Pitchmarks Archive ADVENTure #5 - "Escape to Goswick"

Or, "Golf as it was meant to be played"

“One of the most naturally magnificent pieces of golfing ground that ever swam into the ken of the golfing explorer”
Bernard Darwin

“Escape to Goswick Links” runs the tagline of the club’s website, amid glorious images of this remote stretch of the Northumbrian coast. And, in this cold, wet southern winter, such imagery is welcome - something to look forward to. An invitation arrives from, it seems, a kindred soul; taken by my love letter to Darwin’s beloved Aberdovey, he can sense that Goswick is just the sort of place I’ll fall for.

And so another lengthy journey begins, but some vague notion of the cool, fresh air of the links makes the time pass swiftly, and before long I am within reach of this spot. I leave the A1 behind, and wait at a level crossing for the fast train to Edinburgh to glide past, Elgar’s Nimrod gathering pace as the gates open and I drop down into this staggering landscape before me.

I’ve just enough time for an initial loop, and decide on a rare outing for the hickories, which amuses the smiling Professional. A glint in his eye seems to mean “I think you’ll find it hard enough out there without those”, but the decision has been made, and I strike off the tenth with even less idea where the ball is heading than usual.

As the daylight slowly fades, I get round to the front nine, and marvel at the rugged contours before me. Some of the green complexes remind me of Deal, mown tight all around to create difficult questions, most of which I try to answer with a Braid-stamped approach cleek. That Goswick - a modern-day championship course and Open Qualifying venue - should be so playable and enjoyable with these old sticks seems both wonderful and unlikely, but I accept it along with the many strange bounces I suffer en route.

At the sixth, I seem to experience some sort of epiphany. Left with sixty odd yards to go (no-one measures distance with hickories!), I have no wedge with which to dodge the original challenge of the architect. Instead, the cleek must look to push the ball up a steep slope, skirting a bunker from which I’d perhaps never emerge, then slowly release momentum to the flag beyond.

As I smirk at the test ahead, a single walker is lurking behind the green, binoculars fixed on some seabird in the dunes, and I quietly wish he’d walk on, for the shot fills me with dread, and I could do without the audience. But the cleek is an old friend, and the shot that seems to channel through me somehow stops rolling just a few feet right of the flag. I’ve no idea how it got there, and couldn’t do it again if I stayed there trying ‘til Easter, but over the resultant putt I get that rare feeling - a sort of knowing that goes beyond logic; maybe flies in the face of it, even - and the ball topples in on one final oscillation as I somehow always knew it would. By now, my foolish pride hopes the twitcher is still around, but he has vanished, leaving me to smile privately at the mystical comedy that is golf, though it feels as if the universe smiles with me.

Later, hunkered down in my sleeping bag as the local geese fly in to roost, I make a few notes and feel an immense gratitude for yet another chance to play in the palatial realms of this ancient game. And as I drift off to sleep, I realise that the silent birdwatcher and I are not so different, really. We move around the land, looking for that precious feeling that a rare migrant or a long putt brings, but while those highlights are the tags we record and remember, in some other way it is all about the bits in between, the process. Golf and ornithology are only occasionally punctuated by this notion of “success”, but in the places such things might happen, and in the long pauses that separate the action, there’s a calm and a presence that is just as valuable.

The morning comes, and I take a few more notes under the brilliant white of my headtorch. Even the geese are still asleep, and the only sound is that of my fountain pen scrawling across the soft paper of this latest notebook. After a while, a pair of headlamps appear off to the right, and their beam shines up into the dark sky as the car comes up and over the level crossing. Lights appear in the sheds behind the clubhouse, and before long another set of beams are moving across the links, sweeping light into the darkest corners like the nocturnal snow machines of the high mountain ski resorts.

The day is coming, slowly, and I wrap up and take a walk across the course, in search of the beaches beyond. Tufts of marram grass wave in the gentle breeze like flocks of white hair in this monochrome wilderness, and as I return over the crest of the ridge that forms the course’s eastern boundary, there is light escaping past the clubhouse curtains, and some more cars approach, one at a time. Then the level crossing starts to flash red, and another train snakes past, heading south this time.

Before long I am draining the last of my coffee, and pulling on a hat, for while the light has caught up, it is still chilly out here. We exchange handshakes, and smiles, and start to haggle over strokes given, and then we are off, charging down the first fairway after our drives, eager to face this initial demand. On the second, my weak iron falls short into the cavernous gash which protects this hole, and I face an impossible pitch. I fail not once but twice, and emerge back on to the green with my ball in my pocket, already beaten but delighted nonetheless.

At the sixth, I am somehow where my hickories left me the previous evening, but any attempt to replicate the magic of last night’s par save with more reliable equipment and measurement is doomed, and I walk off the hole perplexed by my score but enchanted by the green itself. We trade holes for a while, until we reach the brilliant twelfth, whose semi-blind second shot is exhilarating, and manage to salvage a half in fours despite the treachery of the firm putting surface. Thirteen is the sort of tempting short hole I could spend all day attempting; a mouthwatering tee sheet to a green protected by the most beautiful, revetted bunkers.

This patch of holes in the guts of the back nine are where Goswick bears its teeth, and, standing smiling on the fourteenth tee, I wonder what the young, hopeful professional must make of such a hole when events like Open Qualifying are held here. For they don’t “build” greens like this anymore, nestled in the hills of some endless dune evolution, and golf is poorer for that, and Goswick richer.

As I wait my turn, last to play after some inevitable bunker issues at the last, I notice that a blustery wind is building momentum, and high above us a skein of geese are in formation, their “v” heading west towards the Cheviot Hills beyond the railway and the road. We pause to gaze up, and the geese are changing formation, honking loudly, but getting nowhere. This crisp morning in early February at first offered a stillness that is unusual here, but now the flag outside the clubhouse looks as if it’s been starched, stretching out towards us. The geese drift south a little, before giving up, and I take an extra club for my tee shot.

Before long we are inspecting our shoes by the clubhouse door, but the shoe cleaner is redundant today. For, winter or not, this sandy soil is made for golf, and the course leaves no trace on our clothes but only on our hearts. I take in a bowl of fine soup, and get ready to head south once again, but it feels emotional somehow, crossing the tracks to leave Goswick behind. For six hours the motorway traffic and fading light cannot bother me, for I am full of reflections and ideas, inspired by what I’ve seen. I’d waited months to make this journey, and had some expectations of what I might find, but the place is so much more than just a great golf course. It feels like an ecosystem in and of itself, nestled quietly in the sand dunes.

The firm, fine turf; all bent and fescue. The hollow thump of a landing ball. The wild green sites, and the wispy banks that hide them. The bunkers, the gullies. The views - trains, beaches, a deserted fishing shiel. Somehow the landscape feels timeless, as if nothing much has changed in all those years that people have been coming here for a dose of such enchantment. And yet, much has changed, and continues to do so, but the club are fighting the good fight at Goswick; preserving what is special about this place and enhancing the property rather than trying to dominate it.

The website cites this exemplar of golf “as part of a sweeping natural landscape we feel compelled to nurture and care for to the benefit of all who call it home”, and it is this recognition of “all” that helped seal the GEO Foundation certification, a tribute to the environmental measures in place. This stretch of coast is a precious habitat for many, and perhaps we golfers - when golf is managed this well - are simply another species passing through, in harmony with all the others. Battling against the wind like those persistent geese; gazing out to sea like the calling curlews.

And so my trip to Northumberland drifts towards the murky realms of memory for now, but this “Escape to Goswick” line keeps nagging at me. The idea of escape bothered me, as if it implied I was running away from something, but I’d been overlooking the importance of the “to” in that turn of phrase. For Goswick is all about positivity, and it is a place to head to for all the glory that awaits, not to move away from anything else. It deserves to be a destination that is somehow worth more because of its location, not despite it. That’s the whole point…it is different, and every inch of the journey pays off with these sort of memories and feelings to treasure.

I’m not sure if anyone has yet observed that all good golf writing is, to paraphrase A.N. Whitehouse, “a series of footnotes to Darwin”, but they ought to, and perhaps there’s a book lurking in that title. For in most cases he saw and depicted a few generations ago what we struggle to make sense of these days, and in relation to this course, it is the same old pattern. So I start with his words, and end with his words, and can only smile at his answer, when asked what happened when first he breached that level crossing and came into the realm we call Goswick, For Darwin - this most intrepid of golfing explorers - and I, lifetimes apart, “fell deeply in love”.

“Escape to Goswick” was first published on 17th February 2023, but it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that I think about that blessed links at least weekly. It was such a special journey, and my host Dan a kindred spirit in terms of our shared passion for both links golf and for writing. Dan - I recalled - when re-reading this - that you lent me a pound which our opposition relieved us of midway through the back nine. I don’t need a reason to come and see you and Goswick again soon, but in case I did, I have a pound waiting here, so will start looking at dates!