terrific short hole…

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A report on the Scottish International Golf Course Architects Conference in Inverness, organised by the Golf Tourism Development Group, a consortium including VisitScotland, Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Development International, Scottish Golf Ltd and the PGA...

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Ten years ago, Wentworth’s West course was ranked in our World Top 100. Looking further back, thirty-eight years, in fact, the Burma Road was listed in Golf Magazine’s inaugural world top fifty. Since then, the West has gradually fallen from favour before tumbling into world ranking obscurity. We detail the latest course changes that will be unveiled at this year's PGA Championship...

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Top 100 Golf Courses of Scotland 2016-2017 was published in Kindle format, which can be enjoyed on any device with Kindle’s free App. This latest title in the Top 100 series is jam-packed full of previously unreleased material and it includes an insight from our Editor and Scottish Correspondent, Jim McCann, who has played every layout in the Scottish hundred.

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