The Golf Courses of the British IslesDarwin, Bernard
History
The Golf Courses of the British Isles
Darwin, Bernard
Golf courses -- Great Britain
So much for the twelfth hole of blessed memory; and now we must get
back to the course in general. To begin with, Ganton is a course of
sand and fir trees and gorse bushes. It is a little like Woking,
a little like Worplesdon; and, generally speaking, it is the type
of course that one would expect to find in Surrey rather than in
Yorkshire. Needless to say, however, it has plenty of character of its
own, and in particular it possesses by far the vastest and generally
most gorgeous bunker that is to be found, as far as I know, on any
inland course. It is a huge pit of sand, with just the depths and
shallows, the bays and promontories of the genuine seaside article. It
is so large that, by its unaided efforts, it provides highly effective
bunkering for the tee-shots to the two last holes; and as regards its
dimensions, I shall not be flattering it very grossly if I compare it
to the bunker in front of the fifth tee at Westward Ho! It is the more
striking because it lies on the other side of a road away from the main
body of the course; and after a series of trim little pot-bunkers, one
comes quite suddenly upon it, rugged, natural, and magnificent.
Nature has done nearly all the bunkering work for these last two holes;
at the others she has had to be assisted by man, and man has been very
busy cutting pot-bunkers, and mostly towards the sides of the fairway
and the edges of the green. The bunkering seems to me, if I may say
so, to be exceedingly well done, and for the most part one has to keep
reasonably straight--sometimes very straight indeed--from the tee. The
sixth, seventh, and eighth I remember particularly as all demanding
scrupulously accurate tee shots, and of these perhaps the eighth is the
most difficult, with serious bunkers on opposite sides of the course
at just the distance of a moderately good drive; it is not unlike the
tee-shot to the sixth at Woking, or the eighth at Walton Heath; and to
say that is not to call the shot an easy one.
There are whins in fair profusion, and they play an important part at
both the second and third holes. The approach to the second is a really
difficult one, for the green lies in an angle made by two lines of
whins, which are partially protected from the infuriated niblick player
by formidable bunkers, so that any perceptible error is likely to bring
with it a disaster either sandy or prickly. At the third, again--a
very full one-shot hole--the whins guard the entire left-hand side of
the course. It is, to be sure, possible to hit over them, but the feat
entails a carry of some two hundred yards, and even Ray admits that a
long shot is wanted to get clear to the left.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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