Now leaving Norfolk behind, we ought to see one course in Lincolnshire, that of the Seacroft Club at Skegness. Skegness, as is well known to everyone from Mr. Hassall’s delightful poster, is ‘so bracing,’ and I would not for the world dispute the fact. I had, however, the misfortune to visit it on one of the most stifling days in July, when the whole flat expanse of Lincolnshire fen lay panting under a hot haze, and our progress round the links was quite unlike that of the gentleman depicted by Mr. Hassall, skimming buoyantly over the ground with a cooling sea breeze behind him. If, therefore, I have pleasant recollections of Skegness, it must surely be a good course; and so it is, lacking, I think, only one thing, a wind that blows from two places at once. It is one of those courses that runs, roughly speaking, straight out and home, and the nine holes that we play with the wind in our face we think really beautiful, while with the wind behind us we are just a little bit disappointed. This is, of course, only the impression of a casual visitor; and, moreover, it must often happen that wind is neither for us nor against us, but blows straight across the course. Then the golf must be really difficult, for the fairway is uniformly narrow and the rough wonderfully tenacious; indeed, I have only met with more clinging rough at Le Touquet, where is to be found a diabolical undergrowth, which the caddies call by the name of ‘les épines,’ and the golfers by a variety of epithets—all of them unprintable.

The course begins admirably with two narrow and difficult holes, where it is equally easy to heel the ball out of bounds or to hook it into the rough before described. The third is blind but exciting—a drive on to the top of a hog-backed ridge, followed by a little pitch over the brow of the hill on to a green in a dell. Of the other outgoing holes, the two best are perhaps those called respectively ‘Spion Kop’ and ‘Gibraltar,’ and of these ‘Gibraltar’ is the best. Here there is a really fine second shot to be played over a whole range of sandy mountains, and if, perhaps with some mistaken idea of making the ball rise quickly, we impart any cut to the ball, it sails away out of bounds, and we are left with the sandy mountains still uncrossed.

‘Gibraltar’ is certainly the most memorable hole on the way out, and ‘Sea View’ strikes equal terror into the soul on the homeward journey. Here the hole stands on a small plateau, and in front is a big bunker in the face of the hill. With a wind behind we may hope to get home with a high, hard hit with an iron, but on a still day it must need the very best of brassey shots, and a shot, moreover, that shall soar high in the air and then fall comparatively straight to earth. Beyond the green is a waste of sand, and the hole lives up to its name, for there is a view of a big stretch of sea. The sixteenth is a ‘dog-legged’ hole that makes some demand upon our cunning, and we must hit long and straight along the bottom of a gully for the last two holes, so that the course ends as it began, very well.

Given straight hitting from the tee, we should return something better than a respectable score, but the demand for straightness is great, and, indeed, the constant avenues of rough remind one rather of the best of modern inland courses. It is genuine seaside golf, however, with good turf and plenty of sand, and the sea itself, although we do not often see it. Neither do we see—and this is an unmixed blessing—the teeming swarms of trippers that come to Skegness to be braced.

CHAPTER VI.
THE COURSES OF CHESHIRE AND LANCASHIRE.

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 once toddled to school, his satchel on his back. The infant Hilton may have been wheeled by his nurse upon these very paving stones. Nay, Jack Graham may even now, perchance, be seen at this identical station at which I have just got out of my train taking his train to go into Liverpool every morning.”

By the time that these remarkable thoughts have flashed like lightning through his mind, the pilgrim will find himself wandering down a straight, dusty, unattractive road, which is flanked by villas of a comfortable though prosaic appearance, and wondering where on earth this famous links can possibly be. Then he will discover that what he thought was another and particularly gorgeous villa was really the Royal Liverpool Club-house, and dashing upstairs, he will see out of the smoking-room window the famous links of Hoylake spread out beneath him.

On a first view they are not imposing. All that appears is a vast expanse cut up into squares and strips by certain cops or banks, partly walled in by roads and houses, with a range of sandhills in the far distance. Yet this place of dull and rather mean appearance is one of the most interesting and most difficult courses in the world, and pre-eminently one which is regarded with affection by all who know it well.

That the course is either interesting or difficult all will not agree, but those who disagree most loudly with the statement will, I venture to assert, usually be found to be the worst of players. “I call Hoylake a rotten course: there are no bunkers to get over; the fellow I was playing with topped all his tee-shots and never got into trouble.” Such is a verdict often heard after a first visit to Hoylake. The critic should then further be asked his opinion of St. Andrews, and it will generally be found that he classes St. Andrews and Hoylake together as the two worst courses he has ever seen. He may forthwith be treated with silent contempt, and his opinions may be ignored. He has effectually written himself down an ass. What this person says is absolutely true; there are very few bunkers in front of the tee at Hoylake, and the man who tops his tee-shot does escape condign punishment more often than he would on a golf course designed on principles of perfect equity. Those short drives, however, though they do not plunge the culprit waist high in sand, bring their own penalty by making it practically impossible for him to reach the green in the right number of shots. Some of the holes that we are supposed to reach in two shots are desperately long, and with a top from the tee all hope is straightway gone. At least if Hoylake does not demand that the ball should always be hit into the air—a matter that is not after all of very great importance among the reasonably competent—it does make very exacting demands in the matter of length and straightness. How fiendishly narrow is the third hole, with that fatal cop on the left and rushes on the right. How we do have to press if we are to hit far enough at those last five holes—‘Field,’ ‘Lake,’ ‘Dun,’ ‘Royal,’ and the home hole; what splendid names they have, and what splendid finish they provide for a match—surely the most exhausting finish to be found on any links in the world.

Then, too, there is always a rich reward at Hoylake for the man who can play his approaches really straight and with a firm, sure touch. There are some courses where the greens are always helping us and the ball is always running to the hole. We may play a most indifferent iron shot on to the outskirts of the green, and behold! a kindly slope has intervened on our behalf, and the ball finishes within comfortable putting range. Hoylake is emphatically not one of those easy and enervating places; there the greens are always fighting against the player, and he must hold his shot straight on the pin from start to finish. If he does not, the chances are that the ball will take a vindictive leap, and his next shot will still come under the category of approaching. There is none of your smug smoothness and trimness about Hoylake; it is rather hard and bare and bumpy, and needs a man to conquer it. The game, as I have said, is not made easy for us, and this is true—a little too true, alas!—of the putting greens. Sometimes they are good enough, though hardly ever easy; but very often, unless I have been exceptionally unfortunate in my experience, they are rather rough and lumpy, and make the holing of short putts a very anxious business. Time was when the greens were the particular pride of the course, and Mr. Hutchinson wrote in the Badminton Library that “The links of Hoylake are associated, in the mind of every golfer who has played upon them, with the most perfect putting greens in all the world.” Since that eulogy was written the building of houses and the consequent drainage operations are said to have drained some subtle and beautiful quality out of the greens, and they may now be said to form the weakness rather than the strength of the course. Even now, however, they are not so rough as they often look, and the man who has a delicate and withal a fearless touch of his putter will still be rewarded at Hoylake.

One more good quality of the holes at Hoylake deserves a word of mention; it has been called by Mr. Low their ‘indestructibleness.’ By this most useful, if inelegant, word, he means that they are good whether played with or against the wind, and that is very high praise, particularly as there are few courses on which a change of wind more completely alters the character of each individual hole. Blessed indeed is the hole which can keep its good character whichever way the wind is blowing.

The first hole is so good and difficult that it seems almost a pity that we are compelled to play it before we have got thoroughly into our stride. Whatever the wind, it is our duty to begin with a long, straight drive between the club-house railings on the left and a sandy ditch and cop on the right. At about the distance of a good drive from the tee the cop turns at a right angle to the right, and we must follow the cop, skirting it as near as we dare. The wind cannot be either with or against us for both our first and second shots, and we shall have a fine opportunity of showing our skill in the use of it. If it be blowing strongly against us on the tee we shall hardly get home in two, and our second must needs be played over the corner of the cop and the out-of-bounds region that lies within it. If it blow behind us we shall be well clear of the cop with our drive, and may hope to be home with a low, running second with an iron club, but it must be a parlous straight one. Altogether there are few finer holes to be found anywhere, and it would always find a place in my eclectic eighteen holes.

Passing over the second—good hole though it be—we come to an unpleasantly narrow one—the third or ‘Long’ hole. If the wind is blowing freshly behind us we may aspire to reach the green in two very long and very straight shots, but as a rule we shall require two drives and a pitch. Along the left-hand side runs a sandy ditch beneath a turf wall with absolutely precipitous sides, and woe betide the man whose ball lies tucked up hard under the face of that wall; he will be lucky if he can get it out backwards, forwards, or at all. I saw Mr. John Ball extricate himself from this predicament by an extraordinary stroke, or so it seemed to me. He stood on the top of the wall, far out of reach of the ball, then leaped down into the ditch, hitting as he jumped, and out came the ball most gallantly; it needs something more than local knowledge to play such a shot as this.

The fourth is a short hole—the ‘Cop’ by name, so called from yet another bank that guards it. Then follow two good two-shot holes, of which the sixth, or ‘Briars,’ has the distinction of having been halved in nine in the final of an amateur championship. The tee-shot must be struck straight and true over the angle of hedge, while anything in the nature of an attempt to sneak round by the right entails a prickly death among the whins. Safely over the hedge, we have yet two sandy trenches to carry, and the green is guarded by rushes and pot-bunkers, so that if nine be an excessive total, four is a comparatively small one. Next comes one of the finest short holes in the world, ‘The Dowie,’ which is not only very good, but really unique. There is a narrow triangular green, guarded on the right by some straggling rushes and on the left by an out-of-bounds field and a cop; there is likewise a pot-bunker in front. To hit quite straight at this hole is the feat of a hero, for let the ball be ever so slightly pulled, and we shall infallibly be left playing our second shot from the tee. Nearly everybody slices at the Dowie out of pure fright, and is left with a tricky little running up shot on to the green. The perfect shot starts out of the right, just to show that it has no intention of going out of bounds, and then swings round with a delicious hook, struggles through the little rushy hollow, and so home on the green; it is a shot to dream of, but alas! seldom to play.

A long and reasonably narrow eighth hole takes us to the confines of West Kirby, and we turn our faces once more towards the club-house in the far distance. Two perfect shots that turn neither to the right nor to the left but keep down a narrow valley between two ranges of hills may see us safely on the ninth green, and we have reached the turn possibly, but by no means probably, in some 38 shots. The tenth is another longish hole of no particular features, but the eleventh hole consists of one big feature—the mighty Alps over which we must hit our very best shot if we are to gain a three. In the Amateur Championship of 1898 this hole was done in one in a rather singular way, the ball going full pitch into the bottom of the hole and staying there. The ‘Hilbre’ we may hope to reach with a drive and a cunning run up, and then we have a chance of another three at the ‘Rushes.’ Here we have nothing to do but play quite a short pitch over a cross-bunker and a little wilderness of rushes, but the hole is very close to the bunker, and the green is hard and full of unkind kicks, and a three is not to be despised. This is undoubtedly the last chance of a three we shall have, for from now onwards to the finish it will not be surprising if we have an uninterrupted run of fives. First comes the ‘Field,’ where the hole is most cunningly guarded by a triangle of rushes. A very respectable five is the ‘Field,’ and so is the ‘Lake,’ even if we go as straight as a die for the hole through ‘Johnny Ball’s Gap.’ So again is the ‘Dun,’ where for two shots we have to keep clear of our old enemies, the cop and the sandy ditch, before playing a deft little pitch over a cross-bunker. At the ‘Royal’ we may hope for a four, since we have a fine wide expanse for the tee-shot, and a really accurate iron-shot should do the rest. There is plenty of room at the last hole again, but we shall need two absolutely clean-hit shots if we are to get home, and once more there is a cross-bunker in front of the green, at just such a distance from the hole that even if we get out in one we are likely to take three putts. And so at last we have finished those last five strenuous holes, and may go to the particularly excellent lunch provided by the Royal Liverpool Golf Club. They are not much to look at, those last five, but they are horribly good golf, and if you are only all square at the thirteenth with one of the Hoylake champions your chances of ultimate success are exceedingly small. As I write about Hoylake I can see it all with a misty and sentimental eye. There are the white railings in front of the club; and Mr. Janion is standing in the porch in benignant contemplation, and Mr. Ball is wandering anon from the seventeenth green with his red-topped stockings, chipping the ball along with his iron as he goes; and I, knowing that somebody is going to beat me by seven up and six to play, yet long to be back there again.

Next in fame to Hoylake comes Formby, and there are many to be found who prefer it to the Cheshire course, though personally I do not consider their judgment a sound one. Formby is at any rate a most delightful course, and with that let us leave comparisons alone.

There is a particularly clear-cut distinction between the two parts of the course, which is in that respect a little like Sandwich. There is the country of the plains, on which the round begins and ends, and there is the country of hills wherein are all the middle holes. There is no doubt which are the prettier and more popular; the sand-hills would come out easily first in a general poll, but I have an uneasy sort of suspicion that the flat holes supply perhaps a better test of golf. There are, for instance, few better seventeenth holes than that which is to be found at Formby; just at the most crucial part of a hard-fought match it is as long and narrow and nerve-wracking as can be. Yet it is as flat as a pancake, and might from its appearance be a great many miles away from the sea. Still it is impossible to get over its intrinsic merits. There is the tee and there is the hole in an exact straight line, distant about two full shots away, and there is literally nothing in the way. That sounds terribly dull, but there would be nothing in the way if we drove down a Roman road, and yet it would be far from easy to keep on the course. To the right is a dreary tract of out-of-bounds, which is, to the morbid imagination, white with the countless balls that have been driven there. To the left is a narrow little ditch, and beyond the ditch rough and tussocky grass. To hit the tee-shot with reasonable accuracy ought not to be beyond our powers, but the second shot is undeniably a beast. We are undecided whether to aim out to the right and try for a hook or to the left for a slice, since for some reason it is horribly difficult to play a perfectly straightforward shot down a straightforward road of turf. We shuffle with our feet, become thoroughly uncomfortable, and—the precise form of disaster must be left to individual fancy.

The sixteenth, at which we traverse the same flattish country, is no bad hole either; nor are the first two or three, where we drive straight ahead, with plenty of cops and bunkers to keep us on the straight and narrow path. In old days there used to be an attractive tee-shot to the fourth hole over the corner of a group of trees, which seemed to be for ever heeling over under the force of the wind and mesmerically luring the slicer to his fate. That is changed now, however, and we go straight on to the old fifth green, and make our entry into the mountainous country rather earlier. Our first introduction to the hills comes at the old seventh, where there is a blind second shot into a big crater—a type of hole not now so favourably looked upon as it was once. Then comes a hole which we shall always remember, along an ominous gorge with frowning hills on either side of us. There is something romantic and mysterious about it, and if we retained the imagination of our childhood we should inevitably play at being an invading army, with the enemy’s sharp-shooters hidden in crevices among the hills.

Wallasey, where we come back to Cheshire again, is another course of mighty hills: indeed I do not think I have ever seen a course on which the contour of the hills and valleys was so infinitely picturesque. At several of the holes we play, or try to play, in the trough of two great waves of sand that tower on either side of us, and feel rather overpowered by the vastness of our surroundings. There was a time when Wallasey, though amusing enough, was too short and blind and tricky to be taken very seriously, but all that is changed now, and, with the addition of heaven knows how many hundreds of yards, the course is a long and punishing one. It is still perhaps a little too blind for those of very rigid and spartan views, but whatever the exact place which may be assigned to it on the day of judgment—and this sort of question will never be settled at any earlier date—it is undoubtedly good golf.

Certainly the first hole is the blindest of the blind. Wallop the first, and the ball vanishes over a hill; wallop the second—this time with a mashie—and it flies over another on to the green. This is not the best of beginnings, but the second has a much more interesting tee-shot, where we try to hug a bank covered with a particularly pestilent form of bush, and then at the third we are in the country of hills and valleys. The view at the third, as we look down the long winding gully that leads to the hole, is one of the most charming in golf; and the fifth is another wonderfully picturesque hole, with a terrifying second shot. After the seventh we leave the sandhills for a while, and play backwards and forwards for a spell along some flat holes that seem to radiate from one solitary house that stands alone in the middle of the course. They are very good holes some of them, and the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth especially need long, straight hitting, but the last four or five holes take us back to the more characteristic country, and the finish comes in a blaze of glorious sandhills. A rather blind, and to the stranger a puzzling, tee-shot should land us safely on the table-land, and then far away and rather below us to the right we see the promised land, the seventeenth green, and with a good shot the ball will swoop away for an apparently incredible distance, and finish by the hole side. The eighteenth, too, is full of charm, and when we have successfully carried the spur of a big hill and played our second over some more bold and broken ground, we can hole out in a deep hollow, with the eyes of the whole club watching us from above as they sit in front of the club-house. It is quite likely that we have played very far from well, since this country of mountains and deep dells is always difficult for the stranger, and our host has probably ways and means of reaching the green that we are apt to regard as ways of darkness, but we shall have found the golf infinitely pleasant and exhilarating.

There are other Liverpool courses, Leasowe, Blundellsands, Hesketh, Birkdale, and Southport, which are fully worthy of more extended notice, but we must be getting away from Liverpool to the links where the man from Manchester often plays his weekly golf—the course of the Lytham and St. Anne’s Club. St Anne’s is not far from Blackpool, where there is incidentally quite a good course, and after the day’s golf we can, if we have sufficient energy, go and dance in the largest dancing hall in the world or climb the highest tower in the world, or, in short, consult the advertisements of Blackpool. This, however, is not business, and we have to play serious golf at St. Anne’s, for the opposition is very good and very keen, as the members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society have discovered to their cost.

As compared with Hoylake, St. Anne’s is very smooth and trim, and just a little artificial. If the day is calm and we are hitting fairly straight, the golf seems rather easy than otherwise; and yet we must never allow ourselves to think so too pronouncedly, or we shall straightway find it becoming unpleasantly difficult. If there is a strong wind blowing we shall not even be tempted to think it easy, for there is plenty of rough grass on either side, and the hitting of a good straight tee-shot, which seemed so simple and made the holes seem simple, will be a cause of considerable anxiety. Whatever the weather and the wind, there is one thing that we ought always to do well at St. Anne’s, and that is putt, for the greens are as good and true as any in the world, and can even challenge comparison with those in the Old Deer Park. Given an opponent who is a really fine putter—Mr. Lassen or some other inhuman fiend—and till he has played two more while our ball lies stone dead we can never feel quite happy; the truly-struck putt comes on and on over that wonderfully smooth turf and flops into the hole with a sickening little thud, and there are we left gasping and robbed of our prey. There is no kind of excuse for bad putting at St. Anne’s, and in fine weather there is indeed little excuse for any form of error, for the lies are uniformly good and the stances uniformly smooth, save perhaps at two holes, where the land lies in ridges and furrows, and we may need a measure of skill to persuade the ball to fly from the hanging sides of a ridge. The trouble, besides rough grass and pot-bunkers, consists of sandhills, both natural and artificial. To build an artificial sandhill is not a light task, and it is characteristic of the whole-hearted enthusiasm of the golfers of St. Anne’s that they have raised several of these terrifying monuments of industry. They are still in their infancy, and look just a little new and raw, but they will destroy the golfer’s card and temper just as effectively as those that have stood from time immemorial. They are, moreover, covered with bent grass, which will no doubt increase and multiply to the greater glory of the hills and ruination of the golfer.

The course begins with a short hole of no particularly coruscating virtues, but the second and third are both good, and the railway on the right scares us into a hook: and the hook takes us into a bunker, and the bunker loses us the hole. The fourth has a very pretty green, well and naturally guarded by hummocks; and Nature has been very kind again at the sixth, where there is a deep crater, to be comfortably reached in two good shots. Indeed these natural craters are rather a feature of the course, for there is something of the same kind to be found at the seventh, and a very perfect example at the fourteenth. The worst that is to be said against them is that they give some encouragement to a second shot off the back-wall, but the attendant risks are very great, and the back-wall shot that just misses the mark brings with it a peck of troubles.

The ninth has a fine tee-shot and a long, difficult, and blind second shot, in which the stranger always finds that he has aimed at the wrong chimney pot in a row of houses at Ansdell. The tenth has a hut for drinks and a tee-shot that fully justifies such an indulgence; while at the eleventh we must go on driving and driving till we reach the green, which, contrary to our expectations, we shall ultimately do. The thirteenth is of an unattractive and inlandish appearance, but is as good a hole as is to be found on the course, and needs the very straightest of play to avoid a network of bunkers. Out of a puddle in the bottom of one of these bunkers I once holed a pitch, and have never played the hole so well either before or since. Then comes the crater hole, the fourteenth before mentioned; and after that we may hope to get home with a three and three fours, but the four at the seventeenth is not a particularly easy one, and there is always a chance of too strong an approach being bunkered in a flower bed beyond the home green, to the great amusement of the spectators in the smoking-room window.

There is nowhere in the golfing world where keener opponents and more friendly hosts are to be found than in the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire, and I cannot help saying that I, along with my brothers of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, owe them a very deep debt of gratitude.

Before finally quitting Lancashire, we must look at one inland course, namely, Trafford Park, which may be accepted as the foremost among the purely Manchester courses. I was interested and surprised to find, in reading a little history of the Manchester Golf Club, that golf was played in Manchester at a date so utterly prehistoric as 1818. However, a few enthusiasts really did play upon Kersal Moor at that remote period, and they called themselves the Manchester Golf Club. They had no imitators till sixty-four years later, when Mr. Macalister founded the Manchester St. Andrews Golf Club that played in Manley Park. The birth of this second club happened almost simultaneously with the death of the first. Kersal Moor, for all its solitary and savage name, fell a prey to the builder, and in 1883 the original Manchester Golf Club ceased to exist, and its name was assumed by the Manley Park Club. Since then, it should be added, it has, happily, come to life again under the title of the Old Manchester Golf Club.

Meanwhile, Manley Park came to share the fate of Kersal Moor, and a move was made to Trafford Park, which has now been the home of the Manchester Golf Club from 1893 to the present time. It has flourished ever since, and has played a prominent part in the golfing life of Manchester.

Trafford Park is a good course in spite of the most unpromising surroundings. All round the fine old park, formerly the home of the de Traffords, manufactories now raise their hideous heads, while along one side runs the Manchester Ship Canal, and the man who desires an excuse for a bad shot may allege that an ocean liner insisted on coming behind him just as he was playing. These are certainly not recommendations, but there are compensating advantages in good turf, good greens, good length holes, and the old mansion-house, which has been converted into one of the most comfortable and palatial of club-houses.

The turf is excellent. It is certainly not muddy, nor is it precisely sandy. One who has played much golf at Trafford describes it as ‘peaty,’ and I will leave it at that. The hazards are of the usual park description: trees, artificial bunkers, and at one hole a pond, while the ground is pleasantly undulating for the first nine holes, and rather too flat for the second.

We begin by driving downhill, which is always a comforting thing to do, although we ought to have warmed to our work a little in order to get full value out of a downhill drive. This takes us into the lower ground, and after a moderate first we have a really good two-shot hole for the second; well over four hundred yards long, and with a thoroughly interesting second shot on to a raised green. The third, which is a one-shot hole—there are four of these in all—takes us up a hill again, and of the holes that follow the fourth and the seventh are especially good, the former demanding a long, straight, iron shot on to a particularly well bunkered green.

Coming home the course suffers a little, as I said, from being too flat, and, so as with many of these park courses, it is rather hard to pick out any one hole from among its fellows. Good sound golf will be repaid, and so will the golf that is unsound and bad, but neither the rewards nor the punishments are of a thrilling or heroic order. There is one hole, however, that calls for special mention, the sixteenth, where two really fine shots are needed to reach the green, and the only thing to be said against the hole is that it would be better still if it were number seventeen instead; not that the present seventeenth is bad, but that the sixteenth is so eminently well adapted to occupy that critical and important position. Gaudin has been round the course in 65, but the intending visitor will be disappointed if he imagines that he himself will necessarily do a particularly low score on that account. In these days of expanded courses—against which one begins to see some signs of a revolt—Trafford Park is not vastly long, but it calls for good, honest golf for all that.

CHAPTER VII.
YORKSHIRE AND THE MIDLANDS.

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 that personally he did not feel in the very least like them, and that he did not think my play was any justification for my doing so either.

In spite of this slight unpleasantness, we had a most agreeable pilgrimage, which was begun by taking a train to Scarborough, in order to play at Ganton. Ganton sprang into fame as being the home course of Harry Vardon. It was there that he played the second half of his great match with Willy Park, and having gained a small but serviceable lead at North Berwick, played one of his most overpowering games on his own course, and never gave his adversary even the faintest of chances. Some of the glamour of Harry Vardon still hangs round Ganton, although he has left it now for some years, and has a worthy successor in Edward Ray, the hitter of mighty drives and smoker of many pipes. The course has been a good deal altered since Vardon’s days, for with the advent of the Haskell, it suffered the common lot and became rather too short. Now it has been stretched and rearranged and pretty severely bunkered; most noteworthy of all, the hole of which the visitor to Ganton formerly carried away the most vivid impression, has been altered out of recognition. This is the present twelfth hole, where in old days the tee-shot consisted of a mashie pitch, played mountains high into the air in order to clear the tops of a row of tall trees. Now the trees have been ruthlessly cut down, and we have a one-shot hole, demanding not a mashie but a brassey shot, very good and very orthodox. No doubt the old hole was a bad one, and the new one is good; nevertheless there must have been some bitter regrets over the felling of the trees. Unless we are utterly consumed with a fire of reforming zeal, we can well afford to drop a tear over the disappearance of these holes—once the pride and joy of their creators, now destroyed or altered beyond recognition. The once-famous short holes are meeting with the same fate all over the country. The ‘Maiden,’ long since shorn of much of its glory, is undergoing yet another metamorphosis, and it is even rumoured that some day it will be a blind hole no longer. The ‘Sandy Parlour’ has even been threatened, and indeed it may be laid down that if the golfers of a dozen years ago praised a hole as being ‘sporting,’ that hole will be the first marked down for the reformer’s attack. It is all very splendid no doubt, but it is also just a little bit sad.

So much for the twelfth hole of blessed memory; and now we must get back to the course in general. To begin with, Ganton is a course of sand and fir trees and gorse bushes. It is a little like Woking, a little like Worplesdon; and, generally speaking, it is the type of course that one would expect to find in Surrey rather than in Yorkshire. Needless to say, however, it has plenty of character of its own, and in particular it possesses by far the vastest and generally most gorgeous bunker that is to be found, as far as I know, on any inland course. It is a huge pit of sand, with just the depths and shallows, the bays and promontories of the genuine seaside article. It is so large that, by its unaided efforts, it provides highly effective bunkering for the tee-shots to the two last holes; and as regards its dimensions, I shall not be flattering it very grossly if I compare it to the bunker in front of the fifth tee at Westward Ho! It is the more striking because it lies on the other side of a road away from the main body of the course; and after a series of trim little pot-bunkers, one comes quite suddenly upon it, rugged, natural, and magnificent.

Nature has done nearly all the bunkering work for these last two holes; at the others she has had to be assisted by man, and man has been very busy cutting pot-bunkers, and mostly towards the sides of the fairway and the edges of the green. The bunkering seems to me, if I may say so, to be exceedingly well done, and for the most part one has to keep reasonably straight—sometimes very straight indeed—from the tee. The sixth, seventh, and eighth I remember particularly as all demanding scrupulously accurate tee shots, and of these perhaps the eighth is the most difficult, with serious bunkers on opposite sides of the course at just the distance of a moderately good drive; it is not unlike the tee-shot to the sixth at Woking, or the eighth at Walton Heath; and to say that is not to call the shot an easy one.

There are whins in fair profusion, and they play an important part at both the second and third holes. The approach to the second is a really difficult one, for the green lies in an angle made by two lines of whins, which are partially protected from the infuriated niblick player by formidable bunkers, so that any perceptible error is likely to bring with it a disaster either sandy or prickly. At the third, again—a very full one-shot hole—the whins guard the entire left-hand side of the course. It is, to be sure, possible to hit over them, but the feat entails a carry of some two hundred yards, and even Ray admits that a long shot is wanted to get clear to the left.

The criticism I feel disposed to make, very tentatively, of the first nine holes at Ganton is that they are a little too much of the same length. There is the third hole aforementioned, and there is the fifth, demanding an extremely pretty little pitch from the tee; nor must I forget the ninth, a really fine two-shot hole that winds its way along the bottom of a little valley. At the other six one seems to be playing the second shot with the same straight-faced iron club. They are individually very good, but the least little bit in the world monotonous, and there is a more attractive variety about the home-coming nine.

Of these last nine nearly all are good; but the last three are, I think, the most attractive, being all interesting and all different. The sixteenth is a fine straight-hitting two-shot hole over undulating country. The seventeenth brings us face to face with the big bunker, and if the wind be favourable we may hope to reach the green with a really good hit, but the green is curly, tricky, and difficult of access. Finally, we have another drive over the big bunker for the last, taking care to avoid being stymied by a clump of firs, and then we may pitch comfortably home across the road with a four well in sight.

We had two rounds of Ganton on the first day of our pilgrimage—a warm, delightful, sunny day—and then took train to Huddersfield to play at Fixby. Fixby is as different from Ganton as chalk is from cheese, or as a watering-place is from a manufacturing town. Ganton is charmingly pretty in a way that is comparatively ordinary to anyone who has seen Surrey and Berkshire. Fixby has for the southerner’s eye a kind of grim and murky romance. For some two miles we have to wend our way up a long slope through Huddersfield and its outskirts, looking rather drab and ugly and intensely prosperous. Then suddenly the romance begins. We climb up a steep hill through a pretty wood, albeit the trees are black with the smoke of many chimneys, finally to emerge rather breathless in a new land. Now we are perched on the top of a hill, in wild, solitary, moorish country. A long way down below us are Huddersfield and its mills, and all around is a great stretch of view, rather bleak and sombre, but possessed of a very distinct beauty of its own. We are not really on the moors, but we feel as if we were, and all the colouring is moorland colouring. Everything is a subdued grey or green, and even the stone walls, which abound on the course, have a gloomy tint of their own—a kind of purplish black that I have never seen anywhere else. It strikes us at once that this course could only be in the north; there is nothing southern about it, and by this strangeness and strong character it casts something of a spell over the southern visitor. This is how I saw Fixby, with a grey leaden sky and a mighty wind blowing the misty rain that is called ‘moor-grime’ strongly in my face. In summer it must possess quite a different sort of beauty when the great clumps of rhododendrons are all in bloom, as the artist has depicted them, and the club-house in the centre of a blaze of gorgeous colour.

To turn from the scenery to the golf, there is a very clearly-marked distinction between the two rounds of nine holes, each of which begins and ends near Fixby Hall, which is used as the club-house. The first nine holes might be described as park golf; and yet this would be perhaps to give a false impression, for the trees do not play an important part, and the turf is harder and dryer than the normal park turf. It is plain-sailing, straightforward golf, in which we can see where we are going, and the trouble consists mainly of artificial bunkers of the ordinary type.

The second half is much more sui generis. We emerge from the park land into country which is more open and much more undulating. We have to play a great many more blind shots—in fact, we have rather too many of them; and there are one or two holes—exceedingly difficult holes they are—which would be, I venture to think, much better if only we could get a good view of the flag. Another feature of the second half is the ubiquitous stone wall. Sometimes it is an ordinary wall; sometimes it partakes of the nature of a sunk fence, and we only realize its presence by seeing our ball suddenly plunge, like another Curtius, into the bowels of the earth. I should not like to pledge myself as to the exact number of walls, but we shall be lucky if we do not make acquaintance with more than one of them upon a windy day; and, in parenthesis, the wind can blow at Fixby with an energy worthy of the strongest seaside gale. The two halves may fairly be summed up by saying that the first half provides the sounder golf, and the second the more exciting; and that both need a man to play them.

On the way out the holes that I personally think the more attractive are the fourth—a nice single shot, 170 yards long, on to a plateau green—and a group of three that come together, the sixth, seventh, and eighth. Of these the eighth is a pretty enough little short hole with a very well-guarded green, but the seventh is the best of the three and also the most interesting, from the fact that it owes its merits almost entirely to ingenuity in construction rather than to natural advantages.

The green has certainly a good natural protection to the right in the shape of a ditch, to which has been added a bunker on the left; but still, if we were allowed to make a direct frontal attack upon the hole, we should have no great difficulty to contend with. A frontal attack, however, has been forbidden us by Mr. Herbert Fowler’s ingenuity. In the straight line between the tee and the green have been erected a series of formidable fortifications, wherefore we must drive out to the right and then approach the hole from the side. The further we go to the right the more difficult the approach will be, but if we can play with a judicious hook, and so ‘pinch’ the fortifications as close as we dare, we shall obtain a reasonably open and easy approach. This device of compelling people to play the hole as a ‘dog legged’ hole has made all the difference between a good and an ordinary hole. Of some of the longer holes on the way out I have said nothing, not because they are not sufficiently testing in character, but because they are for the most part straightforward holes that do not lend themselves to distinctive description.

After the turn comes, as I have said, the region of blind shots and stone walls. The twelfth is a curious hole, because of the extraordinary difficulty of judging the direction of the second shot over a high grassy mound. Even those who are steeped to the eyes in local knowledge are never quite certain if their ball will be lying close to the flag or thirty yards away, and race feverishly to the top of the mound to see what has befallen them. The thirteenth, again, has a puzzling, blind uphill approach, after a really good tee-shot across a wall. There is a good long, punishing finish, all the last three holes being over, and two of them well over, four hundred yards in length. At the last there is a chance, if the breeze be favourable, of a really fine second shot from the crest of a hill that shall send the ball soaring away for an apparently immeasurable distance, avoiding stone walls and trees, and ultimately reaching the green.

There is plenty of hard work to be done in reaching the greens at Fixby, and still more when we have reached them, for they are fast and curly to a degree, although very true when at their best, and there is much allowance to be made for borrow and much gentle trickling of the downhill putt. That Fixby is a difficult course is proved by the fact that the redoubtable Sandy Herd has never accomplished the full round of this his home course under 70. If 70 is Herd’s best, anything under 80 is not to be despised by the ordinary mortal.