Pitchmarks #23 - 3rd December 2023 - "Life After Brora"

Brora; image courtesy of Simon Pope

“I pray it will continue and last as long as the world”
Peter Thomson CBE, on Brora Golf Club

After hastily posting the last of the travel journal pieces from last weekend’s mission to the north of Scotland (here), I wandered out of the Royal Golf Hotel and down the road that runs alongside the opening tees of both courses at Royal Dornoch. To my left lay the Championship course, whose heavy frost had delayed that experience only that morning. Further down and on the right begins the Struie, heading south, but in the fading light of a late November afternoon, I would stride beyond them both, down past the lifeboat station and on to the vast sands of Dornoch beach.

The day’s golf at Brora - brought forward a day by the weather - had left me speechless yet elated, and I needed the wide open space of the beach to absorb what had just happened. For somehow, on the back nine, I had released myself from both expectation and fear, and as a result the golf ball began to spring without effort from the centre of persimmon and forged steel alike, and head for those fluttering flags. For perhaps the first time - certainly the first time in decades - golf seemed to be playing me, playing through me, and here on the sands just a little while later, I didn’t want this feeling of agency and wonder to stop.

And yet as the shots became truer, I could sense my attachment to the result fading away, and the score ceased to mean anything. At one point, I stopped even looking where the ball had gone, for I could feel in my hands and in my heart that I had done everything I could to just let it happen, and the outcome was not even secondary anymore, but irrelevant.

The energy I had somehow released on the links of Brora was still within me, and so I started to run, and by the time I turned round to head north again, the sky was dark and the moon - one dusk shy of a full Beaver Moon - was hanging above Dornoch like a celestial lighthouse, pointing the way for this common lunatic.

Over dinner we are quiet, reflective; both altered by the day. We came here to see Dornoch - finally - but though it sits before us through the window, there is an unspoken sense for us both that perhaps it won’t be tomorrow that we immerse ourselves in that ancient masterpiece, just as it wasn’t today. On that back nine, I’d remembered what it was like to act from the heart, not the head, and my heart was crying out for Brora again just moments after leaving her.

So I make notes, and Simon edits a few photos that will come to mean the world to me; signposts of a day I will never forget, and eventually, we manage to address the elephant in the room, which is that Brora is calling us. Royal Dornoch’s fine grasses have been watching golfers since 1616, and I doubt many have cancelled their first visit in those first four centuries, but there is something going on beneath the surface here, and my instinct, and that of Simon, tells us we are on the trail of something.

In the evenings, I have been reading the golfing journal entries of another kindred spirit, from the depths of 2020, and when he refers to “the game as my classroom”, I am as inspired by those words as I am by the bright light of our satellite, high above us. If these trips are part of the “syllabus of golf”, to steal another of his magical phrases, then the examination of Dornoch must wait, for I haven’t quite finished with Brora. And as I drift off to sleep, those delicate contours and rustic corridors once again flood my mind and I know, somehow deep down, that I’ll never really be finished with Brora. It is a test paper without end, a love affair that will see me out.

Before long we are back on the tee, and the calm sunshine of the previous day has been replaced by an urgent, gusty sea breeze, which delights us. Ahead there is no one, so we race around, urgently soaking up the details on this second lap. A gorgeously simple alignment post here; a green crafted from ancient dunes there.

On the way out we hear the waves crash, and the rolling whistles of the oystercatchers, which enchant me. At the turn we head south again - though each time we reach the ninth we seem to want to keep going, keep heading north - and this stretch is somehow quieter, more detached from the coastline, but the holes seem to build for me, and in today’s more wintry conditions we have most of Brora’s sheep as an audience.

The short thirteenth - “Snake” - cuts back towards the coast, and is a perfect counterpart to the sixth - “Witch” - that runs west at about the same point in this strip of linksland. Of “Snake”, Sam Torrance describes “a hole of infinite charm”, but for me that turn of phrase should be reserved for all of Brora. It is utterly charming, and as the wind and a couple of enthusiastic rain showers batter us, it is somehow all the more wonderful for this dose of authenticity. We’ve not come to the Highlands in late November for the sun…

The fifteenth - “Sahara” - is nothing short of brilliant, its green and dangerous bunker perched on a diagonal ridge somehow reminiscent of the Road Hole; a distant cousin, perhaps. Sixteen - “Plateau” - is an adventure in itself, a carefully placed tee shot just a necessary precursor to a thrilling pitch up and over the ridge. In “Tarbatness” and “Home”, Brora’s final exam questions are tough but fair, but by the time we reach that appealing drive on the seventeenth, we’ve other dilemmas to ponder.

For in our urgency to just keep hitting shots on this incredible golf course, we have raced around, and as quietly as the ludicrous notion of cancelling Dornoch drifted in, another possibility emerges. And so after failing once again on the last, we refuse to take off our windcheaters and golf shoes; refuse to pull out of the car park. And instead we head back into the breeze, despite the proximity of our flight, despite the ache in our legs. We’ve just about time to whip round again, and nothing on this earth is going to stop that.

Of all the marvellous things this writing lark has brought me - friends, experiences, a book of my own - perhaps the real magic is in the passing of sacred information from one golfing adventurer to another. We’ve all got access to those formal lists of treasures on which the Dornochs of this world are dominant, and I am thrilled to have walked that nearby masterpiece, after all the sublime prose I’d read about it. I want to come back one day, and play it - who wouldn’t - but alongside the headline acts, you can sometimes detect in a person’s mention of a lesser known golf course a deeper connection.

Of Brora, I’d sort of sensed this all along, and so had Simon. Eyes would mist over, and words seem jumbled, as if it defied language, this place, lurking beyond a tiny little gate. One person called it the “Rye of the North”; another simply messaged “Brora amazing”. We chuck such words as amazing and awesome around lightly these days, but after three rounds in two days, I am amazed by Brora, and I can’t adequately describe why, either.

We each have our own palate, but this place brings out in me a sense of awe at being in the world that I have carried with me for a week at this stage, and it shows no sign of abating. Simon and I talked after the first round of life being split into BB & AB - Before and After Brora - and though I can’t make sense of it yet, there is something in this latest chapter of my golfing education that feels pivotal. Something about pushing through open doors, and playing downwind…the path ahead seems simpler now.

One fairly distant disciple of Brora said “don’t tell too many people”, and I can understand that. But I have to say something. For you can see in my eyes that a shift has occurred, and it requires some sort of explanation. I loved walking on and gazing at Royal Dornoch, and still yearn to play there one day.

But just last week, two golfing purists turned their back on the 9.42am slot on that ancient treasure, to head north to Brora, already feeling bereft after barely twenty-four hours away. And the only way to understand that decision is to sit that exam yourself. The postcode is KW9 6QS, though I don’t need that information myself.

I can smell the way to Brora…