After the gusting winds and occasional but vigorous showers of Durness, Saturday morning in the car park of Reay Golf Club feels eerily calm. A few hundred yards north, the crashing waves create a rhythmic soundtrack that will persist through our time here even when the land drops down behind the tall dunes on the northern border of the links, but after a few days of sixty mile an hour winds, the relative peace is welcome to the locals, of whom there are many today.
Shoes are changed and snoods applied, and before long I am hovering my MacGregor three wood’s tiny varnished head above the first tee, quietly hoping to avoid an opening hook and the clubhouse windows. Never before has a heavy contact been such a relief, but we are away, and pleased to be moving. The second swings down and away, passing the adjacent farmland and running parallel to the third, from where the fourth - “Sahara” - starts its journey towards the gushing inlet that spills out onto the beach.
The blind second shot, aiming at a vast dune beyond the course - provides a taste of what is to come, and I think of my fondness for blind shots, harking from a childhood playing James Braid’s Wenvoe Castle in South Wales. There, a few tee shots test one’s imagination, and the long four eighth provides a blind, running approach that I will never tire of, though I rarely see it these days. Now and then it crops up in dreams, but even then my ball somehow never finds the right line, as if a gremlin lives beyond the horizon where the marker post stands.
Braid is also responsible for Reay, and across the links are black and white sighting posts, and a magnificently rusted “bell”. And as the round wears on I think about these modern times, and the emphasis on fairness, and a doomed architectural obsession with eradicating luck from a game full of it. On some days it seems mostly bad, though we remember that “every shot makes someone happy”…
Of all the things that I love Bernard Darwin for - his mischievous humour and splendid nicknames (Stuart Paton forever the “Mussolini of Woking” as a fine example); his poetic eye for detail; his adoration of Rye and Aberdovey - perhaps the strongest connection between us is in his nostalgic mourning for the lost sense of adventure in the game, which includes a reduced number of blind shots. As I move from one puzzle to the next, I am glad that at Reay these challenges remain intact from Braid’s extensions to the original twelve hole course ninety years ago.
Another feature familiar from Wenvoe are the false fronts that defend many of the delightful greens, from which my ball falls back towards me time and again. And, with only a half set in the bag, my only weapon of choice for these frequent recovery missions is entirely appropriate for the challenge of this course - an approach cleek stamped with Braid’s name. How delightful it is to find turf that permits the ground game in the back end of November; how delightful to occasionally pull off the trick with one of Braid’s own weapons. Braid versus Braid; man against the elements.
The back nine weaves through some higher ground, all broken up with ridges and furrows, and all the while the views across the golden sand to the plucky surfers are breathtaking. Inland, the distant horizon is of snow-capped mountains, and these opposed borders serve to remind us how precious this fringe of linksland is, sandwiched between such extremes.
From the sixteenth we work towards the warmth of the clubhouse, and I notice how proximate the local community is to the golf course. Farm outbuildings, the local primary school. A church, a row of stone bungalows. Out here, miles from the nearest large town, is a remote community held together by those spaces it shares - the beach, the local store. The golf course.
During the war, Braid’s course closed down, neglected as a victim of shifting population trends, but a generation later, the locals restored those eighteen holes and added a new nineteenth, and his legacy and that of Reay Golf Club returned. So as we shake hands on the final green - finishing as we started with a short hole - I am grateful that Reay persists, for up here, in this country in which golf is the sport for so many, it is part of the fabric of the community, of life in this rugged and beautiful place.
A notice catches my eye as we leave the clubhouse, reminding the last one out to lock the door, and I am charmed by the simplicity of golf in these parts. Under the watchful eye of one greenkeeper, the conditions for running golf are all that is required for a marvellous day. And when the round is done, the locals look after themselves and each others and golf is the glue that holds them all together, keeps them moving and in contact with each other, and keeps them breathing the same fresh air that Braid must have taken in nine decades back.
What a wonderful game it is that can boast such a variety of playing fields. In Reay, we found another shining example of what this intimate game is really all about. And it was really, really lovely…
What did you think of the notorious 7th - with my limited skills set, I found it nigh on impossible ;-)
To Reiss Links next, surely?