Turnberry began with a railway. In 1899, the Maidens and Dunure Light Railway was announced - a line that would follow the Ayrshire coast from Ayr down to Girvan. The 3rd Marquess of Ailsa, who owned 175 acres of infertile coastal land at Turnberry Green that was useless for agriculture, realised the new line would deliver paying visitors to a quality golf course. He commissioned Willie Fernie - the 1883 Open champion - to design the course, and the architect James Miller to design a five-star hotel. The hotel opened concurrently with the railway station on 17 May 1906. The course was advertised heavily in the national press from the start, intended to draw visitors from across Britain. It worked.

Twice, the resort closed for military use. During the First World War, the Royal Flying Corps trained pilots in aerial gunnery on the course, and the hotel became a hospital. After the war, courses 1 and 2 were rebuilt and renamed Ailsa and Arran, and a memorial to the lost airmen was placed on the hill above the 12th green of the Ailsa course. The same cycle ran through the Second World War: the hotel became a Royal Navy hospital, the courses were paved over for RAF training, and as many as 200 patients - many of them aircrew injured during training flights - died at the base. After 1945, Mackenzie Ross redesigned the Ailsa Course, and the resort reopened in 1951. The 1977 Open was, in a real sense, only possible because the people who rebuilt the course knew what they were rebuilding it from.

Turnberry has changed hands repeatedly. Starwood acquired the hotel in 1997 and ran it under the Westin and then The Luxury Collection brands. In 2008, Leisurecorp - the sport and leisure subsidiary of Dubai World - bought the resort. In 2014, the Trump Organization purchased it; Donald Trump's name has been on the resort ever since. The Trump Organization claims to have spent about 200 million dollars on renovations. Between 2014 and 2019, Trump Turnberry posted total losses of 61 million dollars; the resort lost money for several consecutive years before returning a small profit of 186,000 pounds in 2022. The Ailsa Course was further redesigned by Martin Ebert in 2015-16. In 2017, just before his first presidential inauguration, Donald Trump resigned his directorship of the companies owning Turnberry and passed control to his sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

The Open Championship has been played at Turnberry four times: in 1977, 1986 (Greg Norman, by five strokes), 1994 (Nick Price, by one stroke over Jesper Parnevik), and 2009. The 2009 Open is remembered for 59-year-old Watson coming within a single ball-bounce of winning his sixth Open - his approach shot ran off the back of the 18th green, leading to a bogey and a four-hole playoff he lost to Stewart Cink. The R&A, which runs The Open, has not held the championship at Turnberry since 2009. After the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol, the organisation announced it would not stage The Open at Turnberry while the Trump Organization's connection remained. In 2025, following Trump's return to the U.S. presidency, the new CEO of The R&A said the organisation was doing some "feasibility work" regarding a potential return. Turnberry's standing as a course - the Ailsa was ranked No. 8 in the world by Golf Digest in 2024 - has never been in doubt. Its standing in the Open rota remains an open question.

Stand on the Ailsa Course looking out to sea and you understand what makes Turnberry Turnberry. The volcanic dome of Ailsa Craig rises in the Firth of Clyde, ten miles offshore. Beyond it, on a clear day, you can see the mountains of Arran and the long low arm of the Kintyre peninsula. Turnberry Lighthouse, built in 1873 on the foundations of an older castle, stands on the cliff edge in the middle of the course. The wind comes in off the Atlantic. The light changes by the minute. Whatever else has happened on this stretch of headland - the Bruce family, the railway, the wars, the changes of ownership - the view itself has been the same for a very long time, and it is going to outlast all of us.