The Golf Courses of the British IslesDarwin, Bernard
History
The Golf Courses of the British Isles
Darwin, Bernard
Golf courses -- Great Britain
Perhaps the two chief features of the course are Paradise and the
Chalk Pit, and with an unfortunate prodigality nature has so disposed
of them, that we have to encounter them at one and the same hole.
Paradise is a pretty wood, traversed by a public road and adorned by
one of those sham Greek temples which were beloved of our ancestors.
The chalk pit explains itself, and it is only necessary to add that
it is an extremely deep one. We drive over the pit, and a good drive
will go bounding down a hill a prodigious distance, leaving us with an
iron shot to play over Paradise wood on to a horse-shoe shaped green
in the neighbourhood of the temple. How it may be with rubber-cored
balls I do not know; probably everyone pitches jauntily and easily
enough over Paradise, but it was something of a feat to carry the wood
in the consulship of Plancus, and many a reasonably stout-hearted
golfer would sneak round the corner and, giving the timber a wide
berth, make reasonably sure of his five. One of the very finest shots I
ever saw was played at this hole by Mr. Hutchinson with a horrid, hard
little ball called the 'Maponite,' long since consigned to a deserved
oblivion. His ball lay upon the road, whence he hit it with a full shot
against the wind right over the wood on to the green.
The other hole at Eastbourne which leaves a vivid impression on the
mind is the seventeenth--a long hole that is skirted closely on the
right throughout its whole length by the grounds of Compton Place, a
house that belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. The tee-shot gives a
great opportunity for the ambitious driver who can carry just as many
trees as he has a mind for, and thus make the hole a good deal shorter
and easier; but the second is never a very easy one, with a spinney on
the left and a sunk fence on the right guarding closely the side of the
green.
To putt at Eastbourne is an art of itself. It is not that the greens
are not good, for they are often excellent, but the hidden slopes
in them are like Mr. Weller's knowledge of London, "extensive and
peculiar." For the stranger, the safest rule is that he should take
a great deal of trouble in determining where to aim, and then aim
somewhere else. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the course is
visited by a persistent and violent wind, rendering the golf eminently
healthy, but almost exasperatingly difficult.
[Illustration: FOREST ROW
_The fifteenth green_]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account