Pitchmarks #24 - 10th December 2023 - "Slipping into Dornoch Ways"

The Dornoch Links, frozen in time; image courtesy of Simon Pope

“Forces converge in Dornoch. The place is the essence of golf. There’s a rightness about it” Alan Grant, quoted in “A Season in Dornoch”, by Lorne Rubenstein

My copy of the late Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” is by this point battered. I borrowed it from the Oxford Street bookstore where I worked in 1998 - in another lifetime, it feels - and never placed it back upon the shelf, though I recall the moment the cover caught my eye. I must have read it at least annually since, and, like a fine claret or a classic golf course, it seems to offer more with every passing year or visit. And I did pay for it, in case you’re wondering.

In it, the author travelled with a biologist to the depths of the Himalayas, to study the bharal, and with luck, spot the elusive snow leopard - Panthera uncia. But as the Sunday Times review from 1973 notes, for Matthiessen “this was as much an inner journey as a field trip”, which explains why I thought of this beloved book several times on a recent field trip of my own, to the Highlands. All along, Dornoch had felt like a required pilgrimage to me, and several others - friends who were perhaps on their own inner journeys - seemed to know that I must go there for myself.

And then there was the literature about Dornoch…for a change I did some homework. At last I read “To the Linksland”, and when Michael Bamberger wrote that “the world of golf - although inhabited by millions of people playing thousands of courses in dozens of countries - is, in truth, a small village”, I was elated. For he seemed to be getting at what I think this golf writing phase of mine is all about…closing the gaps between people; making connections. And though he spoke metaphorically of the “small village”, if a physical manifestation of the nucleus of this “world of golf” exists, then it is surely Dornoch…

I re-read Herb Warren Wind’s piece in the New Yorker, and picked up Lorne Rubenstein’s “A Season in Dornoch”, and in both I found prose that got close to Matthiessen’s masterful style. Writing that makes one want to break free and explore; to dive into both the outer and inner landscape with equal vigour. With such glorious examples before me, it felt like sacrilege to try and write in my own clumsy style of what this latest trip might mean to me, but the only way I’ll find out - the only way I might make sense of it all - is to try.

When a hard frost arrived under a dark sky littered with stars, our tee-time dissolved as if it had never really existed, some notional mark in a future time that never came. Royal Dornoch lay frozen under a crisp white blanket so we walked it instead, and studied its ancient wares, and imagined how we’d play it. At first, we were doing the right things - laying up at the first, landing the approach in that small portion of the green from where it could hold on. Pretending we could play. Simon even claimed an early hole-in-one, just to annoy me, but in turn I envisaged a heaving bar for him to look after, in the old way, before such insurance existed. I haven’t even managed an ace in my dreams, so the least he can do is buy a very large round for his latest edition.

But before long, even in this make-believe version of our long-awaited Dornoch debut, we were spraying it around, hacking out of gorse and suffering in bunkers. It was a joy to be the only pair on the links, laughing at each other’s foolish courage in the face of this architectural masterpiece; facing up to our mental and physical limitations so honestly. Later we would head to Brora, and wonder if the quiet, more rustic vibe there was closer to the Dornoch that Herb Wind found sixty years ago, before transport and technology brought the boundaries of the “small village” closer together.

In the evening, I ran on the endless beach, and tried to explain down the phone line what visions I’d seen up the road, but it was like the proverbial finger pointing at the moon. Slumber lasted a few hours, but I was up well before the rest of town, and tracked my own footprints in the sand again, my way lit by the full moon high above our hotel. Heading south, it seemed uncommonly silent, just the gentle rhythm of my footfall on the beach, but when I ran out of shore and turned back towards the links, I realised I’d been downwind the whole way, for the northerly breeze stung my face and whistled in my ears, drowning out my ponderings.

There was something in this change of direction that had meaning, as if I should seek out the harming breeze more often rather than just playing downwind as usual, but as I rejoined “Granny Clark’s Wynd” and trotted back through the Dornoch links again, I wasn’t ready to go back indoors just yet.`Somewhere in his own pilgrimage, Bamberger said “the village itself was captivating, charming and tiny”, and that “at night nothing stirred at all, except a few loose leaves on the wide lawns of the town’s thirteenth-century cathedral”, and while the villagers lay fast asleep, I took in the deserted streets and those same wide lawns, and read a few gravestones, imagining what this old place once meant to those departed souls.

And the clock chimed six, and slowly but surely daylight drifted up from under the lapping darkness of the North Sea, and we wrenched ourselves away from Dornoch, to feast again on the nearby marvels of Brora. We came all this way - could see the first tee just below the hotel window - but it didn’t seem to matter that we would not play Royal Dornoch this time, for somehow just being here was enough.

Matthiessen never glimpsed the snow leopard on that trip, and I thought of his “gaze eastward, the last look in this life, perhaps, at the great Dhaulagiris” as our Defender pulled reluctantly out of Dornoch. But he came to terms with it as part of the inner journey he was moving through - towards non-attachment - and wrote that “I am disappointed, and also, I am not disappointed. That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain - that is enough” and, twenty-five years after first picking up this little Vintage paperback, I think I am starting to know what he meant.

Flying home, I dip back into “To the Linksland”, and am thrilled to find my own pencil marks around a brilliant paragraph near the end. “The golf course is a sanctuary. You wonder ‘What’s in store for me today?’ There’s hope in your voice, of course. Without hope, there is no golf” and once again this feels right. Hope has been on my mind of late, and golf’s difficulty ties in well with this open, positive notion. Who could possibly think they could tame or master this game, where the weather and the surface of the planet scupper our best laid plans; where we trip ourselves up more often than not? But to golf is to accept all that and yet still have hope - even in light of all the contrary evidence - and maybe that is why these places keep drawing us back, pulling us outside of ourselves, into the fresh air and towards self-discovery.

So I hope I will pass this way again, hope I will play at Royal Dornoch after all. And find Luigi’s open, and run once more on that ancient beach. But whatever comes to pass, those precious days in that “small village” will stay with me until I am too just some words on a gravestone. For while I was up that way, as Rubenstein said, “I was letting go. I was slipping into Dornoch ways, where people spent time with one another, and where time was more than something you had lost, or didn’t have enough of”. Maybe that’s what timeless means…

Probably a pulled hook; image courtesy of Simon Pope