{"id":424,"date":"2011-02-06T11:03:15","date_gmt":"2011-02-06T18:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgpnolan.com\/?p=424"},"modified":"2013-05-10T02:45:27","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T09:45:27","slug":"of-needles-and-haystacks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/golf\/courses-and-travel\/424\/of-needles-and-haystacks","title":{"rendered":"Of Needles and Haystacks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The crossing to Portaferry<\/p><\/div>\n

Waiting for the ferry I watch Strangford Lough tighten and boil whitely through a last narrow chute.\u00a0 Somewhere beyond a horizon made brief by sullen clouds, it spills into the Irish Sea.\u00a0 Beyond the crossing sits the Portaferry quay and behind it a steep hill.\u00a0 It is a sunless Monday morning in October.\u00a0 Bored commuters ignore the scent of salt water and the screaming gulls.\u00a0 When they hear the bass rumble of the ferryboat\u2019s diesel the men prepare to board by shuffling their newspapers closed and getting into their cars.\u00a0 The women rearrange the children in their prams.<\/p>\n

The ferry ride lasts all of five minutes, but the short, steep chop and strong breeze feel bracing and fresh, an antidote to the achromatic day and the feeling that every day is the same.\u00a0 Map of Ireland in hand, golf clubs in the boot, I am bound north, from Newcastle to the Ards Peninsula, a hook-shaped prominence south and east of Belfast, for a round at the Kirkistown Castle Golf Club.<\/p>\n

Designed by the great golfer and course designer James Braid, who called it \u201can eerie, exposed course,\u201d it is not easy to get to.\u00a0 For my purposes, I count that good.\u00a0 The combination of a great architect and a remote location is the promise of Kirkistown.<\/p>\n

There are a great many out-of-the-way courses that have been hauled from obscurity into the light of day.\u00a0 Still, I\u2019m sure there are worthies that have not.\u00a0 I would like to find one or two.\u00a0 The getting there is half the fun, and in most cases, all of it.\u00a0 If you do not feel this way about these things, then this sort of exploration is not for you.<\/p>\n

Once across and over the rise, I am in sheep-raising country, following twisty, hedge-lined roads, passing through ancient villages with names like Clough and Churchtown.\u00a0 There is mud everywhere on the roads, brown and red, in stripes and clumps, for the roads belong as much to the farm tractors as they do to the cars.\u00a0 A mist begins.\u00a0 Too light to fall, it hovers, integrating itself into the grey light and the brown and red mud.<\/p>\n

Hungry and in need of a directional tweaking, I stop at a pub.\u00a0 It is not quite noon and I know Kirkistown is not far. In the pub three young farmers are leaning on the bar drinking their pints.\u00a0 One is quite drunk, and the other two not drunk at all.\u00a0 All wear black Wellies and mud-colored overalls and yellow slickers.\u00a0 They are covered with mud, vestments of mud. \u00a0Their faces and their hands are red from weather and hard use.\u00a0 The drunken farmer asks me if I am a Yank.\u00a0 I affirm, and he offers me a thrashing for it.\u00a0 His mates take an arm each and tell me no bother; he\u2019s harmless.\u00a0 He argues the point.\u00a0 He is, he says, far from harmless. His friends buy me a pint.\u00a0 I drink it and am on my way, undirected but uninjured.<\/p>\n

The mud, the mist, the easily understood temptation towards an early cocktail hour, all conspire to make Kirkistown feel truly remote.\u00a0 The road emerges from the farmland and starts heading due north, hugging the Irish Sea.\u00a0 The seaside location of the course suggested by the map seems ratified.\u00a0 I feel a score coming on.<\/p>\n

No.\u00a0 The road in fact hugs the beach quite tightly, too tightly to place a golf course between it and the water.\u00a0 When I spot a very modest sign directing me to the clubhouse, it is on the landward side.\u00a0 So much for a links course.\u00a0\u00a0 The pro is genial, lanky.\u00a0 His shop is more like a tool shed than a pro shop\u2019s display set-up.\u00a0 What he has to sell is limited almost entirely to what a round of golf that day might require: tees, balls, gloves, ball markers featuring the course logo, trolley handles, rain gear, golf shirts packaged in odd glassine bags.<\/p>\n

The course is deeply undistinguished.\u00a0 It is, of course, treeless, but it doesn\u2019t have much else to shape it, either.\u00a0 No gorse, no humps and hollows. The bunkering is minimal.\u00a0 Most of the holes are dead straight. \u00a0Its most profound feature is a mesa-like rise in its center.\u00a0 Braid in his routing of the course used it whenever possible, but it adds no interest. \u00a0 The land is so flat otherwise, and the hill so abrupt and brief, that the sudden rise plays less as the leit motif<\/em> of the golf course than as an impediment to any kind of rhythm. Hole by hole I whittle the course away,\u00a0 eager to be finished.\u00a0 I feeI less like a golfer than a commuter trying to make a train.\u00a0 In Kirkistown\u2019s topography, Braid simply had far too little to work with. Good golf ground in Ireland is like its roadways, all gentle heaves and twisty hollows, and that topography I had negotiated with a steering wheel, not my golf clubs.<\/p>\n

When I play locally, I occasionally\u00a0partner up with a native of Ireland, and I ask him for the best obscure course he knows of.\u00a0 I always get a thoughtful answer.\u00a0 I write the unfamiliar names on my scorecard so they don\u2019t escape memory.\u00a0 Often these courses have a website.\u00a0 If it is an unpolished website, good.<\/p>\n

Braid\u2019s description of Kirkistown holds up.\u00a0 It is exposed, in the way an airport runway is exposed.\u00a0 It is eerie, in that a landform more appropriate to Arizona than the north of Ireland erupts from its center.\u00a0 So it goes.\u00a0 Panning for little-known and very good golf courses, there is no such thing as Fool\u2019s Gold, only Next Time. \u00a0I have some names saved up. \u00a0I’ll keep at it, because you just never know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Waiting for the ferry I watch Strangford Lough tighten and boil whitely through a last narrow chute.\u00a0 Somewhere beyond a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":425,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[4924,4926,4927,1554,4928],"class_list":["post-424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-courses-and-travel","tag-portaferry","tag-ards-peninsula-golf","tag-kirkistown-castle-golf-club","tag-northern-ireland-golf","tag-james-braid"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/22\/2011\/02\/FILE237.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":472,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424\/revisions\/472"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}