Standing in the middle of Royal Troon Golf Club, host of the 2024 Open Championship, is a single house. Golf Digest’s Shane Ryan dives into how it got there, who lives in it, and what its future holds.
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here on the West Coast of Scotland on the fth of Clyde across from the aisle of Aaron you’ll find Royal trune Golf Club the course hosting its 10th Open championship this week if you know anything about the course itself you probably know it’s a lyns course you might know that players like Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson have won here and you might know the famous postage stamp hole the par 38 where the green looks like yes a postage stamp but there’s something else totally unique going on at Royal trune take a closer look and you’re going to notice something a little bit strange there it is a house smack dab all by itself right in the middle of the course and you think what is this place why is it there who lives in it this is Black Rock House and no exaggeration there is nothing like it in the world of golf the official address of Black Rock House is 14 and 16 Crosby Road this is a two family home we would call it a duplex they have a fancier nicer term they call it a semi Villa but saying it’s on Crosby Road is sort of funny because you can see the actual Crosby Road here and then this little glorified driveway of sorts that leads across the course to this one house alone and on Google Street View you can see the sign that says Private Road access to Black Rock House only but private or not black Black Rock House Now features prominently in any Open Championship that comes to trun because it has this incredible and unprecedented location within the links to the west of the house is the second green to the south of the house is the back te for the third hole immediately east of the house and nearly in the shadow of the front rooms is the par five 16th green and 17th te and directly north is the championship tea for the 18th hole you know the old cliche the best seat in the house this is quite literally it this is a place where you could go window to window could run back and forth and watch five holes of an Open Championship without ever going outside so where does this place come from trun itself is a relatively small town and it was even smaller before 1812 which is when the Duke of Portland built a railroad line from his coal mines in Kil Marik to the coast at trun from there he could use the natural Harbor like a seap port to export his coal to the British Isles and to the rest of the world the town grew and Royal trun golf club was established in 1878 which actually makes it relatively Young by Scotland standards for comparison they were playing golf at St Andrews at least in the 1500s probably earlier and when it was built Royal TR there were just six holes and if you look back at the plans for that original course you’ll see here right in the middle of it all black rock Cottages which means that a house already stood on this spot when the first golfer hit a shot at Royal trun in 1878 the course is approaching its 150th anniversary but there have been buildings in this exact spot for closer to 250 years now why is it called Black Rock House that one’s easy the name comes from the black rocks that sit between royal trun and the water if you go back to that original course map you’re going to see those rocks highlighted in fact they feature in a lot of old and current maps of trun and were actually used as a convenient beit risky place to dock boats way back in the day as you see if you take a short trip North this isn’t far from the harbor and the port around which the town was built now the history gets a little bit murky it’s not clear whether Black Rock House itself had a role in fishing in shun’s early history more than likely it did its positioned near the sea suggests it was built to House people who work the coastline in fact the buildings that now serve as the greenkeeping sheds for Royal trun these were originally fisherman cottages known as Lobster ow here you can see them in an IM Macintosh book published in 1974 on the history of Royal trune scroll down from that image and you’ll see this early photo of Black Rock House in the same spot where it stands today the house that now stands was built in the 1920s and we know a little bit about the owners you may have never heard the name Greer Carson but if you lived in the 1940s you would have she was a Hollywood star who actually won a best actress Oscar for a movie called Mrs Miner and believe it or not she’s the most famous resident of Black Rock House her brother Douglas a local doctor he owned the place and she would stay with him during the Summers by 2004 we know from a New York Times piece that a man named David Kelly a merchant Banker he owned half of it and the other half was owned by a woman named Anne Lamont seems to have come on the market around 2007 for about £850,000 or the equivalent of close to a million dollars the joke they made in the Daily Record was that you need a million to buy it and another 2 million to fix the broken windows and by 2016 one half of it was owned by a man named Paul Gregory he had bought it as a summer home the obvious question though with black rock house is why is it still standing or why at least hasn’t Royal trun bought it we don’t know the answer to that historically but we do know from Paul Gregory in that 2016 piece that in his time there the club never even approached him about buying the proper property and he had lived there 7 years by that point maybe at one time long before him they tried and they were refused but at this point it’s such an iconic part of the course that maybe they don’t even want to buy it much less to get rid of it today when the Open Championship comes around the house is put to very good use the owners as you might guess sometimes rented out or they have a bunch of friends over and on the property there are corporate tents Hospitality tents and it’s fully integrated with the championship itself as long as the Waters of the fth of Clyde stay right where they are Black Rock house isn’t going anywhere either it’s a fixture of Royal trun a part of the nine opens that came before and a Silent Witness to the drama that will unfold outside these walls in all the Championships to come
11 Comments
The first one yehhhh❤q
👍
Cool video
Greer Garson
Well researched video. The original route to get to Blackrock cottages was along an extension of South Beach straight past where the clubhouse now stands. The edge of the route is the reason for a prominent slope on the practice putting green. Also, until the 1960's there was a small fishermans cottage close to Blackrock house, that was used to hang nets. It's removal was not received well with some members, and it must have been an interesting hazard for the 3rd tee shot. The stone flooring can still be seen, if you know where to look.
Black rock huh?
Hmmm 🤔
Greer Garson was my great aunt (we called her aunt Eileen as that was her first name)
I was very young at the time but our family was lucky enough to see Arnold Palmer win the Open there in 1962.
Fun fact, there is actually a secret entrance to a crawlspace behind the bookcase on the west wall and down there is a very old photo album with a picture of me writing this comment because I made the whole thing up. Enjoy the Open everyone!
I want to live there.
I’d be paranoid about getting smacked by a golf ball every time I went in the garden
Anybody have any predictions for this years Open Championship??
I like the House a lot, I wish it was mine, or at least 1/2 of it. If it was on Augusta property it would have been removed years back, I like that it is part of Royal Troon, and stayed as the tract grew to 18 holes.