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.

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.

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.

Small wonder if the visitor falls in love with Harlech at first sight, for no golf course in the world has a more splendid background than the old castle, which stands at the top of a sheer precipice of rock looking down over the links. Wherever we go it is never out of sight, and though we may glance away at the hills with Snowdon in the distance, we always come back to the castle with a never-satisfied longing. It is so obviously splendid that we might imagine that we should in time grow tired of it, but we never do.

The holes at Harlech that have always left the most vivid impression on my mind, perhaps because, owing to the rather leisurely Cambrian trains, I have not been there half as often as I should like, are those at the beginning and end of the course. Those in the middle, possibly because they have been altered at times or because they are not so markedly characteristic, are more blurred in the memory. Yet it is, I hasten to add, that all the golf is good, very good indeed, and fit to test the very best of players.

At the first hole there is a kind of ditch and bank to carry, a little severe when the player is stiff and ill at ease with his clubs, and a particularly excellent green. Then we turn almost directly back and get rather nearer to the first of those stone walls, which are so common an object in the landscape in North Wales, and quite one of the distinctive features of Harlech. At the third we are fighting with stone walls all the way, and a most effective hazard they make. This third is a really fine hole, for there is a whole stroke to be gained by a drive that is long and bold and clings as near to the wall as safety permits. The first shot has to be played parallel to the wall, or rather to two neighbouring walls, between which lies a sandy cart track full of unspeakable ruts. Then at the second we have to make up our minds whether or not to go for the green, which lies beyond the two walls, and is further guarded by yet a third wall, which runs at right angles to the other two. If we have not gone far enough, or if we have kept too much to the left, there is nothing for it but to play another shot straight along, and so home with a pitch for our third. If, however, we have driven far and sure, we may take the brassey, carrying all three walls at one fell swoop, and accomplish a four. Moreover, it is a four that is a real joy to do. It is none of your ‘Bogey fours,’ for the miserable old gentleman would never attempt that dashing second, but would proceed pawkily and by stages, pitching on to the green with his third, and getting a commonplace and respectable five. Thereby he will often win the hole from us who have died a glorious death in the sandy road, but at least we shall have tried to quit ourselves like men.

The fourth is a one-shot hole, which likewise calls for hard hitting. It is never short, and against the wind a really big shot is needed to carry the bunker, which is made the taller and more frightening by a timbered face. The green is flat and easy, and if we can reach it there should be no excuse for more than two putts.

The holes that come after this have undergone a good many alterations at different times. They are good sound golf every one of them, but it is when we turn our faces homeward toward the castle, and are approaching the almost equally famous ‘Castle’ bunker, that Harlech becomes most memorable. At this fourteenth, if we are fighting a fierce match, we feel that the crucial time is coming, for we are now going to plunge into the heart of the hills for five eminently critical and exciting holes. The first of them entails a shot over the ‘Castle’ bunker, and never was a bunker that more thoroughly belied its true character by a mild and harmless exterior. All that we see in front of us is a grassy bank, with a guiding flag fluttering on the top; and, ignorance being here most emphatically bliss, we may hit a fine shot as straight as an arrow and be congratulated on reaching the green. It is only when we have climbed to the top of that innocent-looking bank that we shall see what we have escaped, a perfect Sahara of sand that stretches nearly to the edge of the green. This green, too, is guarded by a series of knolls and hummocks—there are perhaps rather too many of them—and we may have been very nearly straight and yet be confronted with an extremely awkward little pitch. The hole is a terribly blind one: rather too blind to be classed among the greatest of one-shot holes, but it is impossible not to be swayed by our emotions rather than by pure reason, and our emotions tell us that it is a glorious hole.

There is another hill to carry at the fifteenth, while the sixteenth has a green of almost infinite possibilities in the matter of tortuous and tricky putts. There is nothing tricky about the seventeenth, however—nothing but straight, honest hitting, and the chance of a clean stroke to be gained by it. The green lies in a hollow at the foot of the hills, and in front of it is a bunker and a most uncompromising stone wall. Two really fine shots will carry the wall; let the tee-shot be a little less than good and we must needs play short and be content with a five: that is the entire story of the hole, and a very fine seventeenth hole it is. The eighteenth is mild by comparison, but a good straight tee-shot is needed to reach the green, which is well guarded by pot-bunkers.

Harlech is rich in the possession of one of the best secretaries in the world, Mr. More, and also in one of the most popular of handicap competitions, the Harlech Town Bowl. The fields that enter for this tournament every August are really enormous, and to win it is no mean feat. In this same tournament Mr. Hilton, when he was at his very best, played some of the most extraordinary golf of his life. I am almost afraid to say how heavily he was penalized, but I am nearly sure that he owed eight. I know that in one round he had to give a third to Mr. Palmer, who, if not quite as good as he is now, was at any rate a very good player, and, what is more, played well in this particular match. However, Mr. Hilton beat him after a great struggle, fought his way into the final, and there trampled on an unfortunate and probably awe-stricken adversary. He was laying his brassey shots within a few feet of the hole, and generally making light of difficulties which any visitor to Harlech will find are not to be treated lightly.

To get from North to South Wales is not so easy a matter as might be supposed. It entails much waiting at junctions, which have been placed in some of the most melancholy and deserted spots on the face of the earth. However, once arrived in South Wales, there is plenty of golf to be had, some of it very good. There is a very fine course near Llanelly, Ashburnham by name, which, alas! I have never seen; and there is Southerndown, in Glamorganshire, which is growing fast into fame. Near Cardiff there is Radyr and Penarth, the latter having a truly glorious view over the British Channel, but being sometimes afflicted with muddiness. Then, also in Glamorgan, there are the very excellent links of Porthcawl.

Links they may worthily be called, for the golf at Porthcawl is the genuine thing—the sea in sight all the time, and the most noble bunkers. True to its national character, the course also boasts of stone walls. Of my visits to Porthcawl I retain two particularly vivid recollections. The first is of a hole that has long since disappeared, since that part of the ground is no more played over. As I remember it, it was by far the longest hole in the world, Blackheath not excepted. Perhaps it has become stretched in my memory, or possibly the reason is that I played the hole against a most prodigious driver, Mr. Edmund Spencer, who was one of the hopes of Hoylake in these days, but has now most reprehensibly given up the game. I do not think there were many hazards in the way; one was simply told to aim at a white rock in the dim distance, and to keep on hitting till one got there. To make matters worse, it was the very first hole, so that one was nearly prostrate before the round had really begun.

My other recollection of a more cheerful nature is of a hole which was far easier to get into than any other hole in the world. The hole was not in itself by any means a simple one, involving a struggle with a stone wall and a long shot up a hill, but the green-keeper had selected a delightful spot for the hole at the bottom of a hollow with shelving sides. Once arrived within approaching distance of the hole, one had only to play the ball some few yards beyond the hole and it would topple gently back, not merely to lie stone dead, but actually to go in. The Welsh Championship meeting was going on at the time, and all sorts of wonders were recorded. One competitor holed a full brassey shot, and threes were as common as blackberries. The putting was becoming almost farcical, when one day there came a day of reckoning. I remember being left with a putt of some eight or ten yards, and, banging the ball past the hole with a light and careless heart, fully prepared to see it come trickling in. Alas! the green was a little wet that morning, and the ball stuck firmly on the opposite slope and refused to come back. I can still see that ball perched upon the bank and grinning at me. “Sold again” it was obviously and impudently saying.

At Porthcawl, as it is now, there are some very good holes. Of the two-shot holes, the fourth is excellent, and has a formidable second shot over a big and boarded bunker. The sixth is very similar, both as regards quality and quantity. Then there is the eleventh, where a really long, raking second over a big bunker should entail a four, and the utter destruction of Bogey and other cautious players who duly play short with their second shots. Another good one is the ninth, with a long carry up a hill on to a crater green—a green which I suspect of having been the scene of the putting exploits that I have narrated, though my memory is a little vague on this point.

Of the single-shot holes there is a fine long carry—the shot has to be practically all carry—on to the third green. The sixteenth is another that is good, and the course ends with an exceedingly difficult single-shot hole. There is in the minds of many a prejudice against finishing with a short hole, and it is certainly an ending which is not to be found on many good courses. Nevertheless, if the shot be only difficult enough, it is a little hard to see why a short hole should not make a really fine finish. There is an unpleasant feeling of finality about the tee-shot at any short hole, which never allows us to feel wholly comfortable, and certainly ‘Hades’ or the ‘Maiden’ would be infinitely more alarming if they came at the end of the round instead of in the earlier part of the round, when no mistake is irreparable. From the spectator’s point of view, it is desirable to get the player to the eighteenth tee in the last state of nervous exhaustion, and a tricky, difficult one-shot hole accomplishes that rather inhuman purpose to perfection.

Not far from Porthcawl—as the aeroplane flies—is another excellent course, Southerndown. It is perched high aloft and looks down on Porthcawl, amid the many other glories of a beautiful view. You may look out far over the sea, or again over a wide stretch of the best kind of English—or rather Welsh—landscape. The breezes blow cool and fresh here, and on a still and stifling August day, when the golfer is almost too limp to crawl round Porthcawl, he will be wise to refresh himself by a round on the heights of Southerndown.

In one way the course is rather singular. Being high in the air and not down on the level of the shore, it has many of the characteristics of the typical downland courses. It has their big rolling slopes and deep gullies, but it has not, curiously to relate, the typical down turf. The winds of centuries have blown so much sand up from the seashore that they have practically succeeded in imbuing the turf of the downs with a second sandy nature. The sand does not go very deep down; indeed, if you dig far down you come to uncompromising rock; but this, so to speak, veneer of sand has a great deal to do with making the course the good and pleasing one that it is. An example of this blowing of the sand is to be seen in a huge sandhill, which forms a prominent feature of the landscape in the direction of Porthcawl. It has all appearance of a natural phenomenon, since out of the sand, where by all the laws of Nature there should be no trees, a fine clump of trees nevertheless persist in growing. The explanation apparently is that the trees grew first and the sand was blown afterwards in such quantities as entirely to obliterate the soil underneath. That at least is the story as it is told to me.

The course, as I said, has some of the features of downland courses, but there is one that it mercifully lacks, namely, those detestable greens which are cut out of the sides of steep hills, and so have a back wall on one side and a sheer drop on the other. The greens at Southerndown are for the most part thoroughly natural in character, and their slopes and undulations are not unduly exaggerated. Another point wherein the course entirely differs from others on the downs is to be found in the presence of bracken, which traps the wandering driver at the sides of the course, and, in the summer at any rate, punishes him with commendable severity.

Three good two-shot holes begin the course: the second and third being particularly testing, so that three fours is perhaps a little too good to expect. Then at the fourth comes our first chance of a three. This is a good and difficult short hole, and deserves some particular description. It is 170 yards long, and the ground slopes fairly briskly from right to left. That being so, one’s first instinct would be to play well out to the right and trust to the ball scrambling and kicking down on to the green. This simple little plan has, however, been frustrated by the making of the bunker of the right-hand side. Therefore, we must not push the ball to the right for fear of the bunker, and we must clearly not pull it to the left, lest it run down a steep place away from the green and into troublous country into the bargain. There is nothing for it but to hit the ball quite straight, or, if we want to make the game unnecessarily difficult for ourselves, here is a good chance for trying a ‘master-shot.’ Another short hole on the way out, though hardly such a good one, is the eighth; we have to play a typical downland hole, jumping from hillside to hillside over a gully. It is one of those shots that is entirely perplexing to the stranger, who finds the distance almost impossible to judge correctly. At one time the green lay far down at the bottom of the very deepest part of the gully, but that had to be abandoned. To get the ball down was easy enough, but to get it up the hill again was, on a hot day, too tremendous a task, and so the climb has now been made less exhausting by playing only across the shallower part of the ravine. The ninth is a fine two-shotter, where we must hit a high ball from the tee in order to carry a big bunker cut out of the face of a hill; and then, after two comparatively uneventful holes, we come to a third short hole, the twelfth. It is only 130 yards long, but it is not in the least easy for all that. The green is of the island type, surrounded by a generous profusion of bunkers, and the fact that there is usually a fine high wind blowing makes the iron shot a sufficiently difficult one, short though it be.

The thirteenth, a ‘dog-leg’ hole, is one of the best on the course, where we have to play carefully for position from the tee and must avoid some heavy bracken and thick long grass. The green, too, is well guarded and full of excellent undulations. The fifteenth brings us right up to the club-house, and there is some temptation to curtail the round and fall a victim to lunch, especially as the sixteenth takes in the length of two full drives up a hill and directly away from the club. At the seventeenth we get a most lovely view and a four for the hole, if we play two good shots, and then an easy drive and pitch down a flattering hill brings us safely home.