There are several very excellent courses in Wales, but I am quite determined to put Aberdovey first—not that I make for it any claim that it is the best, not even on the strength of its alphabetical pre-eminence, but because it is the course that my soul loves best of all the courses in the world. Every golfer has a course for which he feels some such blind and unreasoning affection. When he is going to this his golfing home he packs up his clubs with a peculiar delight and care; he anxiously counts the diminishing number of stations that divide him from it, and finally steps out on the platform, as excited as a schoolboy home for the holidays, to be claimed by his own familiar caddie. A golfer can only have one course towards which he feels quite in this way, and my one is Aberdovey.
I can just faintly remember the beginning of golf at Aberdovey in the early eighties. Already rival legends have clustered round that beginning, but the true legend says that the founder was Colonel Ruck, who, having played some golf at Formby, borrowed nine flower pots from a lady in the village and cut nine holes on the marsh to put them in. The first five holes as the visitor knows them now were then but a wilderness. There was no ‘Cader’ and no ‘Pulpit’; we had a long weary walk along the road to the level-crossing, and began with the present sixth hole, which was then guarded by a fine clump of gorse, long since cut to pieces by merciless niblicks. Then came a period when we began and ended on the piece of land which now serves Aberdovey as a cricket ground, and there was a wonderful last hole in which we drove off from the present eighteenth tee, carried with our second shot the railway line and a mighty pile of sleepers, and holed out on the present cricket pitch. Finally, at the time of the first meeting at Easter, 1893, the course had taken something like the shape which it has kept ever since, save for the quite recent introduction of the new home-coming holes. I have in a dusty old album a group taken at that first meeting by a local photographer. I cannot count more than ten players, nor do I believe that there were any more. They stand ranged with their caddies in front of a bunker and a turf wall most curiously and artistically castellated, while behind is a motley gathering of local spectators arrayed in bowler hats. That humble little meeting, with its ten players, was considered a vast success, though I cannot think that the play was very good, since I remember winning the scratch medal with 100, and the best actual score returned during the three days was but three strokes lower. Aberdovey has made great strides since those days. The golf is very good, and will soon, I suppose, be made better, although, if one only loves a course well enough, even the most obvious improvement feels to be almost a desecration. Moreover, the place has a charm which brings the same people back to it year after year with a wonderful constancy of affection.
The village from the second tee
Aberdovey stands at the mouth of the Dovey Estuary, and the links are on a long, narrow strip of turf stretching between the sandhills and the shore on the one side, and a range of hills on the other. The sandhills are many and imposing, but nature has not disposed them with a very kindly hand. There is no turf on the far side of them—nothing but the shore and the waves—and so, although they make a most effective series of lateral bunkers, it is not possible to dodge in and out amongst them in quite the same fascinating way as at Prestwick or Sandwich. Moreover, till quite lately we could not use them at all in the home-coming nine holes, owing to the difficulty of properly draining some of the marshy ground at their foot. That difficulty has now, however, been done away with, at least as regards the summer, and there are some fine new holes, still a little rough, but improving rapidly, where we have to play with something more than ordinary accuracy between a never-ending range of hills on the right, and thick, unyielding clumps of rushes on the left.
As I said before, the course lies on a long narrow strip of golfing country, with the result that the holes have to go straight out and home again, and we have often either to struggle all the way out against the wind, and then be blown homewards, or vice versa. This is, of course, a disadvantage, since the holes in one direction are apt to become too long, and those in the other too short. I remember that on one occasion there was a Bogey competition, and a terribly strong wind, which blew dead ahead all the way out; it blew so hard that no human creature could hope to reach any of the first nine greens in anything like the right number of shots, and I believe the man who ultimately won the competition was eight down to Bogey at the turn.
There is probably no course that has its first tee so near the station. We tee up within the shortest possible stone’s throw of the platform, and drive over a waste of sand and stones, that is still fairly formidable, though neither so sandy or so stony as it was in the days when it served as an impromptu football ground for the villagers. A good drive lands us in a country of those grassy hummocks, which are a conspicuous feature of the course, and a firm iron shot over a bunker should get us a four. The pitch, however, has to be an accurate one, and this applies to the approaching throughout, since the greens are decidedly small and there is no great chance of recovering by a very long putt laid dead. To do a low score at Aberdovey a man must either be keeping his iron shots ruled rigidly on the pin, or he must lay a number of little chip shots from off the edge of the green within holing distance; this, moreover, is not a particularly easy thing to do, since the greens are full of natural dells and hillocks. The second and third holes have very similar tee-shots; there are several small sandhills to carry, and severe punishment for a pulled shot. The approach to the third hole is a particularly attractive one, since the green is almost entirely circled round with small hills, and there is only a very narrow opening through which to play; against the wind the ball may be pitched up boldly enough, but down wind there is nothing for it but a running shot, and that a very accurate one.