THE GOLF COURSES OF THE BRITISH ISLES BY BERNARD DARWIN ILLUSTRATED BY HARRY ROUNTREE LONDON DUCKWORTH & CO. 3 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN All rights reserved Published 1910...

Some dozen or fifteen years ago the historian of the London golf courses would have had a comparatively easy task. He would have said that there were a few courses upon public commons, instancing, as he still would to-day, Blackheath and Wimbledon. He might have dismissed in a line or two a course that a few mad barristers were trying to carve by main force out of a swamp thickly covered with gorse and heather near Woking. All the other courses would have been lumped together under some such des

Now leaving the heather, we must turn to some of the other substances upon which Londoners play their weekly golf. On the course of the Mid-Surrey Golf Club in the Old Deer Park at Richmond there are probably more rounds of golf played throughout the whole year than on any other golf course in the three kingdoms. You may go down to Richmond on any day of the year, on which it is not snowing, and be sure of finding a good many people who have managed to get a day off and are spending it in playin

There is always something stirring in a roll of illustrious names, and for the mere sensual pleasure of writing them I set them down in order at the beginning of the chapter—Sandwich, Deal, Prince’s, Littlestone, and Rye, in the counties of Kent and Sussex. Each of the five has devoted adherents who will maintain its merits against the world in heated argument, but there can be little doubt which has the right to come first. It would be showing a sad disrespect to golfing history, very recent hi

It would clearly be unbecoming to treat the western and south-western courses in strict geographical order, because there is one honoured name which must come first, that of Westward Ho! —the oldest seaside golf course in England. The Royal North Devon Club was founded in 1864, and when the golf at Westward Ho! was in its infancy it was fostered and encouraged by Mr. George Glennie of St. Andrews celebrity, who played much of his golf at Blackheath, so that the famous flinty old course on the he

Of the many good courses in East Anglia, I have the tenderest and most sentimental association with Felixstowe , because it was there that I began to play golf. Till quite lately, however, I had not seen the course for a very long while, and my recollections of it were those of a small boy of eight or nine years old. The small boy wore a flannel shirt, brown holland knickerbockers, and bare legs, from which the sun had removed nearly all vestiges of skin. He used to dodge in and out among the cr

Of all the links in the north of England, Hoylake comes first on account of its historic traditions, the eminence of its golfing sons, and, as I think at least, its own intrinsic merits. At Hoylake the golfing pilgrim is emphatically on classic ground. As he steps out of the train that has brought him from Liverpool he will gaze with awe-struck eyes upon surroundings in which the irreverent might see nothing out of the ordinary. “Perhaps it was here,” he will muse, “that the youthful Johnny Ball

With an open mind and a golfing friend I started in the month of March on a short pilgrimage to the courses of Yorkshire and the Midlands. Two rounds a day on a new course, to be followed by some hours of travelling, constitute a strenuous life for the ordinary golfer, although no doubt it is mere child’s play to the great ‘showmen’ of golf, as Mr. Croome has christened them. On my remarking on this point to my companion that we now knew what it must feel like to be Braid or Taylor, he replied t

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge are rich in many things, but are very decidedly poor in the matter of golf courses. I should be more precise if I said poor in their own courses, for in Frilford Heath and Worlington (or as it is often called, Mildenhall) they are lucky to possess hospitable neighbours, who provide them with very delightful golf indeed. The courses of Cambridge I know very well indeed, having played over them at intervals during the greater part of my life. With those of

By a Long Handicap Man. I should like at the outset briefly to explain who I am and why I am writing this chapter. I am known to every golfer—I play fairly regularly, generally on a Saturday afternoon, sometimes in the evening during the summer; I am genuinely keen on the game, and can honestly say that I devote a good deal of thought and attention to it; I enter for all the competitions at my club, but my name rarely appears on the list of those who have returned scores—my card is generally tor

Really to know the links of St. Andrews can never be given to the casual visitor. It is not perhaps necessary to be one of those old gentlemen who tell us at all too frequent intervals that golf was golf in their young days, that we of to-day are solely occupied in the pursuit of pots and pans, and that Sir Robert Hay, with his tall hat and his graduated series of spoons, would have beaten us, one and all, into the middle of the ensuing week. Such a degree of senile decay is fortunately not esse

There is probably no other golfing centre that is quite so good as Gullane , in the East Lothian. If the golfer can only get up early enough in the morning, and has the strength to do it, he can play on seven courses on one long summer’s day. At his very door is a trinity of courses—Gullane, New Gullane, and New Luffness—which, to the eye of the stranger, are indistinguishable the one from the other. From Gullane Hill to the Luffness Club-house is one huge stretch of turf, and such turf! the fin

Gullane is usually cited as the headquarters from which it is possible to play the largest number of rounds in one day, each round being on a different course, but it is by no means certain that the distinction which is thus given to East Lothian does not really belong to Prestwick and Troon. As one approaches Prestwick, the train seems to be voyaging through one endless and continuous golf course—Gailes, Barassie, Bogside—I write them down pell-mell as they come into my head—Prestwick, St. Nich

There is no country where the golfers are more keen or more hospitable than in Ireland, and the friendliness with which the inhabitants welcome their guests is only equalled by the earnestness with which they endeavour, and very often successfully, to beat them. It is a fine country for a golfing holiday, and this fact is now so thoroughly appreciated that Englishmen and Scotsmen pour over to the Irish courses every summer, and more especially to the particular course on which the Irish Champion

There are several very excellent courses in Wales, but I am quite determined to put Aberdovey first—not that I make for it any claim that it is the best, not even on the strength of its alphabetical pre-eminence, but because it is the course that my soul loves best of all the courses in the world. Every golfer has a course for which he feels some such blind and unreasoning affection. When he is going to this his golfing home he packs up his clubs with a peculiar delight and care; he anxiously co