Pitchmarks #26 - 24th December 2023 - Ashdown

The fifth green on the other side of “Quabrook”; image courtesy of Kolby Kniel.

“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you; you have to go to them sometimes”

“Some people care too much. I think it's called love”
Winnie the Pooh

What is left of the once great golfing press - now just adverts and short-game tips where once we found Darwin & Longhurst - is all about the roll-back at the moment, though when a friend calls earlier in the week simply to chat golf, there’s a mournful silence after he says “don’t they realise - at my age, the body is rolling back my drives anyway…”

So instead of caring too much about that, I focus instead on the game that I play, the way I play it, and meet an old university friend at Royal Ashdown Forest, where we tackle the Old Course, or rather it tackles us. I know Ashdown, though it is now a few years since I’ve been there, but Ed hasn’t played it, and as usual, I delight in introducing what I can remember of the course. We’ve played occasionally - maybe once or twice a year - for almost three decades, so it feels a little like we are being rolled back out here, amidst the timeless heathlands and ancient woodlands once home to Abe Mitchell and Winnie the Pooh. Sacred ground, indeed.

In the gorgeous lounge, gloriously refurbished since my last visit, lives a vast telescope, apparently removed from a Japanese warship. I peer out at this rolling landscape, perched on the North Downs like some golfing oasis, and spy neither enemy aircraft nor the dreaded Backson*, but a swift pair of foursomes, spilling down towards the penultimate green, and I recall that sense of pleasure that floods in once you spot the welcoming lights of the clubhouse across the last valley.

Those four will have worked hard to reach that view - the club’s Latin motto “Per tot discrimina rerum” translates as “through so many crises” - and will toil again to rise up to the final green, but through this powerful lens, I can make out only smiles, camaraderie. For them, the calm silence of the clubhouse will only be diluted by the gentle sounds of golf and the autumnal birdsong, for the forest is a place of great tranquillity.

A little more caffeine and then we stroll down the slope and onto the tee, and our adventure begins. The first few holes are good, but to some degree are also a mechanism to get us out in the wild country; a gentle start in preparation for the challenges - or “crises” - ahead. On the third, “Prue”, Ed hits an approach that almost goes in, and strokes home the birdie though it was long since given, for my blocked drive will hibernate in the heather. Then at the fifth, “Quabrook”, memories of my first game here flood back - a fine, teasing par five that in the summer was once within reach for me, before my own roll-back began. It is with a touch of melancholy that I realise that process began around the time Ed and I started playing...

Another blistering iron shot attacks the flag, and I concede another birdie, and it is only when his short iron to the devilish sixth - “Island” - plugs in the stream’s bank that I forgive him this auspicious start. Our golf has always been like this - a few great shots emerging more as a function of the law of averages than any actual practice - but something about walking together in the fresh air, with bags slung across our backs, invites conversation and so we fail to keep score and instead just trade our own personal updates. We live very different lives, follow different paths, but out here in Pooh’s Forest, we’re heading in a shared direction for a while, with the same goals.

The eighth green - “Hutchinson” - is a joy to see again from high above it in the fairway, and her protective shoulder of heather teases our delicate style of golf. I remember from a generation ago that feeling of open space as we climb towards the turn, and my best MacGregor three wood cannot quite reach the majestic and deliciously named tenth,” Ginger Beer”, though the thwack of persimmon echoing across this plateau is just beautiful.

As we push our bamboo pegs into the sixteenth tee - named “Pennink” for the architect and golf writer Frank, who lived near the club and worked here up until his death in 1983 - Ed reckons we’re about level, give or take, and bearing in mind a number of birdies from his side, I gladly accept. And another three wood goes hunting for the green after a tired slap of a drive, and that same ball dives into heather, presumably to await spring. One down in the match. Two down in balls.

I will spend most of the next week stunned that I had somehow forgotten the incredible seventeenth hole, “Half Moon”, whose approach contours pull everything left of another exquisite green site, but I manage to stop staring at it long enough to claw back the loss of the previous hole, and we stand on the final tee all square. “Jack Rowe” looks tame, compared with what has gone before, but I like this gentle finish, and the way the first and last here are so simple has a charm for me. They deliver you out and in, one and eighteen, and in between you have this rollercoaster of true heathland golf, untainted by the fashion of too many stripes, or too much water, or any sand at all, for there are no bunkers here, though you hardly notice it for the questions asked are myriad and charming.

The final valley; image courtesy of Kolby Kniel

A Wikipedia entry notes that “Ashdown Forest [itself] is an area of European ecological importance” but I would suggest that, for the student of the traditional game, the Old Course is six and a half thousand yards of global golfing importance. For in its open appreciation of a pared down approach to maintenance, it is not only a celebration of the game’s roots - firm and fast heathland golf through the summer months - but also a textbook example of golf fitting in with - even enhancing - the environmental pearl through which Pooh and Ed and I enjoy “so many crises”.

It’s a funny thing, Ashdown. It ranks quite highly, yet still sort of goes under the radar, but when checking in with a Canadian visitor earlier in the year, who’d seen many of the highlights in this south-east corner of England, it was the Old Course here that most surprised him. Bernard Darwin once wrote that it “is not quite like any other of my acquaintance”, and that “I never knew anyone who played on it and was not fond of it”, and as we have come to expect of Bernardo, he was right then and he is still right now. Ed seems to love it at first glance, and once again I am grateful for the enormous variety of heavenly spaces this game offers us.

Half the time when I am trying to ignore the roll-back talk, I find myself wondering why we can’t roll the whole game back. Keep the presentation focused on firm surfaces and a sustainable conditioning; play with the clubs and balls that make you feel alive when you occasionally locate their microscopic sweetspots. Guess what club to hit rather than tracking every last inch. But out here as we hack our way up the last, halving the final hole of this latest edition of our game in more strokes than I’m willing to reveal, I remember that I already play that way.

And at places like Ashdown, where the club are light years ahead of the environmental game because they never lost their way in the first place, there is no need to roll anything back except the years of this golfing friendship. In just over two and a half hours, we’ve had the most wonderful trek through the forest in the depths of December and left the rest of the world behind. And we shake hands and scurry back to those very different lives, but golf - our main connection for nearly thirty years - has once again enriched us, and I hope we can do it all again sometime soon.

Maybe Pooh is right, and love is “when people care too much”. But I do love Royal Ashdown Forest, and I do love golf, and so for me there is no “too much”, for I wouldn’t change a thing.

* For those not familiar with the Winnie-the-Pooh stories of A.A. Milne, Pooh Bear was to be found walking through the “Hundred Acre Wood” (based on Ashdown Forest, where Milne lived), and these books were the fabric of a good chunk of my childhood. “The Backson” was a terrifying, imaginary creature feared by Pooh and his friends (a bit like the sh*nk?), but it was in fact a mis-hearing of “back soon”, a far less terrifying notion. Like many golfing terms, “Backson” has entered my everyday lexicon, though more often than not, “soon” means “about three hours”…