If this third hole is the most terrifying to the habitual foozler, the more mature golfer will be a great deal more frightened of the fourth and tenth, which were really very good holes indeed. That drive at the tenth down a pretty glade between the trees is, as far as appearances go at least, one of the narrowest I know, and the second shot is a good one too, though by no means so long as it used to be, with a gutty. After this tenth comes another capital ‘two-shotter,’ which has been made by the expedient of running two poorish holes into one, and in this case two blacks have emphatically made a white, for the second shot over another pit, only a little less disastrous than the first, is excellent.
There are several more long, slashing holes on the way back, and at one of them I recollect that our adversaries in this same adventurous foursome lost their ball within four yards of the tee, and, in spite of the most arduous and unremitting search, had to give up the hole. I must add that the drive was neither a high nor a straight one, and that the grass at the edge of the course, or as I once heard an Irish green-keeper call them, the ‘sidings,’ were distinctly long.
One good point about Cassiobury is the smooth and velvety surface of the green. They are a little slow and easy perhaps, but very true and soothing to putt upon, and have been wonderfully improved of late years. Time was when the very springy park turf seemed determined never to settle down into a good putting substance, but unremitting care and hard work has changed all that. Finally, I ought to add that owing to the taking in of some new land and the abandoning of some of the old holes, the course is practically in a transition stage, and so I must be pardoned if I have used the antiquated numbering of the holes.
Of the courses to be reached from the Baker Street end of London, such as Northwood, Chorleywood, Harewood Downs and Sandy Lodge, Northwood is perhaps the best known, and there we come upon a somewhat different kind of golf; perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as a mixture of two different kinds of golf. There are holes among the gorse, and there are holes of a more agricultural character among the hedges and ditches. Regarded in the abstract, gorse-bushes, or, as I ought to call them, whins, are not an ideal hazard. It is often impossible to play the ball out of them, and still more often unwise to make the attempt without a suit of armour, while the local rule, to be found on some courses, that the ball may or even must be lifted and dropped under a penalty is thoroughly unsatisfactory.
If, however, whins are from their nature a bad hazard, they have nevertheless very distinguished sanction. They are to be found on links of undoubted eminence, and were found on many more till they were literally hacked and hewed out of existence by the niblick shots of their infuriated victims. Moreover, say what we will, they are rather entertaining, and the very fact that a serious error will almost ruin us gives a poignancy which is lacking in any but the most desperate of sand-pits; we trifle pleasurably with our terrors and snatch a fearful joy. Certainly there is a great deal of amusement to be extracted from the Northwood whins, and our achievements or disasters among them are those that remain graven on the memory. Yet there is one hole in the county of ditches and hedges (such colossal hedges as those at Northwood were surely never seen before) that leaves as vivid an impression on the mind as the spikiest of gorse can leave elsewhere. This is the eighth, which rejoices, I believe, in the appropriate name of ‘Death or Glory.’ It supplies a standing refutation of the theory that a hole cannot be a good one if it is of that mongrel length known as ‘a drive and a pitch,’ or, as it has been brilliantly though indelicately expressed, ‘a kick and a spit.’
‘Death or glory’ (the eighth hole)
