Brancaster is like one or two other courses--Harlech and Sandwich are those that come into my mind. The golf is not desperately difficult golf if one is hitting the ball steadily into the air, but the occasional top which we may allow ourselves with something like impunity on more difficult courses spells ruin. If the punishment of the utterly bad shots was the aim and object of all golf, these three courses would be the best in the world. I don't think they are any of them quite as good as that, but they all provide the very jolliest of golf, and Brancaster is not the least jolly of the three. [Illustration: HUNSTANTON _Under snow_] =Hunstanton= is very amusing golf; it is more than that, for it is for the most part very good golf. Perhaps it is a little unfairly overshadowed in public estimation by its near neighbour Brancaster, which is altogether on rather a bigger and grander scale. Brancaster has the faults which are apt to go with its peculiar virtues; it gives the player just a little too much rope, an accusation that is not lightly to be made against Hunstanton. They had a visitation from Braid at Hunstanton a year or two back, and he left a most destructive trail of bunkers behind him; wonderfully cunningly devised they are, so that if we narrowly avoid one we are very likely to be caught in another or 'covering' bunker, just as we were rejoicing at our unmerited escape. The outgoing nine holes at Hunstanton are nearly all good; the home-coming half is much more unequal in quality. The last two holes always made a fine finish, but some of the preceding holes were once of rather poor quality. Braid's bunkers, however, and the stretching of tees, and a radical change at the thirteenth have worked wonders, and nowadays a low score at Hunstanton, though perfectly possible, has to be earned by sound and accurate golf. We begin just as at Brancaster, with a most terrifying bunker to carry. It is a magnificent bunker and a very good one-shot hole, but these caverns in front of the nervous starter do most sadly retard progress on a crowded green. The second and third are really fine holes both of them, especially the second, which wants two good shots and a pitch, with accurate going all the way. The fifth demands two of the best shots to carry a cop in front of the green; there is, moreover, a chance of slicing into the river Hun. At the sixth we play a blind pitch into a kind of amphitheatre among sandhills--a hole which is picturesque but fluky; but at the eighth we come to a really fine hole--the best on the course--with a fine slashing second over the corner of a field that is out of bounds. It is a hole where we must decide on our own policy on the tee, and either go as close as may be to the field to begin with or else reluctantly put aside all our noblest ideals and play pawkily to the left for a five.