Blasted Heaths and Blessed Green: A Golfer's Pilgrimage to the Courses of Scotland

The author journeys through the lush countryside and rolling shores that bespeak the essence of golf. A companion to "Emerald Fairways and Foam-flecked Seas", this provides a grand tour of Scottish links, complete with course information and workable itineraries.

Chapter One

Edinburgh and Points East

It was a morning in August, the sun was fighting a losing battle with the thick cumulus clouds above the city, and I was playing alone. I had examined the line of my putt on the first green with some care -- after all, how many 12-footers for birdie can I reasonably expect to have these days? -- and now took my stance at the ball, striving to avoid a death grip on the putter. Just as I was about to draw the club back, a second ball crept silently into my peripheral vision. Startled, I straightened up and walked toward the offending sphere. Then I stopped. There was no one in sight as I looked back up the fairway. Of course there wasn't. I smiled at the realization that someone had just driven the green on this blind 325-yard opening hole, where the last 150 yards are steeply downhill and likely to be as fast as an Olympic bobsled chute.

I missed my putt and proceeded to the second tee, the sting of the blown birdie opportunity assuaged by the knowledge that the happiest golfer in Edinburgh was playing right behind me. He would be starting his day with a shot at an eagle. Golf at Braid Hills is nothing if not exhilarating.

This is city golf (green fee less than $15, call ahead for a starting time), on the south side of town and all of 10 minutes from Princes Street, the sparkling main thoroughfare of the capital, with its monuments and sunken gardens on one side and its engaging hodgepodge of shops, banks, clubs, and hotels on the other. Play began here on September 5, 1889, two years before the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers first tested its links at Muirfield. In fact, the Honourable Company was given the opportunity to acquire the land at Braid Hills for its new course and politely declined. The rest of the world must be eternally grateful, for the city then stepped in and promptly built its first municipal course, Braids No. 1. Thirty years later, Braids No. 2 opened for play.

A quick scan of the scorecard for Braids No. 1 may prove disappointing. How, you ask, can anyone take seriously a course that, from the back of the tees, measures all of 5,731 yards against a par of 70; where four of the two-shotters are under 300 yards and five more are between 300 and 350 yards; and where, as we have seen, the opening hole -- the blind fairway beyond the crest is among the world's widest -- is ludicrously easy? But the 2nd, 134 yards, climbs almost vertically to a vast level green with a steep falloff on its left flank. And now the game is on: narrow plateau fairways to be hit and held; gorse-covered hillsides (like those at Royal Dornoch, a blaze of gold in spring) to be given a wide berth; frequent rock outcroppings topped with gorse or long grasses or both; even more frequent humps and hillocks and hollows; doglegs both sharp, as on the 8th, and gentle, as on the long sweeping downhill 11th; tees high and cruelly exposed to the winds (this is the "breezy Braids"); greens on perilous ledges or in lovely dell-like settings. And all of it roams across this splendid hillside, with its distractingly gorgeous views -- which explain the presence of strollers, hikers, and joggers with whom we must share this common ground. To say nothing of the schoolboys, whose cries of success can be heard from time to time as they uncover yet another lost ball in the impenetrable gorse. They will soon be along to offer a bargain buy. It is all part of the rough and tumble of the game here.

Admittedly, there are four or five pedestrian holes. But there are many more that range from good to great. The memorable 202-yard 13th, for instance, rises gently on a lofty ridge, over broken ground to a tightly bunkered green where nothing less than a perfectly struck wood -- often a driver -- will suffice. Then we must be prepared to repeat that perfect driver swing immediately, for the 378-yard 14th calls for a long forced-carry from an elevated tee across a gorse-covered slope to the safety of a hidden landing area in the valley far below. That accomplished, we are now left with a medium iron over another expanse of the fearsome gorse to the haven of the green.

A word about the last hole. It is a par four of 261 yards. From a knob, we drive across a deep swale into a steep hillside pocked with mounds. If our drive is long, it is also blind, cresting the hill and disappearing. If our drive is short, then our second shot is blind. In either case, we arrive at the green to drink in one of the three or four most intoxicating panoramas in all of golf: Arthur's Seat; the city of Edinburgh, including the Castle on its crag; the Firth of Forth, with Fife on the far shore, Gullane and North Berwick and Bass Rock a bit nearer out the East Lothian coast; the Pentland Hills and the Lammemuir Hills. It is the summation of all the splendid views that have accompanied us on our delightful round.

It is common in Scotland for golf clubs to grow up around municipal courses. The town -- as, for instance, is the case with St. Andrews, Carnoustie, and Montrose, as well as Edinburgh -- owns the courses, while the club owns only its clubhouse. Here at the Braids there are five golf clubs: Braids United, the Harrison, Edinburgh Western, Edinburgh Thistle, and Allermuir.

The first time I played Braids No. 1 it was in the company of Norman "Norrie" Robertson, Secretary of the Braids United Golf Club. An RAF pilot in World War II, he had received his flight training at Pensacola. He was 65 years old when we met and playing to an 8. He had been scratch in his prime.

"You may know that Tommy Armour developed his game here," he said. "He won the championship of Edinburgh Western. That was in 1919. And James Braid -- no, no, Braid Hills is not named after him -- was champion of the Thistle, Edinburgh Thistle, in 1892, which would not have been long after the course opened. Yes, they both played here when they were young men and it did their game no harm."

I asked Norrie whether he had ever won the championship of Braids United.

"As a matter of fact," he said, "I have -- four times running, '59, '60, '61, '62. But I must confess," he laughed, "there is no name like Armour or Braid sharing the champions' plaque with me. I will tell you, however, that Ben Crenshaw is an honorary member of Braids United."

A little later he said that his brothers had also won the club championship. "Ed's name is up for '46 and '47, Albert's for '37, '41, and '42. They were both much older than I."

When we reached the 9th, a superb one-shotter of 175 yards where the green, on a knob, is slightly above the tee and there is a falloff front and left and gorse on the right, Norrie said, "Albert once hit the most remarkable shot on this hole. It was in the early forties. You cannot imagine how fast, how fiery fast, this course once played, the way the links courses all used to play in high summer -- yes, I know this is not a links, but it is very like one, isn't it? Well, on this particular day a powerful wind was blowing, and Albert was playing right into the very teeth of it here on the 9th. Any ordinary shot would have gotten up in the air, then blown right back in his face. But the ground was like a motorway, so he took out his putter -- Albert was very strong -- and cracked his tee shot right onto the green, a 175-yard putt that never left the ground, just skimmed along on that burnt-out, frictionless surface and wound up traveling the full distance. They still talk about it."

Norrie also spoke of the No. 2 course, cocking his head back and looking heavenward. I followed his gaze and, to my astonishment, could make out golfers silhouetted against the sky. If Braids No.1 is on the heights, then Braids No. 2 is on the peaks. The notion of even climbing to that altitude, let alone playing golf shots on those vertiginous slopes, was beyond my grasp.

"It's much shorter," Norrie said, "only about 4,800 yards, but it's tighter and not to be thought of as a place fit only for women and children. Indeed not.

"It was up there that the 'mock city' was built at the start of World War II. It was a decoy -- not real houses, you understand, that people could actually live in. But from thousands of feet in the air, from German bombers, it was deceptive. So if they had attempted to bomb Edinburgh, they might have been fooled into dropping their bombs on Braid Hills instead of on the heart of the city.

"But it's this course, the No. 1, that is the marvel. In season it is always covered with golfers from dawn till dark. That's why I am also a member of the Bruntsfield Links Golfing Society, over in the Davidson's Mains section of the city. It's a private club that has its own eighteen. There's no trouble getting on the course there. But" -- and now a note of confidentiality crept into his voice -- "I could never leave the Braids. Ah, the Braids...to play here...the wonderful naturalness of it and the beauty and the thrill of the shots themselves...this is the game."

Norrie Robertson's "other" course, Bruntsfield Links, is short on thrills, and scenically it cannot approach his beloved Braids. Still, it is a perfectly pleasant layout. So is its next-door neighbor, Royal Burgess. As you would expect, Edinburgh has a number of good courses, most of them of the parkland variety. At Duddingston, for example, the sinuous Figgate Burn comes between player and target no fewer than 11 times in the course of the round. At Dalmahoy, a bona fide country club, there are two eighteens (the 6,700-yard East Course, on which the Solheim Cup was played in 1992, is the serious one), squash, horseback riding, loch trout fishing, clay pigeon shooting, archery, and a classically elegant clubhouse/hotel built in 1725 (with a flying external double staircase, no less!) for the 13th Earl of Morton. The Musselburgh Golf Club, at Monktonhall, forgives the less than accurate tee shot and offers a nice feeling of solitude. It is not to be confused with Royal Musselburgh, considerably tighter thanks mainly to trees, or with the historic Musselburgh Old Course, where, in the sixteenth century, Mary Queen of Scots is supposed to have whacked a ball, and where -- this is not a matter of supposition -- six Opens were contested, the last in 1889. Generally believed to be the oldest unchanged course in the world, it was once the home, concurrently, of the Honourable Company (they moved from here to Muirfield), Royal Musselburgh, and Royal Burgess. This nine-hole Old Course is located in the middle of a racetrack, and your first impression is of a dust bowl with, here and there, a flagstick. Nevertheless, this is hallowed ground, so you may want to park your car at the grandstand and have a look. Like the Braids, it gets plenty of play, and steps are now being taken to spruce it up. The trick will be to improve its condition without destroying its irreplaceable sense of times long past.

Edinburgh, it need scarcely be said, has a number of good hotels in the center of town (the Balmoral, the Caledonian, and the George, to name just three) and in its environs (Dalhousie Castle, Prestonfield House). There is one other accommodation, however, that I must mention, and it is not a hotel. It is Rosslyn Castle, in Roslin, no more than 20 minutes from down-town, yet isolated on a wooded and rocky promontory high above the river North Esk. Don't be put off by the name. A mere fragment of its fifteenth-century splendor, this dwelling sleeps just seven. There is no housekeeper, no cook, no help of any kind. Still, it is entirely manageable and, of course, wonderfully atmospheric, though perhaps it does not provide all the comforts of home; getting it warm enough in early October proved an insoluble problem, but stick to the summer and you won't have to worry about that. My wife and I occupied it for a week in 1986 while I was playing a number of the Edinburgh courses. You rent it from the Landmark Trust, which has its headquarters outside London.

Beyond Musselburgh, and sticking to the coast road (A198) along the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, we drive through Prestonpans and pretty Aberlady -- the charming if unexceptional Kilspindie course is here and, not much farther on, Longniddry, which is partly links, partly parkland -- and within minutes we arrive in Gullane.

Gullane is a village whose raison d'être is easy to discern: golf. Unless I'm mistaken, on any day in high summer there are likely to be more golfers here than inhabitants. That's because Gullane is the home of three golf clubs, one of which has three eighteens and a short nine. This place is a hotbed of the game.

I have yet to play the links of the Luffness New Golf Club, whose holes are laid out on relatively flat ground, whose steep-faced bunkers are to be avoided like the plague, and whose greens -- this I can confirm from a recent inspection -- are among the very finest in Scotland. (No wonder it is referred to as a junior version of Muirfield.) Playing Luffness New is, I suspect, a pleasure I have too long deferred.

It is Gullane Golf Club, founded in 1882, that offers three eighteens, not to mention the useful little children's nine, which is tucked away down a lane that also accommodates the Old Clubhouse pub, a convivial spot for drinking or dining. Gullane No. 1 has been the scene of the Scottish Amateur, the British Ladies', the Home Internationals, and final qualifying for the British Open when it is played at Muirfield. Today few visitors realize that it was here in 1947 that Babe Didrickson Zaharias became the first American to win the British Ladies' Championship. Some locals, however, still remember her triumph, and they speak in awe of the great Olympian's raw power. The 15th is a par five of 535 yards. The first 350 yards are level; the remainder of the hole climbs to a hillside green. In one of her matches, assisted by a moderate breeze, Babe reached the green in two, with a drive and a 4-iron.

At the start of the round, the sea is nowhere to be found. The culprit is Gullane Hill. This immense blockade stands squarely between the opening holes and the Firth of Forth. We must surmount it. The 1st hole on Gullane No. 1 is short and flat and gentle, a straightaway 300-yarder that should find us putting for a 3. The second hole is neither short nor flat nor gentle, though it is straightaway; it climbs straight up for the entire length of its 380 yards. There is a sheltered look to it, for it follows a natural cut in the hillside, but the prevailing wind, off the still hidden sea, comes whipping down against us, the cut functioning as a perfect funnel for it. The fairway is tauntingly narrow, with long bent grasses on both sides lurking to devour the shot that strays by so much as two paces. I have never known the hole to play less than 425 yards. It is merciless. Accept your 5, rationalize it as a par -- you are not stretching the truth too much -- and climb onto the 3rd tee.

Now indeed have we come up in the world, though we are not yet on top of it, for that must wait till the 7th. Nonetheless, a great deal of the vast golfing landscape stretches away before us, and the Firth itself is in view, its gray-blue waters stretching away toward the horizon.

Here begins the 14-hole stretch on the seaward side of Gullane Hill. And what delightful and challenging stuff it is, the holes running up and down, over, across and around this mini-mountain, constantly changing direction so that our joust with the wind calls for never-ending adjustments in alignment and strategy. Neither water nor boundaries bedevil us, and there are, of course, no trees. But the sand and slopes and gusts are more than enough to keep us off balance.

The 5th is the finest hole on the course -- in all candor, it may be...