Regular readers know David Owen as my second favorite golf blogger, whose long, meandering posts I enjoy greatly. David writes the Muny Life feature for Golf Digest, wrote the definitive history of The Masters, blogs extensively and amusingly about golf at his home club and also writes occasionally for The New Yorker. He published a wonderful piece on my current great white whale Askernish that can be found here, and this week's edition of the magazine has a new piece of his that I've just finished reading and upon which I'll be blogging soon.
But today we'll be discussing his latest blog post on his trip to Machrihanish, my predecessor great white whale. It's David being David, meaning that in his post on Machrihanish he talks about all sorts of interesting tidbits, meanders off on several tangents and at the end of the day leaves us guessing what he thought of the place. First, he expands our vocabulary:
Machair is a Gaelic word that means pretty much the same thing as links, the sandy, wind-shaped coastal grasslands where the game of golf arose. It’s pronounced “mocker,” more or less, but with the two central consonants represented by what sounds like a clearing of the throat. The word is still used in parts of Scotland -- for example, on the island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. The photo below, of me and my golf clubs, was taken on the machair at Askernish, the ghost course, on South Uist, in December 2008.
The word machair is also preserved in a number of places in Ireland and Scotland: Magheramore, Maghera Strand, Machair Bay, Macharioch, and Machrihanish. Those last two are villages on the Kintyre Peninsula, in southwestern Scotland. The southernmost tip of the peninsula, called the Mull of Kintyre, was celebrated in 1977 in a song by Paul McCartney, who owns a house nearby. A few miles north of the Mull is Machrihanish Golf Club, which was founded in 1876, with twelve holes, and was enlarged three years later by Old Tom Morris.
Funny, my people have a similar word, though we typically spell it macher. But of course it means something entirely different, since in Old Europe our ancestors weren't allowed on the machair (thus we became the moneylenders). But that's not important now...
David provides this photo of the opening tee shot at Machrihanish, considered by many to be the best opening shot in links golf:
As much as I loved the place and course, I thought the attention paid to this hole to be somewhat silly. It's a simple cape hole, where the fairway angles away and the player must determine how aggressive a shot to hit. But in this case there's a mile of room to the right (which is the 18th hole's fairway) and it's a short hole, so there's simply no reason to bring the beach into play.
Back to David:
Machrihanish was the setting of Michael Bamberger’s book To the Linksland, which was published in 1992. One of the most and least appealing features of Machrihanish is that it isn’t easy to get to. If you’re traveling by car, the round trip from Glasgow can be more than seven hours, without much in the way of golf along the route. Flying is possible, although scheduling can be problematic, especially if you're trying to connect from another flight. The workaround my friends and I used during a recent buddies trip -- with help and planning from Celtic Golf -- was to go by water, on a chartered boat, which was operated by a company called Kintyre Express. We made the trip, from Troon, in less than an hour and a half. The boat ride turned out to be one of the week's many highlights.
That's a book that I need to read, but I'll pick another bone with David on the geography. It's remoteness is such an integral part of its appeal that it can only be considered an asset. Were Machrihanish located near Glasgow it would have long since ceased to be Machrihanish. I looked into the Kintyre Express service when we went in 2009, but it was (and I'm quite sure still is) far too expensive for anything but a larger group.
The two guys in the photo below, who were out for a walk with their wives in Campbeltown, chatted with us about golf, and then came back without their wives to tell us a story about Tony Lema. I think they were interested in us partly because I had played two Scottish courses they hadn't believed an American golfer would even have heard of: Reay and Strathpeffer.
I've played Strathpeffer, as it's Elsie (d/b/a The Scottish Housewife) and John's home course up in the Highlands. It's a true mountain goat course, with about fourteen par-3's (I may be exaggerating on that last point, but we'll find out if Elsie is still with us).
David also played Machrihanish Dunes, about which he provides this extensive detail:
The photo below is a view of the water from Machrihanish Dunes. The course was built, with numerous conservation restrictions, on what the British call a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The maintenance crew doesn't use fertilizer, and there's no irrigation system. Only a tiny fraction of the land was disturbed during construction. And the course is terrific.
The course was quite controversial when built, because of the environmental concerns and the resulting routing that entails long walks from greens to tees. But its built amongst wild dunes and I'm sure that there are some spectacular vistas out there.
On our trip we only had time for two rounds of golf. That entailed a Sophie's Choice level decision for your humble blogger, a second round on the famed Old Tom Morris links or a round on the controversial new track. The purist in me won that battle, as he always does.
Do give David's post a hit (link above), if only for the pictures of the spectacularly remote Mull of Kintyre.
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