Forfar Golf Club, Scotland, May, 2007.
Forfar, Scotland, is a small town about dozen miles northwest of Carnoustie. Its most famous resident may be Bon Scott, the lead singer of the rock band AC/DC, who was born there in 1949 and died, of acute alcohol poisoning, in 1980.
Brian.
Forfar—prounouced FOR-fer—has a golf course, which was designed by James Braid. I pulled in one evening in 2007, to make sure I’d be able to find it the following morning. It was almost time for dinner, and I wasn’t really planning to play, but suddenly I found myself in the golf shop handing my credit card to the wife of the head pro. On the course, I soon caught up to and joined three members: Brian, a local builder, who sounded a little like Sean Connery and carried his golf bag by the handle, like a suitcase; Gavin, a retired local cultural administrator; and Michael, a jeweler. Here’s the sort of golfers they were: all three, despite having played the course regularly for many years, were surprised to learn that the round blue marker in the center of each fairway was 150 yards from the green. Gavin told me that the three of them played together almost every Monday evening because “then there’s no one in front and no one behind.” They took lots and lots and lots of swings, although we still finished in just about exactly three hours.
The next morning (after breakfast and a bucket of balls at the local driving range, on the other side of town), I played a second round at Forfar. A ladies’ medal competition was going on just ahead of me, so I had plenty of time to admire the course, which is well inland and is surrounded by farms but feels very much like a links course, in part because most of the fairways have distinctive undulations, like gentle ocean rollers—remnants of ancient flax furrows, Brian had told me. (You can see the furrows, sort of, in the photo at the top of this post.) And when I finished I still had time to kill, so I went around again. And the following year I came back, with friends from home.
If I were sure I’d return to Forfar as often as I’d like to, I’d accept an email solicitation I received a few days ago:
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Rural courses in Scotland – brilliant. I played in my brother in law’s home town in Scotland last summer (Peebles, just south of Edinburgh – we both live in Canada now) and they were offering a years’ membership for 400GBP. Wonderful course with fearsome rough, just incredible value. That kind of money barely buys a handful of rounds here in Calgary…