Pitchmarks #93 - "Love is Blindness"

The delights of Cruit Island

Cruit Island, approach to the third hole...“aim at the Atlantic…” Image courtesy of Simon Pope

Kevin: “Where are you going?”
Me: “Rosapenna, Donegal”
Kevin: “Amazing…will you have time for Cruit Island on the way?”
Me: “No…don’t think so”
Kevin: “It’s amazing, Richard. Believe me. You’d love it. You’ve got to go. You have to go…”

Every once in a while, someone will impart a little piece of information that seems more important than the rest. Maybe you sense a greater intensity in their eyes as they deliver the message, or perhaps a longer pause to follow. But somehow, you know that this is one of the paths for you; an avenue that needs exploring.

And so it was with Cruit Island, which I am finally learning - after months of telling people about it - to pronounce correctly, as “Critch”, which comes from the Irish “an chruit”, meaning hump or hillock. Just which of the thousand mounds it celebrates is unclear, for as we will soon find out, this promontory is nothing but hillocks.

A colleague at work, Kevin - who has been in and around London for several decades but whose heart still resides in Ireland - couldn’t let my impending mission to Rosapenna be signed off without urging me to divert to some unknown outpost a good hour west of Downings. And though it was a hassle to take this detour, and would mean arriving late to the hotel, there was a depth to Kevin’s enthusiasm for this little nine holer that I was not about to disregard.

So Simon and I find, more by luck than skill or signal, the approach road, and cautiously cross what we will shortly discover is the first fairway on our way to the car park. There is a medal on, but the locals have almost all finished their double-loops, and are enthusiastically supporting the bar’s turnover while a rugby match broadcasts from the big screen in the corner. The website states “100,000 welcomes await you at Cruit Island”, but on the evidence of the smiling angel who greets us - whose welcome is as if we are long-lost family - you’d be there for evermore if that were the case. We check in, and - already smitten by the brief glimpse we’ve had - walk round the back and up to the first tee, keen to get in two circuits ourselves if we can.

From the very start, Cruit Island sinks its teeth into us. The opening drive must be guided into a strong breeze that wants to push our balls right and into a vast dune, with the landing area out of sight. From here, waves of long fescue dance in the wind off the main playing lines, but we shall quickly get used to having only a marker post to aim at, and become grateful for that much guidance. After a while, we locate our drives and find that we still have several miles to go to reach the putting surface, or so it seems. Eventually, we arrive, but all thought of scoring is out of the window long before the hole is complete, leaving us to relax into our surroundings, and the staggering perch that the course occupies.

The climb up to the second tee brings a feeling more akin to hillwalking, but - like every fell summitted - it is worth the spent effort. Our target is hewn into a distant mound, with the fairway far beneath us, then rising towards the flag. Everything looks set to kick left but we find the short stuff and hammer two fine long irons into a ferocious gust coming over the brow. It is breath-taking to find such brilliant, natural architecture so early in the round, and our delight in the hole softens the blows suffered in our attempts to master it.

From there, the course swings right - the third fairway narrowing to a spit upon which the green waits on the edge of the ocean, with some gnarly bunkers guarding the entrance for all but the heroic approach. Left and right are dangerous options, and long is quite simply dead, though three holes into this Donegal mission, we are feeling very much alive.

At the fourth, the line of sight marker for the tee shot is two paces from a vertical cliff, and some distance right of any sane line. From the fairway, if anyone has ever found it, the hole swings hard left round a huge dune to a green that gathers shots into its contoured heart. Such are the severity of the slopes here that we spend a few minutes clipping balls away from the flag in order to delight as they check, slowly change direction, and dribble down beside the hole, and when Simon holes one in dramatic fashion, our roaring laughter probably carries halfway back to Derry Airport.

The fifth is another thrilling drive, and we both fail to negotiate the little ridge left of the green with both approach and recovery. But we shall shortly be grateful that the hole contains a bail-out area, for there is no such luxury at the sixth. In general, I loathe the term “signature hole”, for it implies inconsistencies in the course as a whole, or a reliance on immediate, obvious charms. So many of the holes I have come to adore despite an initial indifference - the fourth at New Zealand, for example, or the seventeenth at Woking - have revealed their glory in subtle ways over time, displacing the more commonplace favourites in the process.

But Cruit Island’s sixth is special, there is no doubt about it, and what was already a glorious afternoon - five holes and any number of wild swipes in - becomes an unforgettable one before we reach the seventh tee. On a course where blindness is more frequent than a clear path, at the sixth it is blindingly obvious what is required. Almost every one of the one hundred and thirty-seven yards ahead is stretched over a treacherous ravine, with a slim platform waiting high on the other side. On the fourth, it was only long that was dead; here it is everything but the green, and the green looks - and is, we discover when we eventually arrive - tiny.

The closing stretch is very fine, too, but there is some sense of being dazed by the brutal honesty that the sixth demands, and we drift through the last three. Or the last three of this loop, I should say, for we are delighted to discover the first tee vacant once more, and quickly commence a second bout. Like all great golf courses, Cruit reveals more second-time round, and we approach it after having learnt a good many lessons the hard way. At the fourth, we club up despite the ocean, and our shots hang in the wind for an eternity before plummeting down beside the hole for a half in threes. And at the next, we have the courage to ignore the mad marker post and take a tighter line, and again the green delights us, and again, the hole defeats us. And it goes on like this, until it is time to put the clubs back in the rental car, and snake through the links and back on the track to Rosapenna, infinitely richer for the detour.

When I next see Kevin, Cruit Island is about five hundred shots behind me, but I know he can tell by the look in my eye that I loved it, and that I owe him one. For it is not a beaten track, that road past Belcruit Graveyard, but it is a journey worth taking, and one that I will never forget. For Simon, it is his first glimpse of Irish golf, and he is more or less rendered speechless by it. It gets called quirky, Cruit Island, and it is, and the incessant blindness is part of that, but we golfers are all blind to some degree - certainly in terms of our analysis of our own games.

But the quirk for me isn’t about that, for I love the adventure of it all. I think the quirk - as in the thing that sets it apart, makes it unique - is that it is, in a world of uniformity and consistency and this sport’s blind obsession with fairness, such unadulterated, unapologetic fun. It feels like the free play of childhood, to me, and it is ever so precious for that. And on this little slip of land, dripping halfway into the sea, there are more great holes than most eighteen hole courses can dream of.

“You’ve got to go”, Kevin told me, “You have to go”. And I expected it to be fun, and to find some great golf waiting for us. But there was more of each than you can possibly imagine until you see it with your own eyes, streaming from the fresh air, and from sheer delight. Cruit Island is more than the sum of its parts, even though its parts - all nine of them - are majestic. And Kevin was right, as he normally is. “You have to go”.