Pitchmarks #56 - 21st July 2024 - Sublime West Surrey

Gazing back down the eighth…defeated

We must guard against becoming caricatures of ourselves, of always saying or doing the same things. But given even half a chance these days, I will bang on about vinyl records to anyone who might listen…about the tactile experience of removing the disc, and of how the raw crackle of the vulnerable plastic somehow holds us in the present.

We hear the music as it was laid down, or as close to that as a format can bring us, and then are moved to flip to the other side by the strangest - the rarest - of modern phenomena, silence. Where the digital world automates our experiences, churning through some endless algorithm of noise without pause for thought, the analogue retains some degree of agency for the individual.

As the early evening sun splinters through the oak borders of the sixth at West Surrey, David and I find our common ground. Retired from a life in the audio-visual field, his business life straddled this tightrope between artistry and autonomy, and we bond over a love for the sleeves and sounds of old-school records. I scribble the names of a couple of record shops on an otherwise redundant scorecard, and take equal delight in describing my new favourite haunt - Dig In Records, in the centre of Woking. And all the while, we stroll through this glorious pocket of quintessential English farming land as happily lost in our tranquil surroundings as we would be in the swirl of any one of the albums we so treasure.

West Surrey has been a steady grower for me, just as Herbert Fowler has been. The humps and hollows; his delightful routing, with glimpses across the course here and there. Fowler - better known for Walton Heath and The Berkshire round these parts - had an eye for the heroic in design as well as deed; some holes are subtle, while others flamboyant, and the secret charms of many of the quieter holes here are slow-released over time, like the shyer tracks of a great album.

When the course was laid out in the early twentieth century, the halcyon days of vinyl records were still several decades away, but Fowler was very much a part of golf’s golden age, and though technology has transformed both our equipment and the playing surfaces, much of the soul of the game as that generation played it remains locked in the rolling contours here, to be gently absorbed by the golfers so many summers later.

The tender first, climbing steadily from the sun-trap of the patio, reminds me of Worplesdon’s opener; its green perched innocently above us. The spectacular eighth, where one must actively decide how to position the drive in order to best attempt a valiant approach. The dangerous, protected green of the downhill ninth before the clever, grassed cross-channels of the eleventh. No planes or roads disturb our patterns of thought out here, though London is not so far away, but we bathe instead in the aural delights of midsummer as the golf course builds to a crescendo.

The ninth, sliding into a quiet corner of the property

The simple dogleg of the sixteenth defeats me again - my angles all wrong, and the approach too demanding for my tired effort - but my ball survives and we move to the seventeenth, which David calls “Marmite”, for people generally love it or hate it. In 1910, matchplay would have been the dominant format for much of golf’s play, and though we don’t play a match tonight, this hole somehow makes more sense in that context. It is equally tricky for both sides of a game, but even to mention it here seems unnecessary, for to focus on one hole when the course as a whole is so wonderful feels petty to me.

Fowler had to get us back up to the top of the hill in order that we might come over the brow and have our breath taken away by that timeless gaze down the valley towards Messer’s art and crafts clubhouse, and though the seventeenth is a tough climb, there are far worse ways to gain golfing altitude than this. And so we reach the closing hole, and are flattered by the bounce, and negate the fiendish bunkers and a few more lightning putts, and then shake hands.

Sat in the soft sunlight, squinting up at the group way behind, I am - not for the first time - stunned by the strength in depth of golf courses in this country. Not only are there lots, but they are often classics - manuscripts left by Fowler and Colt, Abercromby and Simpson - and yet, so many are all but unknown, an embarrassment of riches.

West Surrey goes quietly under the radar, and we wonder if it is simply because they - the locals - like it that way. It is superb golf, in design and conditioning, but on days like these for the profile of the club to be any higher would just dilute the solitude, the ambience…the gentle, analogue crackle of this soundscape. Our computers and playlists compress sound into a predictable, digital format, but though we all use and abuse such convenience, I am on the lookout for the intervals where respite can be found, along with joy, and surprise, and connection.

So I pull away from West Surrey once more, and look forward to the next dose, for there is a spell Fowler cast lingering in these hills, and I need more of it. And the instant I get home I pull some vinyl from a sleeve, and the top from this old fountain pen, and feel very, very lucky.

(With thanks to David and Duncan, the perfect hosts!)

Duncan tests the bunker sand consistency, again…