The fourth hole is known to all Aberdoveyites as ‘Cader,’ and is as good a specimen of the blind short hole as is to be found. There is a big hill in front of the tee, shored up with black timbers, and the green has the transcendent merit for this type of hole that it is not too big. There is no vast meadow of turf to play on to, like the Maiden green at Sandwich, and the ball has to do something more than carry the hill-top. Cader used to be particularly memorable a few years back, when the small caddies, stationed on the top to watch the fate of the ball, used to cry out “On the green,” with a curiously melancholy, piping note. Now alas! they have become more sophisticated, and merely signal with the hand in the orthodox manner. It is but a poor exchange, and we sadly miss the old familiar cry.
After Cader we must take a short walk along a winding path among the hills which takes us on to the ‘Pulpit’ tee, where we stand high above all the world, with the sea on our left and the whole course stretching away before us in the distance. The tee-shot is by no means one of the most difficult, but certainly one of the pleasantest that I know, and gives a full measure of sensual delight. Then we must leave the hills for a while and strike inland to play some flatter holes that wind their way by the side of the railway. The sixth and seventh are both very fine two-shot holes, and then at the long eighth we meet with a characteristic Aberdovey hazard, familiarly and affectionately known as the ‘leeks.’ They are in fact irises, but they have always been the ‘leeks’ since Peter Paxton christened them so, under the impression that the national emblem must naturally be found upon a Welsh course. Paxton is not the only man who has found sad trouble in the leeks, for they are wonderfully thick and retentive, and the wise man pulls very wide away to the left at the eighth and ninth, and does not try to run things at all fine.
So far we have gone practically straight ahead, but at the tenth we turn sharply to the left and prepare for our homeward journey. This tenth is a truly beautiful short hole: in length about a cleek or long iron shot on a still day, with a really horrible bunker, long, deep, and wide, stretching before the green and throwing out a sandy tentacle far to the right to catch a long sliced shot. It is really a better hole than Cader, in that we can see far more clearly where we are going, and, when the wind is against us and we must needs take a wooden club, there is no finer one-shot hole in the world.
Now we come to the parting of the ways, where the new holes break away to the right towards the sandhills, and the old holes are on the flat ground, over which we journeyed outwards. There is among the old holes a beautiful thirteenth, with a narrow little green beset on every side, so that the tee-shot had to be accurate in order to make the second possible. That hole we shall miss sadly, but otherwise the new holes are far the better: long raking holes between hills and rushes that give the course just the extra touch of length and difficulty that it wanted. We emerge on to the old ground again to play the ‘Crater,’ a hole that we are fond of for old sake’s sake, though it is in reality a bad and fluky one, as ‘punchbowl’ holes generally are. The sixteenth, however, is a really good one, with a horribly narrow tee-shot between the railway on the left and a wilderness of sandhills on the right; it is capable of ruining any score, and no man is a medal winner till he has played that shot—with a cleek, if he is prudent—and sees the ball lying safely on the turf. The seventeenth has a fine tee-shot from one of the spurs of Cader and another punchbowl green, which follows all too soon after the fifteenth, and then we finish with a fine, long, free-hitting hole over clumps of rushes.
Thus ends the course, and I know it so well that I find it very hard to criticize or appraise at its just worth. One thing may safely be said, that it provides a fine school for iron club shots, whether short or long. There are a great many holes—perhaps too many—which need a long iron shot for the second, and these shots have to be played from every variety of stance and lie on to greens that are good, but uniformly small. There is, too, no better course for teaching the little chip or run up, play it how you will, from the confines of the green—the shot which professionals play so wonderfully well, and many amateurs play so badly.
The tee-shots are good, without being very remarkable, and there is perhaps a lack of full brassey shots to be lashed right up to the hole; that, however, is a criticism to which, in these days of mighty hitting and rubber-cored balls, many courses are open. Yet when the wind is adverse, and the iron shots become wooden club shots, the comparative smallness of the greens makes them wooden club shots of the very best, and I ask for nothing pleasanter to look back upon than a string of fours going out against a wind at Aberdovey.
I have tried as a rule to avoid invidious comparisons between course and course, but it may be pardonable to make a short and wholly friendly comparison between Aberdovey and Harlech, because, although near neighbours, they have such very different characteristics. At Aberdovey the holes go straight out and home again; at Harlech they tack backwards and forwards, this way and that. In the same way the Aberdovey sandhills run in one unbroken line, while at Harlech they are more scattered, and can therefore be used in more different ways. Aberdovey is a course of small, undulating greens, while Harlech has larger and flatter ones. Finally, the charms of Aberdovey grow on one slowly, but also, I think, surely, while Harlech fascinates at the first glance.
Looking across the fourth hole