I have a very great affection for Dollymount. I have played some very strenuous and delightful matches there, and, save possibly at St. Andrews, I feel as if I had been in more bunkers at Dollymount than on any other course. This seems to be the feature of Dollymount, the amount of low cunning, if I may so term it, with which the bunkers are placed. In writing that sentence I find that I have been guilty of a criminal pun without meaning it, because Mr. Barcroft, the secretary, is a great disciple of Mr. John Low in the matter of bunkering. He has saturated his mind in that most charming and instructive of books, Concerning Golf, and then he has gone forth valiantly with his shovel. The result is that there are many pitfalls, which are worthy of Mr. Low’s definition of what a bunker should be. “Bunkers, if they be good bunkers and bunkers of strong character, refuse to be disregarded, and insist on asserting themselves; they do not mind being avoided, but they decline to be ignored.” There are some fine, towering hills at Dollymount, but it is not these that make the player’s knees to knock together; it is the little pots of innocuous aspect that most emphatically decline to be ignored.
The first tee, looking towards Howth
A first glance at the course produces much the same effect on the mind as does Hoylake. It looks a little flat, and bare, and even dull; we do not see where the holes are and whence and whither the players are going and what they are trying to do. As at Hoylake, the first impression is utterly wrong, as we soon discover when we begin to play, more especially if we have been maltreated by the Irish Channel on the previous evening. The first thing that strikes us is that we ought to be beginning with a nice symmetrical row of fours, and that ugly disfiguring fives will insist on creeping in. At the first we really ought to do a four, but still there are a variety of things to prevent such a consummation: a pot-bunker to catch a pulled tee-shot, a bunker in the right-hand side of the green, and a considerable possibility of taking three putts on a green which is as good as it is usually fast and difficult. At the second the trouble is of a bolder and, in a sense, a more commonplace character, a large and ravenous bunker, which must be carried with a good second shot, and then turning back towards the club again we play a hole where almost meticulous accuracy is necessary if we are to get the perfect four, wherein the fourth shot consists of our opponent saying, contrary to the recommendations of the Rules of Golf Committee, “That will do.” Crooked driving may be definitely punished by pot-bunkers, or, if we are lucky, it may only entail the most difficult of approach shots, in which we may have to try a pitch of really desperate difficulty over flanking bunkers. Only if we drive with absolute accuracy we shall be properly rewarded by being able to play a pitch and run shot straight—or let us hope so at least—up to the flag.
There is to be no pitching or running at the fourth—not at any rate with the second shot—but a fine, high carrying stroke with a wooden club to take us home on to a green that lies well protected by hollows and hummocks; a really good four this time, and we must do a man’s work to get it. These first four holes always run together in my mind partly because of their uniform excellence and partly because we now branch off into somewhat different country, a country of bents and big sandhills. The fifth is chiefly notable for what I may call a typical Sandwich shot from the tee, and then comes a region that I know only by sight, for there have lately been some new holes made there. It is a region of rolling dunes and bristling bents; I am told the new holes are long and difficult, with narrow and exacting greens, and knowing the country and Mr. Barcroft I can well believe it.
Of the other holes on the way out I must spare a special word for the eighth—it was old seventh—one of the very best ‘round-the-corner’ holes that I know. The whole face of nature bids us slice from the tee, and the wind generally encourages us to do so, and yet we must pull resolutely out to the left in order to open up the way for our approach shot on to a green that nestles among the hills. If we fail to pull, or if we are tempted to use the wind too freely, we may have a very long drive on which to plume ourselves, but shall have an impossible second, and we shall take five to the hole.
It seems to me that the first few holes on the way home are not so good as the outgoing ones, save that there is a fine tee-shot to be played at thirteen, between the marsh on the one side and a series of pot-bunkers on the other. The sixteenth, however, is good, with the green lying in a long, narrow hollow; and the seventeenth is really very good indeed. It is long and narrow and all the more frightening because there is hardly anything in the way on the straight line to the hole. There are bunkers at the side, however, and more alarming still is the fact that we are always playing along a hog’s back, with marsh to the right and rough to the left. Finally, there is a green not very fiercely guarded, but full of terribly difficult curves and angles, wherein the holing of the very shortest putt is a matter for much prayerful ‘borrowing.’ I cannot help regretting the old eighteenth, which has now disappeared. That tee-shot, with the chance of breaking a club-house window, tempted one very strongly to the taking of a cleek, and that is a testimonial in itself. However, on high days and holidays the general public congregated there so freely that the death of one of them was probably only a matter of time, and so the hole had to go. The old seventeenth now promoted to being the home hole is a very fine hole if there is much adverse wind, for then there is a fine long second to be played over the corner of a territory, which is out of bounds, and those shots in which the ball has to leave the limits of the course for part of its career are never pleasant, when it comes to a pinch.