Blasted Heaths and Blessed Greens by JAMES W. FINEGAN

Author:JAMES W. FINEGAN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Published: 1996-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Some 14 or 15 miles due south, and only 5 miles north of Aberdeen, lies a trailblazer of a golf club. Its name is Murcar and it is boldly leading the clubs of Scotland into the twenty-first century with one of the significant golfing innovations of our time: 150-yard markers. No need for the practiced eyeball here—just check the handy marker and let fly. Murcar is, in my experience, the only club in Scotland to provide this American crutch.

But perhaps we should not be surprised at such enterprise here. After all, Murcar was also the first private club in the north of Scotland to permit golf on Sunday, which it did shortly after its founding in 1909. And it is also the only club to have owned a railway, the Strabathie Light Railway, by which members in the early days were transported from the Bridge of Don to the clubhouse for a penny.

The architect of Murcar, however, had no need of such a convenience. Archie Thompson was given the assignment, and all he had to do was walk over from next door, where he was the professional at Royal Aberdeen. Let the record also show that the “great revisionist” entered the picture some years later, and that the course we play today may well owe more to Braid than to Simpson. One thing is certain: together they made a wonderful job of it.

The land at Murcar is very close to ideal: tumbling, linksland, great sandhills, gorse, heather, the spiky marram grass, even a couple of burns for good measure. An unusual feature of the terrain is the way the sandhills rise above one another in successive ridges from the beach, providing a terraced effect and revealing the sea from almost every hole—the broad curve of the bay and of Aberdeen’s harbor down to Girdleness lighthouse in the south, eastward over the North Sea to the horizon (the oil drilling much in evidence), and northward to the farmlands and the long and regular line of coast stretching away toward Cruden Bay and Peterhead.

From the back tees, Murcar measures just under 6,240 yards and plays to a par of 71. From the regular markers, the length is just over 5,800 but the par is 69 (no three-shotters to help our relationship with par here).

The first couple of holes, shortish par fours running back and forth over pleasantly rolling ground, let us get warmed up before facing the rigors that begin on the 3rd, a 400-yarder where we drive over very hummocky country to a shelf, the fairway then plunging violently to a gully where the ball inclines to bounce left into heavy rough. The green lies in a veritable punchbowl at the far end of the gully in the very lee of the elevated 10th tee at Royal Aberdeen. For the uninitiated, nothing would be more natural than to putt out, climb up onto that teeing ground, and hit away on the wrong golf course! It has happened.

Instead, we locate the 4th

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