There is something of the dog-leg about the very first hole, where we drive at an angle over a ridge covered with bents. The third needs two fine shots, and the pot-bunkers rage furiously together in innumerable quantities. Then at the sixth we have one of the most charming two-shot holes to be seen anywhere, with just a suspicion of a bend in the narrow strip of fairway, a wilderness of sandhills on the right, and rough to the left. At the eighth we need not place the shot with quite such dreadful accuracy, but instead we must hit prodigiously hard and far, for after we have hit the tee-shot a steep hill rears its sandy face between us and the hole, and a really fine carrying brassey shot is needed if we are to be on the green. It is more like a Sandwich hole than a Prince’s hole, and might perhaps feel more at home on the other side of the boundary fence, but after all variety is a pleasant thing, and this eighth brings back memories of the mighty Alps at Prestwick, and has a splendour and a dash about it which makes an instantaneous appeal. The eleventh is another good hole, where, if we push our drive far enough out to the right over the big hills, we may hope to put our second on the green, where it nestles amid a guard of hummocks. Nor must we omit some mention of the short holes, all excellent in their different ways and all fiercely guarded, where a shot has got to be something more than decently straight, since—and this applies to the approaching in general—the ball does not run to the hole unless it is hit there, and the ground falls away towards the edges of the greens.
Now after this very exacting golf we may turn to something rather easier and more straightforward and take our tickets for New Romney in order to play at Littlestone.
New Romney is a pleasant, quiet, sleepy spot with a fine old church, once a thriving seaport, now left high and dry a mile or more inland. Littlestone consists of a long and somewhat unprepossessing terrace of grey lodging-houses, arranged with mathematical precision along one side of a straight, flat road. On the other side of the road is the sea, and this is the saving clause at Littlestone. It is not beautiful—very far from it—but we are right on the edge of the sea; we snuff it fresh and salt in our nostrils, and can almost believe that one wave, just a little larger than the others, could overwhelm the road and the terrace and the very links themselves.
Yet, though we are so near the sea, and there is as much sea and sand as anyone could wish, the course itself has just the suspicion of an inland look. The fairway is so beautifully flat and shaven and runs so straight and so precisely between two lines of thick tufty grass, which might at certain seasons be irreverently called hay. The soil itself at the first two and last two holes is not altogether above the accusation of being clay; it can be rather muddy in winter and terribly hard in summer. No; I cannot get it out of my head that Littlestone does look like one of the trimmest and smoothest of inland courses picked up by some benevolent magician and dumped down again by the sea.
The carry from the seventeenth tee
