The Golf Courses of the British IslesDarwin, Bernard
History
The Golf Courses of the British Isles
Darwin, Bernard
Golf courses -- Great Britain
=Wallasey=, where we come back to Cheshire again, is another course of
mighty hills: indeed I do not think I have ever seen a course on which
the contour of the hills and valleys was so infinitely picturesque.
At several of the holes we play, or try to play, in the trough of two
great waves of sand that tower on either side of us, and feel rather
overpowered by the vastness of our surroundings. There was a time when
Wallasey, though amusing enough, was too short and blind and tricky
to be taken very seriously, but all that is changed now, and, with the
addition of heaven knows how many hundreds of yards, the course is a
long and punishing one. It is still perhaps a little too blind for
those of very rigid and spartan views, but whatever the exact place
which may be assigned to it on the day of judgment--and this sort of
question will never be settled at any earlier date--it is undoubtedly
good golf.
[Illustration: WALLASEY
_The fifth green_]
Certainly the first hole is the blindest of the blind. Wallop the
first, and the ball vanishes over a hill; wallop the second--this time
with a mashie--and it flies over another on to the green. This is not
the best of beginnings, but the second has a much more interesting
tee-shot, where we try to hug a bank covered with a particularly
pestilent form of bush, and then at the third we are in the country
of hills and valleys. The view at the third, as we look down the long
winding gully that leads to the hole, is one of the most charming in
golf; and the fifth is another wonderfully picturesque hole, with a
terrifying second shot. After the seventh we leave the sandhills for
a while, and play backwards and forwards for a spell along some flat
holes that seem to radiate from one solitary house that stands alone
in the middle of the course. They are very good holes some of them,
and the ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth especially need long, straight
hitting, but the last four or five holes take us back to the more
characteristic country, and the finish comes in a blaze of glorious
sandhills. A rather blind, and to the stranger a puzzling, tee-shot
should land us safely on the table-land, and then far away and
rather below us to the right we see the promised land, the seventeenth
green, and with a good shot the ball will swoop away for an apparently
incredible distance, and finish by the hole side. The eighteenth, too,
is full of charm, and when we have successfully carried the spur of a
big hill and played our second over some more bold and broken ground,
we can hole out in a deep hollow, with the eyes of the whole club
watching us from above as they sit in front of the club-house. It is
quite likely that we have played very far from well, since this country
of mountains and deep dells is always difficult for the stranger, and
our host has probably ways and means of reaching the green that we are
apt to regard as ways of darkness, but we shall have found the golf
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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