Leaving Rye we may glance at two other Sussex courses of quite a different kind—Eastbourne and Ashdown Forest. Eastbourne is, like Brighton and Seaford, to name two other Sussex courses, a seaside course only in name. It is one of the fairly numerous clan of down courses, of which the main features, as a rule, consist of chalk, thistles, steep hills, and perplexing putting greens. It may be because I played on it at an early and impressionable age, but I think that the old nine-hole course was better golf than the present full-sized round. The best holes now to be found at Eastbourne were all among the original nine, and the newer holes exaggerate the vices of the old ones, while lacking some of their virtues. There was an old Eastbourne golfing saying which Mr. Hutchinson has quoted, that “the ball will always come back from Beachy Head,” which, being interpreted, means that there are certain slopes at Eastbourne so long and steep that it is impossible to play the ball too much to the left or right, as the case may be. No matter how crooked the shot, down will come the ball, trickling, trickling, till it lies close to the hole. Now that is not a very skilful or amusing or in any way good sort of golf, and there is a good deal of it in some of the newer holes. The old ones are not perhaps wholly free from the taint, and the putting is infinitely deceitful, but still there is less of the deplorable use of the side-wall.
Perhaps the two chief features of the course are Paradise and the Chalk Pit, and with an unfortunate prodigality nature has so disposed of them, that we have to encounter them at one and the same hole. Paradise is a pretty wood, traversed by a public road and adorned by one of those sham Greek temples which were beloved of our ancestors. The chalk pit explains itself, and it is only necessary to add that it is an extremely deep one. We drive over the pit, and a good drive will go bounding down a hill a prodigious distance, leaving us with an iron shot to play over Paradise wood on to a horse-shoe shaped green in the neighbourhood of the temple. How it may be with rubber-cored balls I do not know; probably everyone pitches jauntily and easily enough over Paradise, but it was something of a feat to carry the wood in the consulship of Plancus, and many a reasonably stout-hearted golfer would sneak round the corner and, giving the timber a wide berth, make reasonably sure of his five. One of the very finest shots I ever saw was played at this hole by Mr. Hutchinson with a horrid, hard little ball called the ‘Maponite,’ long since consigned to a deserved oblivion. His ball lay upon the road, whence he hit it with a full shot against the wind right over the wood on to the green.
The other hole at Eastbourne which leaves a vivid impression on the mind is the seventeenth—a long hole that is skirted closely on the right throughout its whole length by the grounds of Compton Place, a house that belongs to the Duke of Devonshire. The tee-shot gives a great opportunity for the ambitious driver who can carry just as many trees as he has a mind for, and thus make the hole a good deal shorter and easier; but the second is never a very easy one, with a spinney on the left and a sunk fence on the right guarding closely the side of the green.
To putt at Eastbourne is an art of itself. It is not that the greens are not good, for they are often excellent, but the hidden slopes in them are like Mr. Weller’s knowledge of London, “extensive and peculiar.” For the stranger, the safest rule is that he should take a great deal of trouble in determining where to aim, and then aim somewhere else. To add to the piquancy of the situation, the course is visited by a persistent and violent wind, rendering the golf eminently healthy, but almost exasperatingly difficult.
The fifteenth green
