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http://ifcus.org/2010/05/06/healing-his-face/ In 2007, I traveled to Scotland on an unusual Golf Digest assignment. I landed in Glasgow without tee times or an itinerary, and I rented a car and set out in a more or less random direction, with the goal of playing only courses I’d never heard of before. You can read my article about that trip here or here.

The bent flag shows how hard the wind was blowing. Cullen Golf Club, Scotland, May, 2007.

One of my favorite stops was a quirky course called Cullen, in Aberdeenshire, on the southern coast of the Moray Firth. The original nine holes were laid out by Old Tom Morris, and the course has blind shots, crossing fairways, otherworldly topography, and a cool tee shot that you hit from the top of a cliff.

Looking down from the top of the cliff, Cullen Golf Club.

Partway through my round, I joined (as the fifth player) a group of older golfers from a club called Hopeman, about thirty miles to the west.

Hopeman Golf Club, Scotland, May, 2007.

They were on a golf outing, and this was their second round of the day, and they were playing a scramble, in competition with three other groups from their club.

The boys from Hopeman. That’s Cullen’s eighteenth green in the distance.

Most of them were carrying flasks, from which they were sipping a mixture of something and Drambuie—I couldn’t quite make out the recipe—and their golf bags were so full of empty beer bottles that they clanked when the wind, which was fierce, knocked them over. They urged me to have a swig from one of their flasks. I declined, because I’d quit drinking about a year before, but they were so relentless that I eventually decided it would be better to risk falling off the wagon than to come to blows. (The other ingredient turned out to be scotch.)

The boys from Hopeman and some of their beverages.

As soon as I’d drunk a capful, though, they began to worry about their supply. “Are you driving?” one asked. His brow was furrowed with concern. When I said I was, he and the others concluded that offering me another swig or a beer would be unwise. Toward the end of the round, one of them asked, in a slurry brogue, “Wha hoe wah noo?” and only I could understand him: “What hole are we on now?” (It was the seventeenth.) A year later, I went back with friends.

The specialty in the clubhouse—at left in the photo above, behind the big rock—is Cullen Skink, a fish soup that has its own Wikipedia entry.

Here’s where my friends and I stayed in Cullen when we went back the following year. It’s my favorite kind of hotel, because you are never in danger of thinking you are in a Holiday Inn.

I’ve had dreams about both the golf course and the hotel. Someday, I will go back.