Pitchmarks #39 - 31st March 2024 - "Ah, St Enodoc"
It is hard to judge just how long I have been meaning to get to St Enodoc. It could be fifteen years, or twenty even; an unexplained desire that just won’t go away. But of late, the sort of people who I’ve come to know through writing, and while exploring golf’s rich tapestry - the people on my wavelength; another theme for some other Sunday there - have started to mention it, and I finally find a way to make this pilgrimage, at long last.
And I tell a few people I am heading there, and I notice how different their responses are compared to some of the other little missions I go on. Half a dozen friends, of the sort I trust completely, simply say “love St Enodoc”, and leave it at that. Another says “Yeah, I love it”, and that the “opening & closing stretch is sublime”, and sitting here a week later I agree, and decide that, for me, the opening stretch is the front nine, and the closing stretch from the extraordinary, other-worldly tenth onwards.
My father’s old Merriam-Webster dictionary, battered by the research for a thousand crosswords, defines “sublime” as “tending to inspire awe usually because of elevated quality…or transcendent excellence”, and adds that the term “implies an exaltation or elevation almost beyond human comprehension”, and I wonder whether that is why these folk I rely on can’t tell me why they love it, just that they do. There is more in the way of intrigue between the lines, because words alone cannot do it justice. So Simon brings his camera…
We arrive early enough to be able to swap things around, and when the receptionist moves our Church Course slot and says “you’ve only two hours” to navigate the delightful Holywell Course, we smile, for that is plenty. The sunshine and breeze quickly dry out any remnants of our morning shower at Perranporth, and by the time we push our stripey wooden pegs into the Church’s opening tee, we’ve already played two loops. In the short time since we arrived, I come to understand that Simon has been here a lot, knows it well, and has been holding back in order that I might see it afresh - his only comment when I first mentioned my plan “Ah, St Enodoc”...
Straight away the scale of the challenge is evident. The first is terrific, its rolling hillocks and firm, running turf a sign of things to come; the second is a beast, and when I now read the planner where the Pro says “play it as a par 5”, I smile, for I probably still took a double up that hill. But we’re not counting. At the third tee, St Enodoc seems to enter another realm, where “transcendent excellence” lurks in every view, every greensite, every waving blade of marram. From there it gets wilder still, the fourth as good a hole as golf can offer, though it gets ignored for the wondrous sixth.
On that sixth tee, I cast a quizzical look at Simon, for I have no idea what to do in the face of such a challenge. I am as lost here as I would be staring down one of the crosswords my parents so effortlessly completed, but there seems to be a sliver of mown grass left of the Himalaya bunker, and while it is only about as wide as the tee box, I feel that if Braid had the courage to build a hole here, I could at least have the decency to play it with conviction. So I hammer it through that tiny gap, and more or less skip down the hill, enchanted by this beautiful, mysterious place. And I duff the pitch, and Braid wins the hole after all, but I can’t stop smiling and only just keep myself from singing out here.
The routing ducks in and out of the wind, which is steadily picking up, and at the famous tenth, St Enodoc shifts from the sublime to the ridiculous. Simon hits two of the best shots of his life right at Betjeman’s resting place, and still the green is elusive. As we stroll through this narrow valley, he tells me that the chapel ahead was buried under a sand dune for three hundred years, and I am at first suspicious, then speechless.
We’re too busy laughing and crying at this intoxicating version of golf to go and find the great poet’s gravestone, but I don’t mind, for I will be back here just as soon as I can. Later I look up the chapel’s history, and read that “to maintain the tithes required by the church, it had to host services at least once a year, so the vicar and parishioners descended through a hole in the roof to perform the rights to keep the chapel sacred”, and I make my own vow, to pay homage to St Enodoc “at least once a year” to keep this golfer sane.
By the time we are sat on the fifteenth tee, we are fifty holes deep in the day, and I just want to pull up a deckchair and stay here forever, gazing through moist eyes at the wild land before us, as the light slowly drifts west and the shadows creep over my Church. Time exists only elsewhere, and the “world of measurement” that Benjamin and Ros Zander spoke of might as well be the other side of the galaxy from here.
The final stretch is, indeed, “sublime”, and by the time we shake hands I am drained by the day’s exertion, and can barely talk. On the way here, I’d been curious as to why so little detail was shared; now I think I get it. This sort of golf - “great days with good people in fabulous places”, as I heard one dear soul describe them, in their heart-breaking eulogy for another - transcends the ordinary. It transcends sport, or language, or every different shade of what we take for normal. To me it is my own form of worship; a devotion akin to that which had the parishioners clambering in through the chapel roof to keep their own faith alive. And if words alone could point the way, well then who are we to think we might do better than this place’s very own Poet Laureate:
“Lark song and sea sounds in the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere”
So ask me about St Enodoc, and I will point you to some photos, and perhaps to “Seaside Golf”, and simply mutter, through a thousand yard stare, “Ah, St Enodoc…”
Marvelous