Golf in Scotland
BY FRANK MORAN.
YOUR ideas and mine as to the place and the programme when you have arrived may be as poles apart, but we stand on common ground at any rate in this—that if you are thinking of having a golf holiday in Scotland I think you are right. My own preference is-for a spell beside a golf course, seaside rather than country, with complete liberty to play when and as little or as much as I like. All the stuff of an ideal holiday is there. I have no envy of the luxury cruisers and I am never tempted to try newspaper competitions which offer these cruises as prizes ; nor am I likely to be found among the tired tourists who, per Mr. A. P. Herbert, say in weary tones :
Oh, Mr. Baedeker ! We've reached page four, And, Oh, Mr. Baedeker, we can't do any more."
I have sometimes dreamed dreams with for their starting point a chic Dublin nurse taking a ticket from among the millions with my name on it and then Derby day suitably endorsing the accident. The end of one of these dreams is a private golf course, which contains holes in imitation of famous ones and others which have possibly no other claim to inclusion in such an eclectic lay-out than that I like them. The brothers of the Ailsa or " Postage Stamp," and the High Hole in, and the Het Girdle, Perfection, the Powburn hole and that wonderful hollow through which the fifth at Cruden Bay takes its way and others, known and obscure, would all be there.
My dream course would have the advantage of giving you the joy of all these in one round. Meantime you will be entertained and interested to the top of your golfing bent if you go to each of them in the original and play it with its present company. My little list embraces, in the order in which I have named the holes, Troon, St. Andrevis, the King's Course at Gleneagles Hotel, the North Berwick old course, fine old Prestwick and, finally, the Aberdeen coast. Pray do not hurriedly surmise that I suggest you do these in your next golf holiday, or I should have Mr. Baedeker looking like a bath-chairman. But although I jotted down the holes at random they have produced a sequence of courses that are well worth visiting at some time or other. Golfers heard a good deal some little time ago about the " inside to out " theory. For holiday purposes we can borrow it from technique and apply it to topography ; it is the general holiday direction for the majority of us. We make the annual movement from the centre (or centres) to the fringe. There are golfers who set their holiday aims high ; they want to play in the track of the Champions, to set their game, be it ever so humble, against the tests of the famous links. In Scotland they can have a variety of experience which is, I should say, unbeatable. Muirfield, Prestwick, _St. Andrews and Troon are at once indicated, and four golfers picked at random to cast merit marks might well present you with four orders of precedence for these famous courses. My own allocation of the marks for them is neither here nor there at the moment, but for a good many golfers these courses set a harder task than 'is compatible with holiday essentials. In the " inside to out " process which I have indicated there are many places which, while they never get into newspaper headlines, we may visit in the assurance that they hold many crowded hours of the pleasantest kind of golf. It is a mistake to be too conservatively-minded in our holiday choice. I appreciate that deep sentiment the golfer feels for this or that course and how regularly it takes him back there, but without scrapping his allegiance and with but temporary sacrifice now and then he would do himself a service in seeing and playing over the courses that appeal to other folks in that way. The cutting away from our beaten track is adventure in itself ; the pleasures of the by-way courses are worth while exploring even against the known credentials of the places where the holiday ballot is busiest.
Some courses come readily to my memory and if space and the mention of only a few make me look invidious I do not name them arbitrarily. I hope that readers will understand that there are many more excellent courses in Scotland than I briefly discuss. I have seen a good many of them and in some degree I like them all, but there are some which never get into the limelight of tournaments where " The haunted air of twilight is very strange and still And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind."
In getting right away from the centre there is Machrihanish in one direction, Dornoch in another. I am glad to make the
amende honorable to the delightful sporting course on the Argyllshire coast because when I wrote before in these page, on Scottish courseS - I had a: prompt query after publica n, " Why on earth did you miss Machrihanish ? " Its laN -out does not put you through the modern mill, but there k rich fun in its carries and dells and blind holes. The turf of Dornoch is matter for rapture. Roger Wethered thinks as highly of Dornoch as Bobby Jones does of ' St. Andrews. The old course at Turnberry is hard to beat from. that ;Joint of view ; and if may finally single out a •cours.: for holiday interest and superb setting, there is Millport. I have no special brief for it ; it is an island that, like other resorts, wants to be visited, but I can say that, once there, the golf visitor will probably want to go there again.
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