We had two rounds of Ganton on the first day of our pilgrimage—a warm, delightful, sunny day—and then took train to Huddersfield to play at Fixby. Fixby is as different from Ganton as chalk is from cheese, or as a watering-place is from a manufacturing town. Ganton is charmingly pretty in a way that is comparatively ordinary to anyone who has seen Surrey and Berkshire. Fixby has for the southerner’s eye a kind of grim and murky romance. For some two miles we have to wend our way up a long slope through Huddersfield and its outskirts, looking rather drab and ugly and intensely prosperous. Then suddenly the romance begins. We climb up a steep hill through a pretty wood, albeit the trees are black with the smoke of many chimneys, finally to emerge rather breathless in a new land. Now we are perched on the top of a hill, in wild, solitary, moorish country. A long way down below us are Huddersfield and its mills, and all around is a great stretch of view, rather bleak and sombre, but possessed of a very distinct beauty of its own. We are not really on the moors, but we feel as if we were, and all the colouring is moorland colouring. Everything is a subdued grey or green, and even the stone walls, which abound on the course, have a gloomy tint of their own—a kind of purplish black that I have never seen anywhere else. It strikes us at once that this course could only be in the north; there is nothing southern about it, and by this strangeness and strong character it casts something of a spell over the southern visitor. This is how I saw Fixby, with a grey leaden sky and a mighty wind blowing the misty rain that is called ‘moor-grime’ strongly in my face. In summer it must possess quite a different sort of beauty when the great clumps of rhododendrons are all in bloom, as the artist has depicted them, and the club-house in the centre of a blaze of gorgeous colour.
To turn from the scenery to the golf, there is a very clearly-marked distinction between the two rounds of nine holes, each of which begins and ends near Fixby Hall, which is used as the club-house. The first nine holes might be described as park golf; and yet this would be perhaps to give a false impression, for the trees do not play an important part, and the turf is harder and dryer than the normal park turf. It is plain-sailing, straightforward golf, in which we can see where we are going, and the trouble consists mainly of artificial bunkers of the ordinary type.
The second half is much more sui generis. We emerge from the park land into country which is more open and much more undulating. We have to play a great many more blind shots—in fact, we have rather too many of them; and there are one or two holes—exceedingly difficult holes they are—which would be, I venture to think, much better if only we could get a good view of the flag. Another feature of the second half is the ubiquitous stone wall. Sometimes it is an ordinary wall; sometimes it partakes of the nature of a sunk fence, and we only realize its presence by seeing our ball suddenly plunge, like another Curtius, into the bowels of the earth. I should not like to pledge myself as to the exact number of walls, but we shall be lucky if we do not make acquaintance with more than one of them upon a windy day; and, in parenthesis, the wind can blow at Fixby with an energy worthy of the strongest seaside gale. The two halves may fairly be summed up by saying that the first half provides the sounder golf, and the second the more exciting; and that both need a man to play them.
On the way out the holes that I personally think the more attractive are the fourth—a nice single shot, 170 yards long, on to a plateau green—and a group of three that come together, the sixth, seventh, and eighth. Of these the eighth is a pretty enough little short hole with a very well-guarded green, but the seventh is the best of the three and also the most interesting, from the fact that it owes its merits almost entirely to ingenuity in construction rather than to natural advantages.
The green has certainly a good natural protection to the right in the shape of a ditch, to which has been added a bunker on the left; but still, if we were allowed to make a direct frontal attack upon the hole, we should have no great difficulty to contend with. A frontal attack, however, has been forbidden us by Mr. Herbert Fowler’s ingenuity. In the straight line between the tee and the green have been erected a series of formidable fortifications, wherefore we must drive out to the right and then approach the hole from the side. The further we go to the right the more difficult the approach will be, but if we can play with a judicious hook, and so ‘pinch’ the fortifications as close as we dare, we shall obtain a reasonably open and easy approach. This device of compelling people to play the hole as a ‘dog legged’ hole has made all the difference between a good and an ordinary hole. Of some of the longer holes on the way out I have said nothing, not because they are not sufficiently testing in character, but because they are for the most part straightforward holes that do not lend themselves to distinctive description.
After the turn comes, as I have said, the region of blind shots and stone walls. The twelfth is a curious hole, because of the extraordinary difficulty of judging the direction of the second shot over a high grassy mound. Even those who are steeped to the eyes in local knowledge are never quite certain if their ball will be lying close to the flag or thirty yards away, and race feverishly to the top of the mound to see what has befallen them. The thirteenth, again, has a puzzling, blind uphill approach, after a really good tee-shot across a wall. There is a good long, punishing finish, all the last three holes being over, and two of them well over, four hundred yards in length. At the last there is a chance, if the breeze be favourable, of a really fine second shot from the crest of a hill that shall send the ball soaring away for an apparently immeasurable distance, avoiding stone walls and trees, and ultimately reaching the green.
There is plenty of hard work to be done in reaching the greens at Fixby, and still more when we have reached them, for they are fast and curly to a degree, although very true when at their best, and there is much allowance to be made for borrow and much gentle trickling of the downhill putt. That Fixby is a difficult course is proved by the fact that the redoubtable Sandy Herd has never accomplished the full round of this his home course under 70. If 70 is Herd’s best, anything under 80 is not to be despised by the ordinary mortal.
Looking across the second green