At the eighth we carry a lifeboat house from the tee—an unique hazard in my experience—and play a long second shot full of interest and possible disaster. Then, alas! we have to leave the sea, which we have been keeping on our right-hand side, and go further inland. All the home-coming holes are good and difficult, but we miss the sea terribly. It is so pleasant to have it there as a reminder that we are really playing on a seaside course and not inland. The finish is a particularly good one, the seventeenth, especially against a breeze, being quite one of the best on the course, since there is a railway which terrifies us into a hook just when we must go straight if we are to get the requisite distance.
All this time I have been talking of nothing but long holes, and that is to do the course an injustice, for there are some very pleasant short ones. The third is a hole that one might expect to find at Hoylake—a pitch over the angle of a field, which is bounded by walls of turf; it is one of the remnants of the old nine-hole course, and therefore regarded with a jealous and quite justifiable affection. The greens are excellent throughout the course, and the number of people who drive off between sunrise and sunset on a summer’s day shows that Sheringham does not suffer from a lack of popularity.
I should imagine that Brancaster, before golf was introduced there, must have been quite one of the quietest and most rural spots to be found in England. Even now it is wonderfully peaceful, and has a distinct charm and character of its own. We get out at Hunstanton Station, and drive a considerable number of miles along a nice, flat, dull east country road till we get to the tranquil little village, with a church and some pleasant trees and an exceedingly comfortable Dormy House. In front of the village is a stretch of grey-green marsh, and beyond the marsh is a range of sandhills, and that is where the golf is.
The great defect of Brancaster used to be the thinness and poverty of the turf. The holes were splendidly conceived, and the carries blood-curdling; but the sand was so near the surface that the lies were none of the best, and the putting greens sometimes of the worst. I retain a vivid recollection of a visit to Brancaster with a somewhat irascible friend. He greeted me at the Dormy House door with the depressing words:
“It’s utterly impossible to play here. We had better take the next train back.”
“Oh, no,” I said cheerfully. “As we have come here, I think we had better play.”
“Very well,” he rejoined. “Of course, you won’t mind putting with your niblick. A mashie is no good at all.”
We stayed, and personally I enjoyed myself; I don’t think my friend did, and certainly the greens were of a surpassing vileness. All that is changed now, and by some miracle of industry the course is a velvety carpet, and the greens are as of the greens of Sandwich, with plenty of good, holding grass upon them. Good greens are all that Brancaster needed, and now it has got them. Perhaps there is one more thing needed, and that is a stout man with a spade to dig a few more bunkers; but that want, I believe, is in course of being or has actually been remedied by now.